Football pundit Danny Mills has had his say on Celtic trying to secure Jota and Cameron Carter-Vickers on permanent deals.
Speaking to Football Insider, Mills said: “They will be concerned that other clubs will be sniffing around them in the summer.
Before there’s too much interest, they think ‘Can we get them before somebody else comes in and somebody else turns their head?’
It’s one they will want to get done quickly so the players are signed up before they get gazumped and someone steals them from under their noses.”
I mean, what he’s saying I suppose does have some truth in it. With both of these players doing very well for Celtic so far in their time here, especially Jota, other clubs are bound to be interested, but we do of course have first refusal on both players for a set fee, so it isn’t possible for another club to ‘gazump’ us in terms of buying them for a higher transfer fee or anything like that.
Ideally both deals get wrapped up soon, but £12.5m that we need to spend to get them here permanently can probably wait until the summer, as that would give us more money to spend in January on other areas we need to strengthen in, when we have these two players until the end of the season anyway. That’s possibly the way the club are looking at things, but time will tell.