Imagine, for a second, that a Premier League club came forward with a January bid for Kyogo Furuhashi. How much do you think Celtic would demand?
£15 million maybe? £20 million? More? Whatever your answer, we’d imagine it the number was a whole lot bigger than the £4.6 million Celtic paid Vissel Kobe in July.
14 goals and five assists later, Kyogo has gone from unknown quantity to the darling of Parkhead, the load-bearing column holding up the roof of Ange Postecoglou’s ambitious rebuilding project.
Clearly, there is value to be found in the J-League. Value that Celtic plan to exploit with the January transfer window just three weeks away.
Daizen Maeda, the most prolific forward in the whole of the country, is expected to join on a short-term loan deal that Celtic can make permanent for as little as £1.3 million.
The swashbuckling, adaptable Reo Hatate, meanwhile, could join on a free transfer when his Kawasaki Frontale contract expires.
And according to Yahoo Japan, a deal is in place that will see Yosuke Ideguchi – yes, he of Leeds United ‘fame’ – swap Gamba Osaka for Glasgow.
Ideguchi, a 25-year-old in the prime of his career with 15 international caps under his belt, will set Celtic back as little as £850,000.
Compare that to the fee Celtic were rumoured to be splashing out on Fernando Henrique, an unproven, inexperienced 20-year-old who has played fewer games in his entire career than Ideguchi has since August.
Have Celtic chosen Ideguchi over Fernando Henrique?
Reports in Brazil back in November claimed that Henrique, a disciplined, dogged defensive midfielder who has often been compared to Real Madrid’s Casemiro, was in talks over a deal to join Celtic for a fee of £3.3 million.
The report added that a representative working on behalf of the Scottish Premiership giants was holding talks with the Gremio board and you get the feeling that the crisis-hit Serie A giants would have been rubbing their hands together with glee.
£3.3 million is a whole lot of money for a man who’s played just six minutes of league football across the last 26 matchdays after all.
That links with Henrique have dried up since Celtic turned their attention to Ideguchi does not feel like a coincidence. After all, both players perform a similar sort of role on the pitch, even if the latter is a bit more attack-minded than the former.
There is, as the cowboys used to say, only room for one of them in this town.
£850,000 for a 25-year-old in the form of his life? Or £3.3 million for a player who can’t even buy a game for a club on the verge of relegation?
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