This morning, we learned that the club from Ibrox has been involved in pushing yet another bit of misleading information and misdirection concerning its outgoing footballers.
The story of José Cifuentes has intrigued me for quite some time, largely because he’s a player none of us has actually seen much of, and also because what we have seen has been hilariously poor quality.
Over the last couple of weeks, the media has been pushing an obvious fiction, and the Ibrox fan sites have aided them in putting it on steroids.
They’ve been pushing the idea that Cifuentes is some sort of player after all, even though that potential will never be realized at Ibrox. The reports about his pending one-year loan to Greece suggested that the club he was going to would be obliged to buy him for £4.2 million—a sum that’s four times what the Ibrox club paid for a player who has barely featured in their team.
To anyone familiar with the player and his travails at Ibrox, a fee that size sounded absolutely ridiculous. And, of course, ridiculous is exactly what it’s turned out to be.
How anyone—whether in the media or outside it—could ever have believed that a player as mediocre as Cifuentes could fetch a £4.2 million transfer fee when he’s barely kicked a ball since moving to Scotland, defies belief. Even a spell on loan delivered nothing and revealed what a stupendously bad signing he is.
Today, to the surprise of absolutely no one in Celtic cyberspace—where we’ve been saying this for weeks—it’s been confirmed that Cifuentes will be going to Greece, and the club will have an option to buy for €2 million, which isn’t even half of the initially reported fee.
There are some stories where the media obviously falls asleep at the wheel, failing to even do the most basic research. But this one? This is such a basic error, such an inexcusable mistake, that it genuinely shocks me. The poor quality of sports journalism in Scotland is staggering.
This didn’t require any special effort or deep digging into the situation at Ibrox or in Greece.
A sports journalist in Scotland who had watched this guy play for even five minutes would know that the idea of a £4.2 million obligation to buy is absurd.
There’s simply no excuse for getting something this easy so wrong.
Calling Cifuentes lazy is an understatement.
Calling him ineffectual is generous praise.
I can barely remember watching a player contribute so little.
In one live match last season when he did feature, we were more than sixty minutes into the game before I even realized he was on the pitch.
Even the Ibrox fan forums, which can be pretty delusional, have almost universally written him off. Yet some of those same fans completely believed he was leaving in a multi-million-pound deal, and were already spending the money in their heads.
But it’s the hacks who deserve the most criticism for buying into the “obligation to buy” story.
Some of them have actually watched this guy, so they must know there’s no way any club is going to spend that much on him.
Of all the transfer sagas this summer, this one was the easiest to identify as pure fiction.
It’s about as fact-based as fairies at the bottom of the garden.
Here’s an easy prediction for you: having actually watched Cifuentes play, the Ibrox club will never see a penny of that €2 million option to buy.
The club he goes on loan to will figure out in no time that he’s both a waste of money and a waste of a dressing room peg.
It’s astonishing that anyone believed he’d ever be anything more.
