Celtic Fans Can Safely Ignore All The Hype Over The German We Passed On.

What a ridiculous story filled our media today; that Celtic were told to “sign unseen” the German “wonderkid” currently plying his trade at Ibrox. The whole thing is absolutely crazy, and the media’s embrace of this player is desperate stuff.

Tillman has scored a goal in an important game and fair play to him for getting to the ball ahead of the keeper in the game. But in the three competitive matches before it he did very little of note.

He showed some nice touches, but was wildly inconsistent.

On the back of that single goal we’re supposed to be gasping with fury about how we missed out on this guy. You know what? It’s nonsense. The whole way the story has been framed is patently daft.

We were told to sign him unseen?

And our scouting department was meant to take that seriously, were they?

Just go out and do it, having never watched him?

(But of course we had, as I’ll get to in a minute.)

What a joke that article is, and what a joke that we’re expected to turn on the club for making an epochal mistake just because he’s turned in one good performance.

What do these people take us for? Over emotional children who lose our shit at the least little thing?

Clubs do not, for a start, sign players unseen.

We actually moved for a Bayern Munich youth player at the start of this window, and that deal was thought to be almost done when he decided he wanted to move elsewhere.

It happens.

If we’d watched Tillman – and of course we did, by then we knew exactly who he was – we very definitely passed on him.

A mistake? Who knows? Even if he turns out to be a good player – and the jury on that is well and truly out at the moment in spite of the media’s hysteria – there are other factors.

What’s his personality like off the pitch? How does he integrate with other players? Does he fit into the playing style and the system?

Apparently none of them concerns the people who write this stuff for the media.

So Mark Fotheringham thought we should have signed him. Big deal.

Maybe if he’d done a better sales pitch than “you don’t have to watch him, just take my word for it” the idea might have been taken seriously by people inside our club.

But it wasn’t a serious suggestion of the sort that a pro would make.

Which is partly why we didn’t.

But Fotheringham was told at the time that Celtic knew exactly who Tillman was, and it was another of their youth players we were interested in.

How does he think it all works exactly?

In the act of going to watch one specific player others will stand out to a good scout. So we didn’t have to “sign him unseen” as even then we knew what we needed to. And we passed.

The story is absurd. It is a gross over-reaction to the guy having one good game, but it’s the kind of thing the media here excels at when the player in question is at Ibrox.

All of a sudden, this complete unknown is a world beater who we missed out on.

What a desperate grab for attention. It’s a story we can safely ignore.