Celtic Is In Serious Danger Of Ending Up With The JD Vance Transfer Window.

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” – V.I. Lenin.

The transfer strategy this club follows is lunacy. I don’t care how many self-regarding pro-board stooges tell the rest of us that it’s the only way to run this club. That is manifestly not true. We have other options. We simply choose not to take them.

I cannot emphasise this point enough.

We have chosen a strategy and we refuse to consider that there are alternative strategies. We are here by choice. The restrictions which playing in Scotland automatically force on us are nothing compared to those which we voluntarily impose on ourselves.

A strategy of targeting projects. A strategy eschewing the signing of people over the age of 25. Aiming low and getting what we pay for almost all of the time.

In the past decade we’ve had one brief period where the transfer windows served the needs of the manager first and foremost and were not built around signing players cheaply to sell them later for a profit. One brief period, swiftly brought to an end with one of the most un-necessary and abrupt pivots to what had been the status quo that any of us has ever seen.

Blame whomever you will for that; they all work at Celtic Park, they all sit in the same boardroom, they all have their own role in a strategy which holds us back. They are the authors of a series of policies which are badly flawed and which have us in a downsizing cycle.

My first priority, and my only priority, on this site is to see this club be all it can be, and if there were no alternatives open to us, I would not hesitate to acknowledge that and offer the strategy my full support. But there are alternatives.

There are options. There are paths not chosen,

In the end whether you see the hand of Peter Lawwell in that, or Dermot Desmond holding the strings, or if you think that the secret puppet master all this time has been Brian Wilson – hell, for all we know it’s him, with his political background and all his connections, at the very central point of the Grand Conspiracy Of The Unseen Fenian Hand – everyone in a strategic, decision-making, position at Celtic bears their share of the blame.

How many times have I said this? These are not bad people. They are tired old white guys who have been at the club too long and who are utterly incapable of charting a course to our future, and that future is within our reach if we are smart.

I don’t believe they have nefarious motives, even the one which isn’t as crazy as it sounds, the one about how the policy is based on keeping Ibrox semi-competitive, falls down when you consider that they are such a mess over there that almost nothing we could do would guarantee they wouldn’t fail on their own, regardless of how we behaved.

Many of the people in our support look at where we are in the here and now, in this window, and don’t overly concern themselves with the overall strategy. If we got it right here, and now, they would not care whether we’d made crucial mistakes in other areas.

All the board has to do in order to calm people’s fears and alleviate our concerns is get the job done, the job the fans expect and which the manager expects. Not too much to ask. Instead, we’re risking what I’m more and more coming to think of as the JD Vance Transfer Disaster.

On 28 June, Joe Biden’s campaign team got their fondest wish; the earliest US Presidential debate in history. In point of fact, it was a Hail Mary pass with the polls looking rotten and they needed a moment to break through the wall. They got what they wanted, just not in the way that they had wanted it.

That debate was a game-changer, just not in their favour.

I’ve watched every Presidential debate since I was in my late teens. I have studied debates even further back, all the way to the first televised one, which was between Nixon and Kennedy. I watch most of the American politics podcasts, with The Bulwark, made up of industry professionals, the best of the bunch. And the consensus – across the boards, and with which I was in 100% agreement – was that Biden’s was the single worst performance in Presidential debate history, the sort that destroys campaigns. For weeks it looked as if it had.

Nothing Biden did, or could ever hope to do, was going to erase the image the American people were presented with in that debate, that of an elderly man struggling to be heard and stumbling his way through his sentences.

About a week later, with the polls cratering, Sarah Longwell, of The Bulwark, presented a series of focus groups on her show which she described as “disastrous.” She said that people had gone from wondering whether Biden could do the job for four more years to being genuinely scared about “who is running the country right now?”

And from that, politicians and campaigns do not recover.

Think about the current state of the Ibrox club in that context.

That’s the kind of mess they appear to be in over there, scrambling about trying to sell off one group of aged failures to bring in more of them.

A club which can’t even play out of its own stadium.

A week after Longwell presented her truly shocking focus group information, someone tried to kill Donald Trump at an outdoor rally, and that picture of him with his fist in the air and blood pouring down his face went internationally viral.

At that point political commentators and professionals started talking about a Republican landslide which didn’t just return Biden’s opponent to the White House but put him in charge of a two-House majority as well, resulting in a worst-case scenario few had even considered; Donald Trump with his Supreme Court majority and the Imperial Presidency.

Likewise, Ibrox fans, looking at Celtic, must wonder if a generation of dominance is just the start of what it is that they are facing right now.

I had a chat to some of my mates in the aftermath of the shooting, and we agreed that Trump only had to do two things to virtually assure that landslide win; change his aggressive tone and start speaking like someone who wanted to unite the country … and pick the right Vice-Presidential running mate.

The convention was not far off, and had Trump followed that blueprint, which we now know was precisely what his campaign was urging him to do, he might not currently be flapping like a fish caught on the end of a line.

But Trump is being pulled at the moment in two directions; on one side he has the MAGA crowd, and on the other the professional campaign team he hired in the best strategic decision he’s made since he first came down the gold evaluator. In the aftermath of the shooting, he initially did listen to the pros, but when it came to the VP decision, he went the other way.

JD Vance was not a great idea, even in the circumstances of that moment, when it seemed like the size of the landslide was the only thing still up for debate. But even from the outside looking in you can sort of see the thinking; they presumed it was already won, and they picked a “core vote” guy. It was not a great strategic move, but they thought by then they were beyond needing strategy.

When you’re at the finish line, you’re down to mere tactics.

What’s Celtic’s strategy? Is there one, beyond “Ibrox will continue to be a mess”? Well, if that is it, what if we’ve misjudged that? What if we’ve taken our foot off the gas because we’ve concluded that they are too far behind, and we find ourselves in the literal version of the hare and the tortoise and we wake up at some point, with the finish line in sight, to see an outclassed opponent plod slowly over it? Are we really willing to tolerate that risk?

Here’s what that risk might look like.

Days after the Republican convention, Joe Biden told the world that he would not seek a second term.

He immediately endorsed Kamala Harris, the VP.

The public knew next to nothing about Kamala Harris, except that she was a black woman who had been a prosecutor and a Senator. Within a very short time social media also discovered that she’s a quirky, lively, funny woman with tremendous charm and warmth and steely determination. Videos of her dancing, singing, laughing, went viral.

Her message on women’s rights, on voting rights, on raising the middle class didn’t differ from Biden’s … but she delivered the message clearly, with good humour, and she did one other thing; she framed them in the context of hopefulness and optimism.

The contrast between that and Trump’s “American carnage” is exactly what swing voters want to hear.

Had the media still been focussed on Biden and his issues, and the Democratic Party in meltdown, what happened next might not have had any real impact on the race.

But a steady trickle of abysmal stories started making their way into the media about JD Vance, stories about his weirdness, his extremism and his bizarre background.

One wild internet rumour swept the net about his once having had sex with his sofa.

Instead of ignoring that story, his campaign did the most ridiculous thing it could have done; it issued a denial. One Fox News reporter said that in order to substantiate the “allegation” that people should provide proof … it’s almost too stupid to wrap your brain around.

And in a very short space of time, Vance has become an embarrassment.

Trump is now the oldest nominee in history. He’ll be older than Biden is right now if he gets elected and serves his full term, and for every day he’s in the White House, the world will be one bad hamburger away from President JD Vance.

Kamala Harris will pick her VP in the next day or two, and then they will go into a Democratic Party convention which is going to be euphoric.

She already has the momentum in all the swing states, and she has a rash of outstanding candidates.

If she picks a good one, her hand is strengthened. If she picks one of the superstars, like Josh Shapiro, the contrast between that ticket and the Trump/Vance one will be cataclysmic for the Republicans.

From Biden’s debate to now, it’s been just over a month. That’s how quickly everything can turn.

It’s only been a matter of weeks since Republicans thought they were on the brink of a big, big win.

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”

It’s why I opened with the quote.

Because then came the convention, and the choice of JD Vance.

Where will Celtic be in a month? What kind of state will our club be in? If they’ve got their act together at Ibrox, and their signings are even a little bit more capable than the guys they’ve replaced they’ll push this current squad of ours right to the wire.

Trump and his people were arrogant and complacent, that’s why they picked Vance, and our club is arrogant and complacent which is why we’re content to live in the slow lane under the misapprehension that we can’t be caught.

Of course we can be caught.

This season isn’t a lock.

We need to make sure that we’re prepared for this campaign and all of its twists and turns, and if we’ve misjudged either their strength or ours, we’re going to wake up the day after the transfer window shuts asking ourselves who has had the better time of it, and you know what?

It’ll be too damned late if that’s not us.

The Republicans might be stuck with Vance.

There is some dispute about whether or not they could ditch him even now, even though their convention is over, but even if they could, that’s an admission that your campaign is a shambles that can’t even get the basics right, which is why it’s only ever been done once before; in 1972, the Democrats nominated George McGovern and he picked a guy called Tom Eagleton to be his VP and then the papers found out he’d had electroshock therapy.

They dropped him, replaced him on the ticket with Sargent Shriver, and he and McGovern went down, to Richard Nixon, in the second worst political defeat in US electoral history, winning just Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.

I know this; we are officially stuck with the Celtic squad which is in place at midnight on 30 August.

And as with the above example, there are historical precedents.

Back in January 2009, we were top of the table but stuttering. We knew we needed a good signing, a striker, to put things in the bag.

We call it the Wilo Flood transfer window.

If we’ve not got the business done by the time this one shuts, if we’re still short in key positions, with more money in the bank than at any time in our history, then we’re locked in until 1 January when we can start to correct that mistake, and we don’t know how the world will look then.

We’re almost certainly writing off any chance of progress in Europe. We’re probably gambling with the title race. The League Cup will have been won or lost … there are a range of potential consequences. We don’t know which of them we’d face.

We’ve got 28 days, just over four weeks. Is that enough time to get done what we need to? People are already making the excuse that the business always gets done late in the window; I think that’s dangerous rubbish, especially with us short in so many critical areas.

If we’re waiting until then to see who is available, we’re already gambling with this season.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see us in the last week without a second striker, and finding ourselves on the last day making increasingly desperate bids for people and not getting anybody who we’d want to be relying on if something happens to Kyogo up front.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see us do the same with a centre back or the left back we’ve been needing for over a year. It doesn’t require much imagination to see a scenario where we sell O’Riley late in the day and don’t bring in a replacement at all.

And if that happens, we’ll be told “we tried, but we just ran out of time”, a risk so obvious and so readily apparent that it’s the sole reason this blog and others have been screaming about it at the top of our voices for weeks now without end.

I might understand the relaxed attitude some people have about our chances of a JD Vance Transfer Disaster if our club didn’t have a record for having done this before, but we do and everyone knows that we do.

We did this in January, for God’s sake, that’s recent enough in the memory banks that even the most sycophantic board lover should have it fresh in their minds.

We’re in a very dangerous period here, and there’s no excuse for us being in this position.

If we had functioning systems at Celtic Park we’d have known who our key targets were before the window even opened and we would have been in motion on Day 1, and if a deal looked like it was going to take too long we’d have moved to the next name on the list.

People want to make this out to be far more complicated a process than it is.

People have dragged their feet lugging that one around for longer than we’ve been alive.

“You only think this is easy but if you only knew …” it is condescending bollocks.

In 2021, we had an almost perfect summer transfer window.

That window is a demonstration of what happens when the manager and the club are working in perfect sync.

Then we went into the January window – the one we always hear is so difficult – with the club still rocking, and in that window is the textbook example of how a modern transfer policy can, and should, work.

Our initial midfield target was Riley McGree. He opted for Middlesbrough.

Ange didn’t go and cry in a corner somewhere.

Almost without missing a beat, we switched our focus to an alternative target and in short order we had Matt O’Riley at Celtic.

Ask people why that strategy couldn’t have been implemented this summer, and nobody will give you a straight answer.

The club certainly doesn’t think we’re entitled to one.

But you know, that won’t make the questions stop, and some of us are going to be asking them as long as our club does things in this shabby fashion, and I make no apology for that, and I won’t be prevented, not by anyone, and not by anything, from continuing to do so.