RONNY DEILA, the Celtic manager, has revealed that his plan to retain all of his top players for an attack on the Champions League does not extend to the Swedish striker John Guidetti.
The Norwegian has insisted that he is prepared to turn down offers of £8m or more for central defender Virgil van Dijk in order to keep his team together for the qualifying rounds in July and made it clear that others such as Stefan Johansen, Nir Bitton and Charlie Mulgrew are not for sale.
However, Deila does not intend to put a contract proposal in front of Guidetti at the end of his loan move from Manchester City unless the 23-year-old, linked with Dutch club Feyenoord and Sporting Lisbon of Portugal, shows greater willingness to remain in Glasgow after calling off initial negotiations in February.
"I don't think he knows himself what he wants to do," said Deila. "It's not like I need to know because I'm making my plans anyway. We are planning without him.
"We are very calm with the situation. If he wants to stay at Celtic, he needs to come to me and say he wants to do it. If not we have to move on and try to get somebody else.
"I said to him in February that the offer was being taken away now and he has to tell us if he's changed his mind."
Deila's opinion on van Dijk, however, is considerably different. The Dutch centre-back is sure to attract interest, but the Celtic boss insists he is not willing to let him walk away to a mid-table English Premier League team when keeping him and making the group stage of the Champions League would prove far more lucrative.
Asked what he would do should a club outside of England's real elite offer £8m or so, Deila replied: "I would say 'no' because we would get that at Christmas and maybe more.
"You get much more money from being in the Champions League and we'd lose one of our best players. It's an easy thing to talk about."
Deila is also at pains to point out that his chief executive, Peter Lawwell, has vowed to back him on that point.
"What is the difference between me and Peter?," asked Deila. "He would rather go to the Champions League than sell Virgil van Dijk."
Van Dijk has made no public pronouncement on his intentions while Johansen, voted Cheque Centre PFA Scotland Player of the Year, has already suggested he will snub interest from Germany to remain in Scotland.
"We don't need to sell them and we don't want to sell them, so we're going to keep them here," said Deila.
"We want to go into the Champions League. Stefan Johansen has never been in the Champions League and Virgil needs a very good campaign with Champions League football.
"If he does well there, it's easy to get to the big clubs."
Nir Bitton, meanwhile, has been linked with Club Brugge of Belgium while Bournemouth have been credited with an interest in Charlie Mulgrew following their success in winning the Sky Bet Championship.
"I don't know why anyone would think Charlie wasn't wanted here," stated Deila. "He is an important player and he's going to stay here.
"With Nir Bitton, we would rather give him a new contract than sell him. Everything is possible if the player wants to do it and we want to do it.
"I hope the message is quite clear: we want to keep our team and add people who can make the team better. We want to be as strong as possible to get into the Champions League. It's there that you have the (great) moments and it's there that you have the money."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article