For Celtic Fans Few Things Are Funnier Right Now Than The Ibrox Rebuild Narrative.

Reading the sports media at times, it is easy to forget that we follow football in Scotland. You would think, based on the some of the clickbait nonsense out there, that we had ready access to English football’s vast TV resources and wealth.

Some of the sites that have us linked with players throw around the most absurd sums of money; money that Celtic, even with our surplus, are just not going to pay. Remember, our biggest transfer outgoing spend in recent years was Ange’s first campaign where the outlay was roughly £18 million. But we actually posted a surplus, because we also sold Edouard and Ajer to pay for it. We could certainly afford to do it again, but not the way some suggest.

That’s why I marvel when I see suggestions that we would spend £10 million plus on a goalkeeper; we have more than one position to fill here, and unless we’re talking about a player who is truly exceptional, we’re not going to pay eight figures for anybody, not when there are so many areas of the team where we need to reinforce or strengthen.

Most Celtic fans are being sensible about this. They know our limitations as a club and those which are imposed on us by playing in Scotland. They are not insanely demanding tens of millions be spent on single players or even that we whittle down the surplus to spend tens of millions across the boards. Four or five strategically chosen signings, of the right quality, will make a whopping great difference to this team. We are not as far short as some think.

Across the city, their website are filled to the brim with the worst kind of nonsense though. Today some of them are saying that a deal for Fabio Silva is “unlikely” in the summer because some people aren’t convinced he would be worth signing. No-one stops to ask where in the wide blue were they ever getting the money to complete that deal had he actually possessed an ounce of football ability, as opposed to that which you usually see in a bad acting class?

But these Peepul are fed lies and disinformation and feel-good guff so readily that it’s no wonder some of them can’t discern fact from fiction. That they can’t do basic maths has been evident for a long time; some of them still don’t accept that their previous club ran out of money because for years they had been spending far too much of it.

In case it hasn’t dawned on them, I’ll crunch some numbers for them here.

Key players are out of contract and by all accounts are leaving. All of them have to be replaced. There is some talk in the media that this will “save them” millions from the wage bill; are these people too stupid to realise the simple fact that their replacements won’t be coming to the club to work for free? They have loanees going back to their clubs, and they will miss them, because they cannot afford to pay big money for any of them. The manager has already cut the knees of Connor Goldson; the manager also says he expects him to be at the club next season. Yeah, because if he’s not that’s another player you need to replace with limited funds.

Insane as it will sound, they have already committed a sizeable chunk of their transfer kitty on the signing of Diomande, who doesn’t have to be paid for until the summer. All their January business was high-risk gambling on making the Champions League by finishing as champions. If we win the title we get that prize instead. So that gamble will have failed.

They are talking about buying Sima. They don’t know how they are affording him, so I would say that’s unlikely. I do hope they try, and I do hope they succeed because he seems injury prone and has one good game in every half dozen. That would be a colossal squandering of cash.

At some stage they need to explain to their fans how this rebuild is to be paid for, and this is where the real madness starts. They are shopping Butland around to clubs in England; what happens if (as I expect) there are no takers? They harbour a fantasy about getting Tavernier and Goldson shipped out to Saudi Arabia for obscene fees; sources in Saudi denied the Tavernier story last night, saying that Gerrard isn’t interested, which confirms my suspicion that he is more interested in saving his job over there than in lending a helping hand to Ibrox.

The Goldson story wasn’t real anyway, just a bit of Daily Record speculation which sounded like something they were trying to promote as opposed to reporting what was really going on. They have a number of players out on loan they can try to punt; Lammers might get a modest offer from Holland, and they might do a low-ball deal to move on Hagi. Crucially, there is a lot of speculation that will try to move on Dessers, Rankin and even Cantwell.

Good luck with that! It will be funny watching them try. The chances are that they will not find a single club willing to pay premium fees for any of these guys. I very much doubt they will get takers in the eight figure zone for Butland, who English clubs could have had for free last season and who has lost an awful lot of goals for a keeper in the SPFL.

Remember this always; it doesn’t matter how much our media hypes these guys. Real professionals watch these players, serious people will be the ones who make these calls and I think you’d be hard pressed to find many who would conclude that he’s a top-drawer player. We are also looking for a keeper this summer; would we spend that kind of money on Butland if he was somewhere else? Think about it in those terms, and then consider that everyone within our price range is going to be cheaper for other clubs looking for keeper than he is.

That makes our lives harder. But we’ll live with that, it’s the price we pay for not working harder or moving faster when we should have. It does show the challenge their club faces if it tries to sell Butland for a massive, unreasonable fee … and just like Celtic, they would then be forced to go out and try to bring someone decent in, and that won’t be cheap.

Their fans can make up all the fantasy nonsense that they want, but the reality of what awaits them in the summer is enormous and it should be sacring them a little, especially if we get the Champions League cash and Rodgers gets a chance to put his own stamp on this team. They would be facing a strengthened, emboldened Celtic with strength in depth with a side assembled on the cheap … and still carrying some of the lamentable failures of recent years.

No wonder they don’t want to fully face up to it.