Paulo Bernardo close to Celtic return on permanent deal, says Brendan Rodgers

Brendan Rodgers expects Paulo Bernardo’s return to Celtic on a permanent deal to be finalised imminently.

The 22-year-old Portuguese midfielder made 33 appearances for the Hoops during a fruitful spell on loan from Benfica last term.

Rodgers revealed the nuts and bolts are all in place for Bernardo to return after Celtic agreed a transfer fee with the Lisbon club.

“Hopefully it’s a matter of hours,” the manager told Sky Sports on Wednesday. “He’s due to have a medical so hopefully all being well with that…”

Rodgers remained tight-lipped, however, on the prospect of another of last term’s loan stars, Norwich forward Adam Idah, returning to Parkhead for 2024-25.

“Adam’s a Norwich player,” he said. “He obviously did fantastically with us last season and we’ll just see what happens over the coming weeks.”

Matt O’Riley’s future has been the subject of uncertainty this summer, with Atalanta recently failing in a bid to sign the Denmark midfielder, but Rodgers said no club have come close to reaching Celtic’s valuation of one of their main assets.

“It’s actually been straightforward with Matt because he’s such a great professional,” Rodgers said. “I think always the challenge for teams coming to a club like Celtic (with an offer for a player) is that they can sometimes place a value on the league and not the player.

“We all understand the model here, players will come in and develop. It’s not a club you have to move on from, but obviously there’s riches in other leagues much greater than ours that allows players to go and improve their conditions for their lives, so we all understand that.

“But I think it’s really important from my perspective that if a player does leave here that they pay the value for the player, and that’s something that doesn’t always happen.

“Sometimes the value comes in a lot less. No player will leave here unless it’s for the right valuation and at this moment in time there has been no team that’s been anywhere near that.”

Celtic are yet to sign a senior outfield player this summer, but Rodgers remains optimistic that his squad will be enhanced by the end of the transfer window.

“We still have work to do but in transfers there’s lots of moving parts,” he said. “It’s never as easy as just seeing a player and bringing him in.

“We would hope by the end of August that we would have the team supported how we would want. It’s so important, you cannot snooze in this game of football.

“You always have to be improving and developing and we want to ensure we have an improved squad for this season in order to take on all the challenges we will have.

“Speaking to a lot of managers, it’s been a slow window. Especially with a lot of the top English teams being away and having the Euros and everything else, squads are a little bit broken.

“It’s not really until they come back and are all together that they can see what they have, and obviously there’s a knock-on effect from that.

“Everyone always wants to have their work done as soon as they can, we’d love to have had everything done for the first game of the season but that doesn’t necessarily always end up being the case.

“But my hope is that we can be much stronger coming out of the August window than what we finished last season.”