Blog

Fabrizio Romano has sent a tweet out this afternoon confirming the earlier reports from various other outlets that Celtic have a bid on the table for South Korea striker Cho Gue-sung.

Like the other reports, he also confirmed there are also currently bids on the table from German Bundesliga side Mainz, which is slightly below Celtic’s offer in terms of transfer fee, and also a bid from MLS side Minnesota, which is above Celtic’s initial transfer fee by about 2m euros.

However, Cho has already expressed his desire to move to Europe, and it looks like his club would rather he made the move to Europe also, so even though Minnesota have the highest bid, apparently Celtic and Mainz’s bid are still acceptable as things stand, so it looks like we are fighting it out with the German club for Cho’s signature.

Cho is believed to be deciding his future by this weekend, so hopefully we won’t have too much longer to wait until we get an answer either way.

What was interesting about Romano’s tweet though, was that he went into more detail on Celtic’s offer.

He stated that Celtic have made a bid of 3m euros (£2.66m), but, interestingly, he says we have also offered 50% to his club on any future sale, up to 6m euros (£5.32m).

Now, that can be interpreted in two different ways.

On first reading, I thought it was clear that basically the maximum that we would have to give Cho’s previous club by way of a sell on fee, is 3m euros, as that is 50% of the max amount of 6m euros.

However, some fans seem to think he is saying that 6m is the max amount we would have to pay in terms of a future sell on, so if we sold him for 16m, we’d have to pay his previous club 6m as 8m would be 50%, but 6m is the highest we have agreed to pay back.

The second example seems a lot less realistic to me, especially since his club seem to be very happy with our initial offer of 3m, potentially paying up to another 6m just to sweeten the deal, seems unlikely to me.

Check out Romano’s tweet below.