WASHINGTON — Scottish Premiership side Celtic is one of several European clubs linked with acquiring American midfielder Tanner Tessmann for this upcoming season, but manager Brendan Rodgers did not reveal any information about the proposed move.
Tessmann, who earned promotion back to Italy’s Serie A with his parent club Venezia, was moving close to joining Inter Milan on a permanent move this summer until talks broke down. Inter Milan and Venezia failed to agree on a loan destination for Tessmann as part of the deal, which led to the newly-promoted side ending negotiations.
Celtic, Brentford, Everton, Como, and Parma are among clubs that are reportedly aiming to hijack the deal and make the U.S. men’s national team midfielder the newest member of their squad before the season begins.
The 22-year-old Tessmann is coming off a career-best year with Venezia, where he scored seven goals and added three assists in 42 combined appearances. He’s made 99 appearances for Venezia since his move from MLS side FC Dallas and is currently with the U.S. Olympic team ahead of the start of the competition in Paris, France.
A move could still happen between Celtic and Venezia in the coming weeks, but for now, Rodgers is focused on who he currently has in his squad.
“Right now it’s a lot of speculation and gossip and that is the time of the season to be fair,” Rodgers said postmatch Saturday after Celtic’s 4-0 friendly win over DC United.
Tessmann and the United States open group stage play on Wednesday against hosts France before also taking on New Zealand and Guinea on July 27 and 30 respectively.
Celtic continues its preseason tour of the U.S. against Manchester City and Chelsea over the next week.
this kind of underlines my belief this is tessmann’s agent shopping him around to GMs for a money deal, as opposed to venezia wants him gone/liquid or some of these destinations really want him to come start. celtic has a pretty good team and their coach almost said, “who?”
venezia wants him back and it would be a serie A season. other than greed i don’t get it. a lot of the theorized transfer locations don’t sound like he’d start there.
“venezia wants him back and it would be a serie A season. other than greed i don’t get it.”
You have this greed default setting. Maybe it fits nicely into your view that pro players are morally inferior to college guys like you. You’re aware that Tanner is a pro not a college player right? He gets paid to do this.
Getting loaned back to Venezia or even staying at Venezia has little appeal for Tessman. Why would it? Juric, the manager who got Venezia promoted, is now the Torino manager. Venezia is not a great team and maybe they just go straight back down w/o Juric around. That’s no fun.
Tessman was okay with moving to Inter but if they were going to loan him he wanted to go to Torino to be with Juric the manager who , it seems, believes in Tessman. Seems logical to me. Play for a manager who knows you best and appreciates you.
what’s the point of the ad hominem here? i doubt many people, on purpose, sign up for any team from kindergarten bunchball league to the pros, for the purpose of sitting the bench. and here some of the potential “destinations” sound just like a loan hub, which is even worse. like they have zero interest in you for real and are you just going to send you out someplace else for years.
you tell everyone you’re on the celtics, and they did draft you, but you’re really playing in the english basketball league while they hold your rights. since you mocked college, it would be like you tell everyone you’re going to “play D1 for duke” and next thing they look up and you’re instead farmed out to, i dunno, medger evers in D3 or blue mountain college in NAIA, so you get some playing time. ditto if you were supposed to be on some great select team and were instead playing beer league because they decided you weren’t good enough, but you made some deal where technically you were still on the roster. you can talk personal smack all you want. it looks goofy as heck.
doing something like this when your first team is happy with you — and your contract would run at the same time any relegation happened — raises obvious well duh questions “why the heck would you do that.” it’s either the superficial prestige of saying i am on contract with “chelsea” (wiley) or “inter,” or it’s something else non-soccer. like money. because “inter” is not “inter-ested” in him for real. he hasn’t even played serie A yet and you’re already making nervous excuses if he does for venezia. so how on earth does it ever happen for inter?
you can mock me all you want but the easy explanation for this counter-productive “soccer” behavior — picking a team way too good for you to play there — is money. he probably gets 15% or so of the transfer fee which he splits with his mr. 10%. he then gets a paycheck set by his deal with inter, which, presumably, pays well. inter plays along as they get the loan fees every year for several years, as well as the bulk of any transfer fee if he gets sold.
otherwise, all due respect to your nonsense but no one signs up for a soccer team to get benched or cut. true for 5 year olds. true for pros.
IV,
“you can mock me all you want but the easy explanation for this counter-productive “soccer” behavior — picking a team way too good for you to play there — is money.”
“easy” explanations are sometimes born out of ignorance. They are not always the right explanation.
How do you know Inter is too good for him to play there? Most athletes need a challenge and if Tanner is confident enough in himself he may well believe that, with a year’s prep with his favorite manager at Torino, he can prep for the Inter challenge.
For their part Inter could be buying him, if they are, as a developmental project and have the loan period figured into their equation.
Or they are buying him and are looking to flip him right away.
I don’t know.
I don’t know all the ins and outs of these kinds of deals because I’ve never been a soccer player that was bought by Inter and then loaned out to another club.
But then, you haven’t been through that experience either (I think).
So, my ignorant speculation about this transaction might be about as relevant and accurate as yours is.
I assume that Tessman knows what he is doing. Or at least thinks he does.
Mocking you? Give me a break. The whole world does not revolve around you. This about Tanner having the balls to take a calculated risk. If this is mostly about money for Tanner, BFD, cool. His money is none of our goddamn business. There is nothing counterproductive about wanting to be the best you can be and to make more money while you are at it, especially if you can live up to your end of the bargain.
Tanner has a family to support. He’s not playing to satisfy your moral compass. And if he can work out a loan to his former manager’s club for a season, what better way to prep for Inter?
If the whole thing falls apart then it’s back to square one but Tanner seems to be following a pretty sane logical path. There is obviously some risk involved.
You’re very risk-averse and you love the safe approach that often leads to mediocrity. Unlike you I believe trying to be the least mediocre professional you can be is a good thing.
“no one signs up for a soccer team to get benched or cut. true for 5-year-olds. true for pros.”
Nothing Tanner did indicates that he is planning on sitting anywhere. Which is why he asked to be loaned to Torino where he would play.
Tanner and I don’t talk. But it is possible he thinks, with a bit of work, he can be an important player for Inter. Since he went to Venezia, he seems to have grown quite a lot as a player. So, maybe he’s right, maybe he’s wrong but I applaud the attitude even if he is wrong.
Loads of belief in oneself, self-confidence and a quest for lots of money. Not risk averse.
There is nothing more American than that.
The SPL is a big step back from even Serie B, and I do not exaggerate. Rangers and Celtic are £24 and £19 million-pound teams – or about $31 and $24.5 million, respectively, which would put them ahead of any MLS team except Miami. The rest of them have payrolls of less than £4 million – or $5 million US, which is less than half of what the smallest-spending MLS squad spends in total annual payroll now.
You want to figure the quality of a league, the first place you usually look is the money. There is a reason nobody except Celtic or Rangers has won the SPL since Aberdeen in 1985…and that team was coached by some guy called Alex Ferguson. It’s those two and then a ton of total tomato cans, basically.
Tessmann needs to walk on by. It’s a definite step in the wrong direction for him.
first off, these sorts of “how many big 5 players do you have” or “how much is the team’s payroll” analyses tend to be lagging indicators. after you win the world cup or make the semis everyone wants your players. if your team sucks like 2017 around couva, no one wants your players. your ageing players are liabilities. your rank and file are undesirable. you’re losing because villafana is your LB, and he would grab limited european interest — and none in the big 5 — not because villafana and others “failed” to sign big 5 deals like they “should.” if you have good talent that is just underrated, give it a tournament or so and europe will catch on — they lag when the good group comes up.
which is also my response to the people dissing our pool talent, is occasionally a guy gets overrated, jozy, EJ. but if weston and musah keep getting big 5 jobs someplace, someone thinks we have some talent. some ones because they leave one place someone else grabs them that level.
second, how do you plan on getting your players scouted? SPL has a paramount deal, serie B is fairly invisible on tv or streaming. serie B teams won’t be playing in europe, the old firm SPL teams will. CCV thus got called up for A duty. busio gets the odd B or age group call. tessmann is age group. everyone has forgotten novakovich even exists.
now, outside the old firm, different story. i’d seen polvara play last year and thought he was ok, but most had forgotten he exists. harkes was over there and no one cared. but to circle back to my initial point, they are lesser players doing the equivalent of playing in scandinavia — which is just across the north sea. those teams probably couldn’t afford a good american wanting full wages, or to pay a fee for someone like that.
kind of like i am sure third division wrexham could load up on americans who passed permit — and i wonder when ryan and rob try one — but our permit player wage bill would be prohibitive. the players they could afford might not get a permit. it’s not that we couldn’t play lower division england ball, it’s being good enough for a permit but cheap enough to play there.
IV: I love how you continue to naively think USSF scouts by watching tv. It’s called Wyscout. They provide scouts, coaches, management, and agents with video and data analysis from over 600 competitions around the world. Originally an Italian company it was purchased by Hudl (from Lincoln, Neb). Hudl is how your local high school scouts their opponents across most sports including soccer. If the next US manager wants to evaluate he/she can watch Eduvie Ikoba in the South Korean 2nd division, Romain Gall in the German 4th Division, Alex Mighten with the Nottingham U21s or whatever League 2 club he gets loaned to and even watch Josh Cohen in MLS Next Pro or US Open Cup.
JR: all due respect to your lazy flex but you never reference anything that USSF uses that, nor do our actual call sheets look like we are using these supposed resources. they instead look precisely like we called the guys from the obvious leagues which have TV cable or streaming deals? like before you pretend we “must be using” some resource, it should maybe look on paper after the fact like we ever did. they instead run the thing as though with your usual “haha that league” snark. once in a blue moon someone from sweden or austria.
i wouldn’t be surprised if we were hooked up on analytics because we run the team like decontextualized numbers are everything, and routinely punish strong younger players for lacking first team numbers, effectively slotting them behind their lesser colleagues who sign in MLS or some lower european league.
nor do we tend to look like we thought one bit how the players integrate together, which would be a natural outcome if they ever used the video you think they do.
IV: perhaps the simpler answer is those players in top leagues really are actually better. Ponder this perhaps player A in say England is actually better than player B in a lower division. You think that can’t possibly be true because you’ve seen player A multiple times and have discovered their weaknesses. Player B you’ve only seen once against Grenada’s U17s and some YouTube highlights paid for by his agent. Now USSF scouting department and age level coaches are actually watching all of Player Bs matches and thus can see clearly they are not as good as Player A. Services like Wyscout are why US players aren’t coming out of the professional ranks in Scandinavia. 25 years ago a player had to go to a lower league to get noticed. Today scouts from big clubs see them at showcase events and then can monitor them every week with full match video online. So those top players are “being greedy” and signing with bigger clubs. There’s going to be very little turnover in the roster under the new manager because there are fewer and fewer guys slipping thru the cracks. I think obviously a CB or 2 might switch in or out and perhaps the 6th attacking player and maybe the 6th CM maybe a new backup LB. Not because they are lazy but because they are actually doing their jobs and know the level of those players.
He would be better off staying with Venezia until his contract runs out.