Does Ryan Christie’s contract expire in six months or twelve?
This is the new hellish torment that the media has unleashed on us today knowing that there’s not going to be anyone from the club in front of the press for the next week and taking full advantage of the growing swell of chaos which appears to be battering us on all sides at the moment.
So where did the story come from? It appeared in The Daily Record but I don’t believe that it came from there.
The story has appeared out of the blue.
There are two reasons why I believe it’s a little dubious.
The first is that if this was true someone would have twigged to it long before now and second is that Celtic would have had to take action on this long before now.
As chaotic as our club is, we would surely have sold Christie in the summer if there was even a shred of truth to this.
I mean, none of us are particularly impressed with the club right now but all of us think we’re more professional than this.
If it’s true, then we are a far bigger shambles than we thought and all of the component parts at the club have stopped working alongside each other. In that scenario, the problems we can see are the tip of the iceberg.
Unfortunately, the state of the club right now makes anything seem possible; this is where the lack of information out of Celtic Park starts to become more than just a niggle and becomes a real problem, the kind of problem which can have long term impacts.
As I said yesterday, we risk completely losing control of the narrative here.
The absence of anything out of Celtic Park has created a vacuum into which everyone else pours their hopes, fears, prejudices and biases.
The media can pound us endlessly.
The bloggers are forced to speculate.
Speculation itself results in the spread of rumours and untruths.
The club cannot fight this from an ivory tower.
Silence does not project strength here, no matter what some inside Celtic might tell themselves.
The PR at our club is appalling. We’ve seen so many major strategic errors lately that it’s hard to believe that there is some over-arching plan which will answer all our questions and soothe all our fears.
Ryan Christie will be no loss to this team right now, but every one of us who has done the transfer war chest calculations has included in it a fee that he is likely to command, and although not the eight figure sums we could have had for him once, a mid to high seven figure fee was something I think we’d all mentally put in the bank for the new boss to spend.
So this news would be a disaster if it’s true, but worse is that it would make us look like a stumbling, bumbling amateurish club filled with incompetents.
There is, I’m afraid, no way to sugar coat this one if it’s not media rubbish.
It would be a calamity and the kind of thing for which heads ought to roll.
Even that would bring us little satisfaction as most of the guilty have already fallen or are set to fall.
Just when you think this mess couldn’t get worse …