Murdo MacLeod has urged Celtic to break their transfer record this summer in a bid to properly replace Odsonne Edouard when he inevitably leaves the club.
The transition Celtic will have to undertake means some positions will have to be properly replaced with serious cash.
We don’t have any room for prospects or players who you could categorise as ‘works in progress’.
Celtic need players for the here and now, guys who can walk straight into the first team and make an instant impact.
For that sort of player, you will have to pay a healthy amount of cash.
Given we’re likely to get decent fees for some of our wantaway stars, that money has to go straight back into the team.
“The new manager will need to hit the ground running and so will his staff.” MacLeod told the Sunday people.
“Bringing in new players will top his list of priorities and there is an urgent need to find a striker who is going to get you at least 25 goals a season.
“Going back to when I played for the club more than 40 years ago we had guys such as Charlie Nicholas, Brian McClair and Mo Johnston.
“Since then there has been Andy Walker, Pierre van Hooijdonk, Jorge Cadete, John Hartson, Chris Sutton, Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink, Scott McDonald, Gary Hooper and Moussa Dembele.
“They all scored goals for fun.
“Of course, I’ve not forgotten about Henrik Larsson. He was sensational. He was part of the rebuild in 1997 and went on to score nearly 250 goals for Celtic in seven years. It shows the importance of having a dependable striker.
“Odsonne Edouard has been very good for Celtic in the past three years but he wasn’t as hot as everyone at Celtic wanted him to be in the past nine months.
“I think the team still created plenty of chances but the players just weren’t as lethal as they’d been previously. Points were dropped by missing chances.
“In the past seven or eight years Celtic brought in a number of strikers that cost around about the £2m mark.
“One or two of them were very good but too many of them didn’t hold up.
“That’s why they need to get it right this summer and if that means breaking their transfer record then that’s what they have to do.”
If we did break our transfer record, we would be paying upwards of £10m on a player. Currently, Edouard sits at our biggest ever expenditure for a football player.
Before we can look to the future, Celtic have to appoint a new manager of the football club.
There’s no excitement or hope at the moment from the fans with the Celtic board not delivering a new manager over two months after Neil Lennon left the building.
When Edouard leaves the building we sincerely hope it won’t take as long to replace the striker as it has done with the manager.
Nonsense, there is no way we should be doing this, to buy these price range players also means massive wages which causes jealousy with other squad members. We also wasted 5-6 million on a so called proven goalscorer in useless ajeti.