The Tillman Story Goes Mainstream Even As Celtic Fans Continue To Poke Holes In It.

Nobody in Celtic cyberspace could believe the utter gullibility of the Ibrox fan sites this morning when they started running that Tillman nonsense. It hasn’t surprised a single one of us that the mainstream press is now running with it.

And even as they do it is the Celtic fans who continue to ask the pertinent questions, and there are so many of them, and so many holes here, that I cannot understand (oh but you can, James, of course you can) why the mainstream press is running it instead of asking these things themselves. Honestly, you could not make some of this up.

Question Number One: Wouldn’t it just have been easier for Bayern to tell Tillman that there was interest from elsewhere and have him turn the move down?

Perhaps the most obvious question of all. Indeed, some of the mainstream press were reporting not that long ago that Tillman himself wasn’t keen on coming back to Ibrox and was keeping his options open about a move. In order for the clause to have any value, Tillman would have had to be up for going to Ibrox. Wasn’t this what we were being told over and over again during last summer about Jota and Carter Vickers? Unless those two wanted to sign for us there was no prospect of the deal being done. And that was true! So instead of paying Ibrox £1 million, couldn’t Bayern just have got the player to reject a move there … invalidating the deal?

Question Number Two: Why didn’t Bayern just wait for the option to expire?

These deals come with a built-in time limit. A lot of people thought that it was up at the end of May. But we’re almost at the end of June; is it feasible that Bayern would have had the option run that far after the end of the campaign? And if so, why didn’t Bayern just give it a couple of weeks and save themselves the money? Are they stupid or something? Or was this the one “first option” deal in the history of football which didn’t have an expiry date on it?

Question Number Three: If Tillman is wanted by other clubs, why didn’t Ibrox just pay the £5 million (haha) and then sell him themselves, as happened with us and Jack Hendry?

This is supposed to be a great news story for the Ibrox club, right? Well let’s imagine for a second that it’s actually true; doesn’t their £1 million look a little weak? Because if Bayern pulled the plug because other club are offering them more money, why didn’t the Ibrox club simply meet the buy-out clause, refusing any “settlement”, take the player and sell him themselves? Because that doesn’t look like “brilliant” business to me but as if they missed a trick.

Question Number Four: As Ibrox has been trying to get the fee down for the last six months, isn’t it their club who is far more likely to have walked away from the deal, or attempted to negate the contract, than Bayern?

When does a club trying to renegotiate a contract after the fact become, in itself, a breach of the deal?

Because it seems to me that Ibrox has had a cast iron agreement with Bayern for a year which they have not even attempted to hold up their end of, and in circumstances like that, when one party is obviously not playing the game, isn’t the whole idea of an agreement already virtually null and void? Bayern would surely fancy their chances at a tribunal here.

As someone said to me earlier, when you can swallow toilet water I guess you can swallow anything, but this is just four of the questions which are doing the rounds of social media tonight and putting our mainstream media to absolute shame.

On top of that, there are some Ibrox fan-sites which are actually indulging in a wild bit of Sevconomics this evening by maintaining that, in fact, this adds up to a seven million quid turnaround … the “£2 million Bayern owe them” (remember even if this is true, that extra £1 million would depend on them selling him) plus the £5 million that was earmarked for the signing … and all of that is now available to The Mooch.

Honestly, some of these muppets really are sitting at home with framed ownership papers for the Kingston Bridge hung up on the wall. No wonder their club rips them off time and time again with such ease.

In Sevconia there are ten born every minute.