However, the Northern Irishman did not want to give any firm promises, citing the example of Iheanacho.<\/p>\n
Celtic wanted to retain the Nigerian striker at the end of his one-year contract, but instead he signed earlier this week for Bursaspor, who have only just been promoted to Turkey’s second tier.<\/p>\n
“We thought we had a deal with Iheanacho and it didn’t go,” added O’Neill. “It was something we thought we had sorted out.”<\/p>\n
Celtic chief executive Michael Nicholson has admitted it was proving “difficult” to add to their squad because they are competing with big-spending clubs in England’s top two divisions.<\/p>\n
Reports suggested Bursaspor were able to offer the 29-year-old Iheanacho a higher salary, but O’Neill said: “There are two sides to every particular transfer as there is to every story.<\/p>\n
“I thought we had a deal with him at the time. but seemingly that wasn’t the case and so he’s gone to pastures new.”<\/p>\n
O’Neill had also hoped to retain Saracchi after the 28-year-old left-back’s loan spell from Boca Juniors.<\/p>\n
The Uruguayan posted on Instagram on Friday that he and his agent “did absolutely everything within our power to make a return to Glasgow happen”.<\/p>\n
However, O’Neill added: “Saracchi’s done very well at the football club and there’s circumstances which seemingly it was never going to happen.”<\/p>\n
Celtic start their season at home to Dundee in the Premiership on 3 August.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"However, the Northern Irishman did not want to give any firm promises, citing the example of Iheanacho. Celtic…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":698986,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[218,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-698985","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-football","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698985","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=698985"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698985\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/698986"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=698985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=698985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=698985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}