Sky Sports man’s insight into Celtic’s understaffed and shambolic football operation

Speaking on Celtic Fans TV, one of the fan media outlets banned by the club for no reason, the Sky Sports transfer specialist discussed the last four transfer windows and points out the areas where Celtic is failing.

“Every club usually ends up having to do business on the last day, or last couple of days. It’s very rare for clubs to say that they have completed their business. There are various reasons why clubs end up doing late business” (injuries etc),” Anthony Joseph explained when asked why Celtic has to resort to a mad rush to secure signings in the closing stages of the transfer windows.

He continued: “With Celtic, certainly more recently has become more frantic than ever before. The Scottish window was a couple of days later than England, Spain and France and the big leagues but closer to Austria and Belgium’s transfer deadlines. Yes, it may have benefited Celtic getting in there for their last minute signing but as Celtic fans will say, that shouldn’t have been the case in the first place, scambling about for four loans and a free transfer.

“So it’s more in terms of the last few windows from Celtic than most other clubs, certainly the other clubs that I report on,” Anthony Jospeh admitted.

Trying to explain the reasons for this he stated: “What is it down to? Lack of preparation is the biggest one. Last summer (2025) for example you knew that Nicolas Kuhn was going to be going, Kyogo had already gone, Daizen Maeda was looking for a new challenge as well. If you don’t prepare, when bids come in for these players, if you accept them, you are the going to have to look for a replacement.”

Joseph went on to make a stark comparison between the current operating procedures at Celtic and what it was like under Ange Postecolgou who he noted was both a manager and director of football rolled into one.

“It’s very different to the style operating under Ange Postecoglou where people were going ‘what’s going on here?’ They are bringing in a replacement before the player in that position is sold.

“You look at Alistair Johnston coming in before Juranovic is sold, or Oh coming in before Giakoumakis has left. Matt O’Riley coming in before Rogic has gone, so that is a great example of how a club should be operating with the board and the structure they’ve got but it just fallen by the wayside.

“Even under Brendan Rodgers, he had to bail them out a couple of times with Kaiser Schmeichel for example. They knew that Joe Hart was retiring, they missed out on the first couple of goalkeeping targets then realised that they didn’t have a number one goalkeeper or a number two either.

“Brendan Rodgers after the Euros bailed them out. Kasper Schmeichel has talked about this saying it was literally the day after the Euros, he was on holiday, in his hotel and gets a call from Brendan Rodgers asking “do you want to come and join Celtic?”” Jospeh said.

“Iheanacho is another one where Brendan Rodgers had to bail the club out for not signing a replacement striker for Kyogo and Adam Idah,” Joseph said, before revealing the current set-up at Celtic which he compares to a local amateur team way of operating.

“This is down to lack of preparation and this time they were doing it with a reduced level of staff.

“They are missing so many, they don’t have a head of football operations, they don’t have a head of recruitment, they don’t have a chief scout, they are a number of analysts down – I think an advert went up for two or three analysts, so they are a number of people down on what would be the recruitment model. They don’t have a sporting director as we all know.”

And it gets worse as we get confirmation on how be believes Celtic transfer operation is currently being handled.

“You’ve got the CEO” (Michael Nicholson), “the CFO” (Chris McKay) and sometimes Martin O’Neill getting involved in the transfers and actually calling up players and agents and dealing with them. But in terms of actually doing the deals it’s just Michael Nicholson who needs the approval of Dermot Desmond at times to get things over the line,” Anthony Joseph explained.

That remark about Dermot Desmond having to be consulted before the Chief Executive Officer can act is something significant in itself when you consider the ‘whitewash’ explanations given by Charlie Methven on The Celtic Exchange podcast earlier this week (see below). Talk about walking on thin ice.

According to Methven, undue influence should actually be no influence at all and there is mounting evidence that Dermot Desmond is in breach of rules regarding being allowed hold the share percentage without being required to bid for all shares.

Anthony Joseph reckons that all this causes the hold-ups in the club’s transfer dealings that seem to drag on and on. Take for example Mika Baur, one deal that did eventually get over the line in the summer, but it was like pulling teeth at one point.

And many other transfer deals hit the rocks due to the time it takes for the understaffed Celtic transfer team to get around to looking at doing business.

“And that’s why you often see holdups,” Joseph said. “That’s why people often get frustrated at the time it takes. These things sometimes take time anyway so we’ve got to cut them some slack. There’s transfers that end up in sagas and just take a couple of weeks to actually get over the line.

But it’s going to take time if you only have one person dealing with the Kasper Hogh contract, also dealing with the termination of Stephen Welsh’s contract, also dealing with outgoing of Inamura.

“Those smaller scale transfers could be done by someone else in an ideal world,” the Sky Sports man suggested. “But the way Celtic have got their structure at the moment – it was bad before but now having it in January and this” (summer) “window, it has really shown up.

“When they did get knocked out of the Champions League, they dropped a lot of their main targets, a lot of the players they were looking to bring in and went for the next stage down and a lot of them were loans.

“I remember getting a lot of flak after the LASK game – the second leg obviously when Celtic were knocked out of the Champions League – I wrote a piece on our” (Sky Sports) “website about what this means for Celtic in the transfer window and I said don’t be expecting big signings anymore. The majority are going to be loans, projects or free transfers now.’

“And that was the case. But it shouldn’t be the case. It doesn’t need to be the case,” Joseph said.

“It’s not a great look and there are a number of reasons why they are in this situation.

“The structure of how they operate and the lack of preparation and foresight is the main driver of why we are seeing more recently Celtic scrambling in the last couple of days of the transfer window.”