Van Dijk proves Celtic must play hardball
THE strange quirks of the football transfer system don’t work so well in the real world. No one ever held off on hiring a window cleaner pending the results of a medical. Dysons are never sold on eBay with a ten per cent sell-on clause in case they move to a bigger house.
Parents don’t gift kids a £5 loyalty bonus for playing 30 games for the school team. And English firms don’t get away with paying less for goods purchased in Scotland simply because it’s a small country they don’t especially care for. Not, that is, unless they are professional football clubs.
In September 2015, Celtic sold Virgil van Dijk to Southampton for £12million. It was good money at the time. It still is.
But a little over two years later, the Dutchman has become the most expensive defender in football history after Liverpool agreed to sign him for £75m.
Has Van Dijk really improved by £63m in 27 months? Well, no, he hasn’t.
Performing in the SPFL, he always looked like a Range Rover on a highway of Mondeos. And the fact others couldn’t keep up didn’t make him any less of a Range Rover.
No one ever walked in to their local dealership and offered £20,000 for a 40-grand car because they feared it had never been driven on a proper road and may not perform on a Tuesday night in Chelsea. But when it comes to cross-border transfers in British football this kind of nonsense is standard practice. Josh Windass has been the best player at Rangers this season. Yet neither Preston or Wigan can offer more than a paltry half-a-million pounds.
A C-grade in higher economics hasn’t proved much use in the last 30 years, but it’s clear supply and demand is a factor here.
It costs more to buy a three-bedroom semi in Pimlico than it does to buy the same home in Port Glasgow for one reason. More people want it. And if Real Madrid and Bayern Munich rather than Southampton and Wigan snapped up the cream of the SPFL, it would drive up transfer fees in an instant.
But Van Dijk, Victor Wanyama, Moussa Dembele, Kieran Tierney, Andrew Robertson and Barrie McKay show that the Scottish Premiership is no barren wasteland. It provides talented footballers. The kind no club should be selling on the cheap.
In recent years the prices have been driven downwards by an abusive relationship with the English game. Gripped by a lack of self-esteem after years of being run down and mocked, Scottish football spends its days hiding behind black glasses telling people it walked into a door.
It’s easier for SPFL clubs to play the game and take any cash they can get because, let’s face it, you don’t bite the hand that feeds.
This week Neil Warnock recalled how his chief scout at Crystal Palace advised him against paying £6m to sign Van Dijk from Celtic because ‘he’s not very quick and it’s Scottish football’.
When English managers buy players from the SPFL, they do so holding their nose. Their chief executives preface an offer with a kick of the tyres before making it sound as if they are doing teams up here a favour by taking their best players off their hands.
Sometimes, of course, they are. When Dundee United sold Robertson for £2m you could hardly blame them. That’s more than they earn from television rights in two years.
But there’s no logical reason why a club like Celtic, with a £90m turnover, should settle for £12m for Van Dijk simply because he plies his trade in the SPFL.
An astute sell-on clause inserted in the contract means they will rake in another £7.5m from his move. A total fee close to £20m makes him the most profitable footballer ever to pass through the Scottish game.
For Celtic, the timing couldn’t be better as the vultures hover over Dembele. Clubs like Brighton, West Ham and Southampton fancy their chances of nabbing the France Under-21 striker for £18m plus add-ons. But when these clubs come on the phone next month — and they will — Peter Lawwell is duty bound to point to the £75m paid for Van Dijk and ask an obvious question. Dembele has scored in the Champions League against Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain. Why should Celtic flog him for a penny less than the going rate?