Matt O'Riley is a transfer diamond as Celtic signing touch earns Jamie Vardy comparison

Malky Mackay will never forget how close he came to signing future Premier League superstar Jamie Vardy. A decade on, the Ross County boss reckons Celtic’s coup in plucking Matt O’Riley from obscurity could prove comparable in scale.

Leicester pipped Mackay’s Cardiff to future England star Vardy in a £1million deal from Fleetwood Town in 2012. Chelsea, Manchester United and Liverpool were this week credited with interest in Vardy, just as O’Riley was being talked about as a potential £25m-plus target for English giants including Brendan Rodgers’ Leicester.

Mackay, who also managed Watford and Wigan before becoming SFA performance director, knows the UK transfer market like the back of his hand. In just over a year with County he’s built a reputation north of the border for unearthing English lower league gems such as Regan Charles-Cook and also enhancing the careers of loan stars such as Arsenal’s former youth Harry Clarke and Watford’s Jo Hungbo.

Mackay is full of admiration for the way this weekend’s Dingwall opponents nicked O’Riley from under the noses of big English clubs. And Mackay said: “O’Riley is one of those diamonds you talk about finding.

“He is not someone who was on the radar of a lot of clubs in the way someone like Kyogo Furihashi would have been a sure bet if you knew the Asian market. O’Riley is exactly the sort we used to talk about, certainly at my first club Watford. We had very little money and it was a club teetering on the brink of administration but we had a category one academy.

"My remit was to bring through prospects, bring in X-factor loan players – we had 10 loanees go on to become England internationals – and find lower league diamonds. They are not easy to get and right now even less so.