Is This The Celtic Transfer Window Which Will Reveal How Little The “In The Knows” Know?

The in-the-knows have had a bad few weeks folks, haven’t they?

All these bright sparks in the media and on its periphery who had Juranovic set for a medical and Giakoumakis agreeing a deal and everything tied up in a neat little bow … and yet at the time of writing this both are still at Celtic and the manager is laying his plans for the weekend.

In the meantime, Celtic continues to work behind the scenes on at least one transfer target and although that individual’s name may have been in the public domain already I’m willing to bet that when we find out who the striker target is it’ll be a name we’d never heard of before, or at least not in the context of signing for us these past few weeks.

Rumours are everywhere at a time like this, but at a club like Celtic negotiations for signings are most often close-hold and known only to a handful of people.

What most folks tend to forget is that but for a small cadre of people in the business, most of the in-the-know information is coming, essentially, from the same rumour mills that churn out nonsense like “Cristiano Ronaldo linked with Glasgow duo.”

If you had a mind, and if you didn’t care about accuracy, you could assemble, very quickly, a reputation for being a “transfer guru” simply be regurgitating every single rumour you heard and putting it up on your Twitter feed.

You’d be right some of the time. For some, that seems to be enough.

The in-the-knows have pulled our fans hither, thither and yon over the course of this window. Barely one of their predictions has proved right so far, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they were wrong all the way to the finish line.

The irony is that the mainstream press is still our best source of genuine information, because like it or not these guys do know agents and players and managers and get the occasional word from directors and others inside clubs.

It’s easy to miss the genuine stuff sometimes in amidst the nonsense, because much of what they do write is pulled directly from blogs and Twitter rumours and media abroad whose veracity they don’t know and don’t care about.

When we were linked, the other day, with J League duo midfielder Yuito Suzuki and Brazilian forward Thiago Santana I doubted it as soon as I saw that Santana was 29.

He does not fit the profile in any way, shape or form but our media ran with that based on “stories in Japan.”

It took Dan Orlowitz, the sports writer based there and a genuine J League expert, to point out that the story had originated on the Twitter feed of a “notorious bullshit merchant.”

But hey, the mainstream media got a day of fun out of that.

So yeah, even their output has to be watched very carefully.

There is a lot wrong with their coverage.

Still, I reckon that when you read first who the striker is going to be it will be in a mainstream title, probably on the day that the deal is formally done, as it has been so many times before.