The BBC’s “Gossip” Section Is An Embarrassment Of Untrue Stories About Celtic.

If you don’t know what the BBC’s Scottish football “gossip” page is, then I congratulate you on having avoided it, because there are times when I sincerely wish that I had as well.

Today the headline on a well-known news aggregator which I frankly think this site advertises enough as it is without any sort of corresponding assistance from them, reads as follow: “Kyogo & O’Riley to exit while Armstrong returns to Celtic?”

If you’re sitting reading that for the first time and thinking “Eah? What? Kyogo is leaving Celtic?” then you can relax, because there’s no indication of any sort anywhere which would lead you to conclude that although much of the media is going over every word that comes out of his mouth to find a way to get a story which suggests that he might be.

“Honestly, I’m not sure what my future holds,” he is said to have told the Japanese media, which is true for every player when their club is in the midst of a rebuild.

The stories about him leaving have focussed explicitly on a return to Japan, though, and he added this. “But I want to work hard overseas for as long as I can, and if I can come back someday, I’d like to come back to Japan and play in front of you all.”

Which is the extent of his remarks. Nothing controversial in there at all. Rumours of interest in him from other parts of Europe have faded in recent months to virtually a whisper. So where is the BBC getting its justification for the Gossip column running that?

The same place as the Armstrong story; from the worst website in our football landscape, Football Insider, which this site and others have condemned over and over again as nothing but a repository of clickbait and sports fiction.

They have no “insider” knowledge to speak of, just a stable of people with some past connection to the game who speak as if they are still “in the know.” If that dire site ever gets a single story right it will be the first time.

That site should not be legitimised by the national broadcaster.

It has precisely zero legitimacy.

They doubtless base their “exclusive” on the utterly discredited Urawa Red Diamonds story, which as you can see, the player himself has shot down as if he needed to. But they have created phantom interest from elsewhere too, and according to them Celtic is willing to accept a £25 million offer.

That’s the level that site operates at; not even the lower end of the scale but at the “look how clever I am for stating the obvious” end.

They have the cheek to claim that as an exclusive. Kyogo is 29. Of course we would accept a £25 million offer for him. It doesn’t require inside information to recognise that, any person with a shred of common sense knows it already.

And we’re going to sign a 32-year-old Stuart Armstrong on a free? To do what? To get a lesser player than the one we had before he left?

The chances of that are as slim as the chances of us getting, and refusing, a £25 million offer for our Japanese Bhoy. The Armstrong story stinks of the sort of lack of any imaginative thinking that in this window has linked us to Jota, Tierney and Edouard already.

That serious professionals in an allegedly serious business would spend their days constantly churning out obvious garbage is amazing to me. Jota at £25 million, Edouard at £20 million, who could possibly believe either of those stories, or anything suggesting that Tierney is on the brink of returning to Celtic when virtually every word he has said confirms that he sees himself staying in a top five league … it’s astonishing.

Now we’re adding Armstrong and why?

Because he played under Rodgers and is available free. It’s just lazy.

The story about O’Riley comes from Neil Lennon. Doesn’t he have a job to go to? In the last week he’s been in the media “refusing to rule out” a return to Celtic. He doesn’t have to. There’s more chance of us lining up with Armstrong, Edouard, Tierney and Jota in the team next season than there is of Lennon ever finding his way back to Celtic in any official capacity.

He still refuses to accept that he made mistakes, big ones, last time he was here, although he only has to look at the calibre of clubs which have hired him since to see that the football industry itself basically agrees with the verdict on him which many of us passed at the time.

Their O’Riley headline is his saying that his departure is “inevitable” this summer, which is just a stupid thing to say. Because there are three elements to any deal which all have to be present for it to happen.

First, Celtic has to be willing to sell. Secondly, that will only happen if there is serious interest from a club which is willing to meet our valuation. And third, the club itself has to be sufficiently exciting for O’Riley to leave Celtic to go there.

I don’t know whether we’ve got much chance of keeping him should the first two conditions be met, but the second in particular is not an insignificant hurdle to overcome, and so the word “inevitable” is a fairly ridiculous one to use here. Likely, perhaps, but that’s as far as anyone who knows what they are talking about would ever be willing to go.

But at least Lennon is in the media industry to an extent. He’s also still current in football, with a new job waiting for him in management at the end of the summer.

So whilst I think he’s talking rubbish using the word “inevitable” he’s got more credibility, by far, than Football Insider does, and that the BBC has managed to stitch together its “gossip” headline out of a daft Lennon comment and two stories with that as the primary source shows how far they’ve fallen themselves.