Celtic’s £8 Million Net Spend Should Leave Our Rival Fans Asking Hard Questions.

Tonight, according to The Record (but on a day like this, when they’ve been accused of making up stories, should we believe them?), Kenny Miller “has the calculator out” as he tries to tote up how much this underwhelming Ibrox side has cost the club.

He, and some others, have gotten awfully fixated on the idea that they are spending their money badly.

This has been evident to some of us for years.

That team has had fortunes spent on it.

Since the day and hour it crawled out of the Ibrox death pit, it has spent £100 million above and beyond earnings. Much of that has gone out in transfer fees and wages for people who barely delivered the bare minimum.

At Celtic, we get criticised for spending money on Barkas, Ajeti and Bolingoli.

Three major flops out of God knows how many signings.

There is no doubt that Ange has worked a minor miracle in achieving such a phenomenal hit-rate of success … but Celtic wasn’t doing too badly on the front in the first place. You wouldn’t know that to read the hacks.

Our club’s recent success is, of course, the real problem for these guys.

The contrast between what we’ve been able to do and what they have done is stark.

Our current squad cost a pretty penny by Scottish standards, but when you look at it closely you see that the vast majority of the cash went on a handful of players; Kyogo, Abada, Juranovic, Starfelt.

On top of that, we have brought in good money for the player who went out of the club. That has allowed us to assemble this team for a net spend of just over £8 million. And we can afford that because we’ve consistently posted profits.

For the last ten years, we have spent less than we’ve earned in every campaign but one.

In all the rest, we posted profits and managed to win trophies at the same time.

A club which spend £100 million above and beyond earnings should be miles clear of us, and they find themselves looking further behind than at any point since they reached the top flight.

As much as anything else, that should haunt them because we now have a squad of high value footballers and a manager who knows exactly where to look to replace any we lose for big money.

It is not inconceivable that we could lose a handful of top footballers and replace them with equally talented prospects and have plenty left over for emergencies.

We just do this so much better than they do, and I don’t need Kenny Miller’s calculator to work that out.

There are serious problems across the city, and their scouting department is only a small part of what is wrong. Nobody forced them to spend their January transfer kitty last season on some high-rep wonderkid and a clapped out has-been.

That was the same window where we got Matt O’Riley for £1.5 million … and he wasn’t even our first choice target.

That should scare them most of all.