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News
‘Couldn’t keep up’… Sporting director admits Celtic beat them to sign £3m player last summer
Another day another transfer story involving Celtic but at least this one is about the club going above and beyond to get one of their targets last summer.
With the unexpected departure of Carl Starfelt last season, Celtic had to go and fill a hole in the heart of their defence, and quickly.
Up stepped Gustaf Lagerbielke who had just come off the back of a brilliant season in the Allsevenskan and Celtic deemed him worthy of spending £3m on.
However, what wasn’t known at the time is that Serie A side, Lecce, were also tracking the 23-year-old and the club’s Sporting Director, Pantaleo Corvino, has recently revealed his club couldn’t match Celtic’s offer for Lagerbielke.
Corvino said [], “We appreciated his desire to come to Lecce. This summer we were interested, but we couldn’t keep up with the exorbitant demands, so he went to Celtic for 4.5 million and 800 thousand euros in salary.
“We had (Marin) Pongracic and (Federico) Baschirotto. When he didn’t feel comfortable, he and his agent asked us to come to Lecce.
“It was his request. However, we had already assessed Pongracic, Baschirotto, (Ahmed) Touba and (Sebastian) Esposito as suitable at the beginning of January.”
It seems like a bit of a wasted effort now by Celtic seeing as Lagerbielke has been deemed as not good enough and was almost allowed to leave the club in January.
An injury to Cameron Carter-Vickers put an end to that move but when the US defender returns to first-team action, where does that leave the Swede.
Right out in the cold, that’s where. Because even for the match against Aberdeen on Saturday, Stephen Welsh was preferred on the bench to Lagerbielke as the 23-year-old sat yet another fixture out.
Clearly, he has no future at Celtic and the sooner he is moved on the better because there is nothing worse than having an unhappy player at the club at this crucial stage of the season.
In other news, Celtic did make moves to sign £8.5m striker in January