'Down to the wire' - Club chief reveals Celtic's Premiership rivals bid £1m for transfer deadline day signing

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The Easter Road club had a seven-figure offer bettered by Celtic during the final hour of transfer deadline day

Malky Mackay has revealed that Hibs submitted a £1 million bid for Luke McCowan late on Deadline Day only for their offer to be gazumped by Premiership rivals Celtic.

The Easter Road sporting director insists finalising a transfer for the Dundee midfielder was made impossible after the Hoops swooped in the final hour of the window, leaving the Hibs hierarchy unable to identify a value-for-money alternative to the former Dees captain once their bid was knocked back.

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The capital outfit were favourites to land McCowan’s signature for most of the summer after tabling a series of ever-increasing offers only for Brendan Rodgers’s side to make a late move. Addressing fan complaints that Hibs didn’t appear to have a back-up option on standby, Mackay explained the chain of events that left them frustrated.

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“The Luke McCowan one was very particular signing,” he explained. “It was one who clearly is one of the best midfielders outside of the Old Firm, in Scotland. And data backs that up. Forget the naked eye. His numbers over the last two years show how productive he’s been, so he’s a very specific player.

“There are not a lot of them around. Certainly in the timescale we were looking at. To go and find another version of Luke McCowan, that’s not easy. Now, we had an owner absolutely willing to back that signing. Let me be really clear about that. I’ll tell you that he wanted to back it to the tune of a million pounds. The man was prepared to back that. I don’t mind saying that our owner was going to spend that.

“Obviously once Celtic come in, you are not going to get that player. There’s not a lot we can do about that. But our conversations with Dundee were all conducted in good faith. And our owner was really prepared to back the football club by going to get a very specific player. It went right down to the wire, it really did. It was an hour from deadline. It’s not as if we knew for definite that Celtic were going to come in for him – it went down to 10 o’clock on the night, when we were told that we’d been outbid.

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“It wasn’t a case of us saying: ‘OK, what do we do with the million pounds?’ Because I’m not in the business of just spending the owner’s money for the sake of it. It’s got to be specifics – and we have to make sure we don’t make mistakes with finances and investment, meaning we repent at our leisure. We could have jumped onto another target, spent the money and then ended up thinking: ‘Actually, this guy isn’t any better than what we have in the building.’ That’s a long and convoluted way of saying that just because the money is there, that doesn’t mean the opportunity is there.”

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