The Shocking Truth Is That Brexit Has Benefited Celtic In The Transfer Market.

Brexit is an unmitigated disaster for this country, and I’ve written that many times and not just on this site. It has damaged our economy and infused a lot of people with a lot of nasty, bigoted ideas.

It has caused problems in areas most people haven’t even thought about yet, and those issues are only become more obvious as time goes by.

Brexit almost had a devastating effect on football.

In truth, we’re still too early to know whether it will or whether it won’t, but one thing has become increasingly obvious; the SFA’s victory in being able to fall back on the old work permit system, instead of moving to the one they have south of the border, has given us opportunities English clubs don’t have.

And that has not only prevented us suffering the worst Brexit impacts, as least as far as work permits and the need for them goes, but it has given us a wider focus than we’ve ever had before.

Part of that is down to Ange, and no doubt about it … but I hope that this is a permanent state of affairs. We’ve seen how much talent there is beyond Europe.

Something fundamental has happened here. I think a lot of British transfer policy has, for years, been shockingly lazy and focussed on Europe because it’s been easy to sign players from there.

But now that the same hoops need to be jumped through to sign a player from Latvia as have traditionally been required to sign one from Liberia there’s no incentive to prioritise one over the other. We are casting the net further afield as a result.

Because of that, we’re going to find bargains that other clubs on this island aren’t able to.

Ibrox doesn’t have the cash for a global player hunt and no other club in Scotland does. In England they are limited by the crazy “points” system which the FA supported for the explicit reason that it will force clubs to rear their own players.

This is an advantage we have to continue pressing because it may well be the most significant one that we’ve had as a club for a long time. You can see the way we’re not afraid not to go to Asia and North America for players … Ange mentioned that we’re also looking at African players and there are probably some for Central and South America in the mix.

This is a radical departure from what we’ve done previously, and you only have to look at the number of European leagues which shop this far abroad to recognise that it’s something we should have been doing a long time ago.

But we fell into a bad habit of shopping only in the European market.

Now that habit has been broken and everything we used to do upended.

And for once we have found the proverbial diamond in the mountain of coal. Long may it continue.