Selling Players: Why Scottish Clubs Struggle

“The challenge for teams coming to a club like Celtic is they sometimes can place their value on the league and not the player.”

So said Brendan Rodgers during Atalanta’s long-running summer pursuit of Matt O’Riley, when every week seemed to bring with it a new bid from the Europa League holders, all of them well south of Celtic’s valuation.

Eventually, it was a case of all’s well that ends well for the Parkhead club. With Brighton more than happy to stump up the £25million asking price which the Italians had been so loathe to meet, a chunk of the money was swiftly reinvested in a club record £11m deal for Arne Engels, the Belgian midfielder who’s already gone down a storm with fans. But the saga still spoke to a wider issue within our game.

In the never-ending quest to diagnose what’s holding Scottish football back, much has been said in recent times about TV deals, UEFA’s dreaded country coefficient and the lack of game time afforded to homegrown youth. Arguably though, the inability of Premiership clubs to extract a fair price for their assets is just as big a thorn in the league’s side.

It may seem harsh to raise the point now, after a summer littered with groundbreaking deals up and down the country. Celtic’s sale of O’Riley equalled the Scottish transfer record (set by, you guessed it, Celtic themselves) while Aberdeen won praise for shattering their own record when striker Bojan Miovski went to Girona for £6.8m.

In both cases, the respective boards displayed a steely resolve which Scottish clubs have often seemed to lack in transfer windows past.

Even Motherwell, in the midst of a draining takeover bid, managed to rake in £1.6m for Theo Bair – the Canadian forward widely considered a laughing stock when he arrived on a free from St Johnstone 12 months prior.

However, a quick glance around Europe shows how far Premiership clubs still have to go to catch up with leagues of a similar size. Consider Denmark, where tiny Nordsjaelland, from a town with a population of 20,000, made 54m euros in the window that’s just closed.

Celtic and Rangers may go in as favourites when they welcome Club Brugge and Union Saint-Gilloise respectively to Glasgow in the coming months, but when it comes to the art of the deal, the Belgian Pro League is streets ahead, with five Belgian clubs making more than €20m in sales over the summer. By contrast, five of the Scottish Premiership’s 12 teams made precisely zilch.

So, are Scotland’s top clubs focusing on the wrong profile of player, or is it a simple lack of business savvy that’s holding them back? And if the league still isn’t respected by the rest of Europe after launching the careers of Virgil van Dijk, Jeremie Frimpong, Calvin Bassey and Lewis Ferguson (to name just a few), when will it be?

Glaswegian journalist Stefan Bienkowski is UK lead content manager for Transfermarkt. From its humble beginnings as a Werder Bremen fan site at the turn of the century, Transfermarkt has grown into one of the most influential websites in the sport, its reams of statistical data and intricate system of player valuations making it something of a bible for those whose livelihoods revolve around the buying and selling of footballers.

Mail Sport begins with a simple question: did Rodgers have a point?

‘Scottish football is a little tricky because Celtic are essentially in a tier of their own, but on the whole there’s little doubt that most Scottish clubs accept fees that are well below what clubs from nations of a similar size demand for their players,’ says Bienkowski.

‘So, I would certainly agree with the idea that most European clubs think they can pick up bargains in the Scottish Premiership, albeit Celtic remain the exception to that rule.

‘I wouldn’t say the O’Riley transfer was particularly unique; Celtic earned similar fees for Jota, Kieran Tierney and Moussa Dembele, so they’re obviously good at getting the most for key players when they’re in demand. Aberdeen did really well to get a big fee for Miovski and have shown with the sales of Scott McKenna and Calvin Ramsay in recent seasons that they’re starting to demand more for their players.

But overall, there’s still a lot of work to be done. In the last five seasons (including this one) the Scottish Premiership has only earned €269m from transfer fees, which is the 20th highest among all European leagues – below where the league ranks in UEFA’s coefficients (currently 17th).

It’s also less than clubs in Croatia, Switzerland and Austria made, and about €1 billion less than Belgium football has generated in that period of time. But the biggest problem is that 57 per cent of that business has come from Celtic selling players, with Rangers (€65m in sales), Aberdeen (€22m) and Hibernian (€11.8m) all making much less. And Hearts – historically one of Scotland’s biggest clubs – have made just €3m in that period of time, considerably less than most clubs of their size around Europe.’

Having earned around £135m more than any other Scottish club over the past 10 seasons, comparing Celtic to most of their Premiership contemporaries can sometimes feel like comparing a nationwide supermarket chain to your local grocers. But regardless of how pretty the figures in this year’s annual results might look on paper, there remains plenty of room for improvement where the reigning champions are concerned, as Bienkowski explains.

‘While Celtic are a level above the rest of Scottish football, they undoubtedly lag behind most clubs of their size in Europe. Their income from player sales of €154m in the last five seasons dwarves all other clubs in Scotland, but is only the 66th highest in Europe. Clubs in similar-sized leagues with smaller budgets, like Gent, AZ Alkmaar and Club Brugge, have all earned more from transfers than Celtic in that period, and the Glasgow club are well behind the biggest clubs in the Netherlands and Portugal in terms of developing and selling players for higher fees.

Considering the stranglehold Celtic have over Scottish football right now, the club should be doing a lot more to emulate the likes of Ajax, Benfica and Sporting Lisbon by having a more extensive scouting network and making far more money from selling players to England and Europe’s other top leagues.

‘With the Arne Engels deal, he looks like a promising young player, but it does seem as though Celtic were stung in the negotiations.

‘A transfer fee of €11m and a reported sell-on clause of 20 per cent suggests that even if the club were to get, say, €25m for him in a few years, their profit on the player (without even considering his wages) would stand at just €9m. Maybe they were pushed for time due to the need to sign a replacement for O’Riley, and if he helps Celtic win titles, fans won’t care what profits the club make from his sale. But he’s a good example of Celtic doing a decent job in the transfer window, but perhaps not nearly as well as they could do given their privileged position.’

And what of Rangers? Most Ibrox regulars are sick to the back teeth of the phrase ‘player trading model’ at this point, having been promised one worthy of the name by their board for years, only to watch a raft of first-team regulars leave for nominal fees or, in some cases, nothing.

‘Rangers are in a very difficult situation: trying to catch a historic rival that fans demand they challenge for every trophy each season, despite having a much smaller budget,’ observes Bienkowski.

‘The club have spent less than half of what Celtic have on players in the last five seasons, and earned less than a third of Celtic’s total in sales. So this means that they’ve had to prioritise signing ready-made players like 28-year-old Cyriel Dessers for €5m, 26-year-old Sam Lammers for €4.1m, or most recently, 30-year-old Robin Pröpper for €1.8m.

‘That’s a lot of money spent on older players with next to no sell-on value for Rangers, but signed because – at least on paper – they can add something to the first team immediately. That’s not to say that Rangers haven’t picked up some good young players. Mohamed Diomandé in particular looks like a fantastic prospect. But I would say the club’s emphasis on the short-term demands of ‘being Rangers’ are getting in the way of their long-term goals.’

Being prepared to sell early, even if it risks the ire of the fans, is another lesson Scottish clubs have been slow to learn. Rangers learned it the hard way when Ryan Kent and Alfredo Morelos both left for free in the summer of 2023. Meanwhile, the chances of Hearts earning a major windfall for the out-of-form Lawrence Shankland, or Aberdeen doing likewise for the out-of-favour Duk, both appear to be receding with time.

As with on-field tactics, the ends usually justify the means in the realm of transfer strategy. Take St Mirren and Kilmarnock, two of those five Premiership sides that didn’t earn a penny in the summer window. Stephen Robinson and Derek McInnes know what they like and like what they know, tending to prefer experienced, physical types who offer little in the way of re-sale value. But who can say they’re wrong to do so, after a summer where fans of both clubs got to cavort all over Scandinavia watching their team play European football?

Nonetheless, as long as short-termism continues to be the preferred credo, the chances of anyone else outside Glasgow taking the sort of leap forward Jimmy Thelin’s Aberdeen seem poised to take – thanks in part to money reinvested from Miovski’s sale – will be slim. And the chances of the Premiership emulating those huge profits made in places like Denmark and Belgium will be even slimmer.

‘I don’t think it’s a case of the league not being taken seriously as a talent factory – quite the opposite,’ adds Bienkowski. ‘As we’ve seen, Italian clubs are more than happy to raid Scotland for young players, just as English clubs have done for the past 10-15 years.

‘The problem is that many of our U19 players leave Scotland for riches down south before our clubs can tie them up to long-term deals and demand big fees. And most of the clubs in the Premiership run on extremely short-term plans, which means the majority of senior players are on short-term contracts to minimise the risk of paying big wages to flops.

‘This means a huge turnover of players at most clubs, an over-reliance on loan players from England and ultimately, very few opportunities for clubs to have a top-quality, senior player tied down to a long-term contract. Only once you have all of those things in place can clubs like Aberdeen start demanding bigger fees for players like Miovski.’