It is a line fans generally hate seeing trotted out but, please, bear with me.
You know the one, ‘player X returning from injury/agreeing a new deal will be a like a new signing’. A more groan-inducing take you will rarely find among punters on months-long tenterhooks as they await fresh faces holding a club scarf aloft. I’m usually inclined to agree, it’s usually a telltale sign of there being no imminent arrivals on the transfer front, a softening up of supporters for some summer window disappointment.
By now, though, you may have deduced where I’m going with this: tying down Kyogo Furuhashi on a new deal could be the most significant piece of business Brendan Rodgers conducts this summer.
From the moment Ange Postecoglou departed for Tottenham Hotspur, it was inevitable that rumours would begin to swirl around the talismanic Japanese forward he signed from Vissel Kobe in 2021. Kyogo was very much the Postecoglou signing, immediately embodying everything about how he wanted his team to play.
From his very first start, Kyogo was ruthless in front of goal and utterly selfless out of possession. He was Postecoglou’s ‘we never stop’ mantra made reality, and it’s not a stretch to reason that where Kyogo led in that regard, others followed. Former Celtic full-back Mark Wilson spoke to the media in June and raised the pertinent point that Postecoglou’s reported interest in a reunion was not just about the forward’s goalscoring prowess, but in how he could act as a tone-setter for implementing his ideas and methods on Tottenham’s squad.
But Kyogo put all that to rest on Tuesday as news of his contract extension until 2027 went public. It had been speculated that, being in his late 20s and his stock at an all-time high, the Japan international may have marked this window as one of few left in his career where a move to any of Europe’s elite leagues remained open to him.
His show of commitment, then, is a real tonic to Celtic fans who waved goodbye to Postecoglou and Jota in the space of a month, two figures with whom they had felt a real connection. Getting used to top players and managers being around Glasgow’s east end for relatively short spells had been a sobering topic of conversation for supporters in recent weeks, with plenty vowing their days of getting too attached to such figures were over. I’m not convinced that will bear out in reality but, in Kyogo, fans will feel they do have a hero about whom they do not need to fret over a sudden, unexpected goodbye.
Anyway, back to the manager and why this renewal is so significant.
The headline figure from Kyogo’s 2022/23 campaign was obviously his 34 goals, the first Celtic player to reach 30 since Moussa Dembele in 2016/17. It is impressive enough in isolation, even in a side as domestically dominant as Postecoglou’s.
But what is most striking is just how many of those goals were truly meaningful. His double in the Viaplay Cup final win over Rangers immediately springs to mind, but if we look exclusively at his Premiership record then the value of keeping him at Parkhead becomes increasingly stark.
Kyogo scored what proved to be the winner in 10 league matches last season, making no fewer than 30 points attributable to his decisive contributions. It’s arguably even more, with his late equaliser at Ibrox in January at once rescuing Celtic a point and denying Rangers much-needed momentum in the title race.
Kyogo is utterly invaluable to what Rodgers referred to as the ‘bread and butter’ of domestic football. There has been considerable excitement over a renewed push to crack Europe but the only way to consistently grow in the Champions League is to take care of Premiership business, and there is no one better at taking care of league business than Kyogo.
He is the perfect player for those stuffy fixtures where Celtic might lack a touch of inspiration or the opposition’s low block is proving particularly effective. Kyogo will go long stretches of games without touching the ball, but his work rate and concentrations never seem to dip. The day Celtic clinched the title at Tynecastle he was utterly anonymous until the moment he turned Reo Hatate’s pass into the winning goal.
You don’t often see him involved in the build-up but that’s no accident, he’s just not that interested in it. Instead, watch how he’s always looking for the next pass after Celtic break into the final third or get down the side of a packed defence. For a side which is almost always tasked with finding their way past a ruck of bodies, having a player who is hyper-focused on – and so ruthless at delivering – goals is of incredible value.
Make no mistake, he is the type of player Rangers will know they must unearth this summer.
As the gap between Glasgow’s big two and the rest continues to be widened by financial disparity, we have moved into an era where exceeding 90 points is no guarantee of delivering a Premiership title to your door. The odd stuttering home draw for Celtic or Rangers now has the potential to be near-fatal when the margin for error is so thin.
In this brutal context, Kyogo is the one player who shifts the odds of securing one point or three significantly in favour of the latter. Losing Jota is undoubtedly a disappointment for Celtic, albeit softened by that astronomical £25million fee, but even if he is less sought-after elsewhere than some his team-mates, Kyogo would probably have been the hardest to replace this summer.
Celtic have been generally very effective at it, but immediately replacing one proven goalscorer with another is no easy task. Rodgers will know this is a significant item of business ticked off the list very early in pre-season.
New signings will surely arrive in the weeks to come, but Celtic’s best deal of the summer may already have been signed off.
