Former Wigan Athletic, Fulham, and Hull City midfielder Jimmy Bullard has opened up on the shocking reason why his loan move to Celtic in the summer of 2010 collapsed.
At the time, it was revealed that wages were believed to be the reason the Englishman failed to join the Hoops, but Bullard himself has spoken in depth about the story behind the failed negotiations.
Bullard said: [Open Goal], “That deal came, they (Celtic) wanted to do a loan deal and my dad came on board to help me out and he pretty much f***ed the deal up, to be honest.
“He’s murder the old man. We went up there and, in a loan deal, we didn’t really know that Hull (City) had paid half and Celtic would pay half. But we went up there and the old man went, ‘Woah, woah, woah,’ because they sold a dream to us, Lenny (Neil Lennon) sold a dream. Talked about the keeper who was on this and that.
“They were gonna give me the 10 jersey, they put it on me heavy and my dad says, ‘If you’re paying the keeper that, why is Jim getting this? You don’t give him the number 10 to get less than the keeper. Let me do a deal with you and I’ll go back to Hull and do a deal with them’.
“Lenny was like, ‘I don’t think it works like that Mr Bullard’. Anyway, the old man asked for like and the director fell off his chair. I asked for big chunks, it didn’t happen but I should’ve gone. I never played for a huge club.
“I played for some good football clubs but never for that huge club we always wanted to play for. It would’ve been, I should’ve done it.”
Clearly, Bullard regrets the move falling through, later joining Ipswich Town on loan, just six months later.
In just 24 league appearances in the 2010/11 season, he managed to pick up a respectable seven goals and five assists for Hull and Ipswich, respectively, winning Ipswich Town Player of the Year.
The Englishman’s career would then wind down, announcing his retirement in October 2012 due to injury setbacks, just a little over two years after his failed loan move to Paradise.
Whether Bullard’s time at Celtic would have been a roaring success is open to debate, but if signings from England like Gary Hooper, Fraser Forster, and Kris Commons during Neil Lennon’s first spell in charge are anything to go by, there is a very good chance that Bullard could have made a great impact in the Hoops.
