Originally Posted by
Stupie82
Im actually with Pacman on this. You could argue that Celtic met the clause criteria and therefore we couldn’t stop them speaking to him. That said, he is STILL under contract and the board could easily have said that we are not selling Hayes to one of our rivals. That decision is in the boards hands. Hayes may have made intentions clear in January that he wanted to go to Celtic, but none of us know if that was the case or not.
The £1.3m is actually a decent amount of money, but will it be reinvested? If it doesn’t, then the way I see it is that we have sold our best player to a team we cant even touch in the league or cup, effectively strengthening them further, while weakening ourselves and developing one of their own players in return? Football is a buying and selling game, I don’t dispute that, but just not to Celtic. Celtic are getting a win win out of this and I cant help but feel I would rather of took half the money if it meant not strengthening Celtic. They would of course strengthen with or without Hayes, but at least we would be making a point of not selling our players to them.
As for Christie, great player and no one can dispute that. But he isn’t a direct replacement, nor can he play against Celtic in the league or cup. We get the benefit of him, while Celtic get the bigger benefit of us developing their player. Again inadvertently strengthening them.
We could argue all day about whether it was good deal or not, but its down to each person. Time will tell. One thing we can all agree on is that he is a huge loss and will be very difficult to replace.