Celtic’s summer transfer window 24-25: The verdict is in.

Back in the sands of time, as Ronald Reagan was gearing up to fight the 1984 general election, one of his senior aides, Stuart Spencer, was recorded at a meeting of top campaign officials admitting that the White House had no strategy for the race.

“The most striking thing I discovered is that they don’t have a goddamn thing in the pipeline. They don’t have an idea,” he said.

And months out, they still had no idea.

Reagan ran in 1984 without any kind of coherent blueprint for how he would govern in the next four years. His entire political philosophy was best summed up two years later when he candidly told a meeting on the Iran-Contra scandal that they should, “Avoid specifics. Declare that whatever we’ve done is consistent with our policy.”

And two years prior to that meeting, his campaign people had drawn the same conclusions.

The campaign they ran has become famous.

It’s one of the greatest political victories of all time… because it didn’t promise a damn thing. It was encapsulated in an ad called “Morning In America” which eulogised the four previous years and told the country that if they wanted the good times to continue, they should vote to re-elect the President.

By the end of his second term, he was roiled in scandal and his administration was on the brink of collapse.

So was his health; his son later admitted that he’d suffered from early onset Alzheimer’s.

It may have been one of the reasons that he let his advisors run amok and make up government policy on the hoof, which was the cause of most of his problems.

There is a story that Reagan liked to tell people; it’s a story that on the surface is about optimism, but I actually think it’s a cynical story, about people’s willingness to believe whatever keeps them smiling.

It’s about a kid who wakes up on Christmas morning, goes running downstairs to get his presents, and his dad takes him outside and points to a large mound of manure. The kid is not deterred in any way; he grabs a shovel and starts digging with the words, “There must be a pony in here.”

Well, no kid, sometimes what you get is just a pile of shit.

And sometimes people who don’t have a clue what they are doing can present a superficial vision which suggests great competence and a strategic outlook.

But that’s just a different sort of shit.

And with that, we get to the point; the summer transfer window season, 24-25, is closed.

And it closes not with a bang, but a whimper.

There are people who will call this a success. It won’t surprise anyone to know that I am not going to call it that. There are People who will present this as a triumph for the board of directors. I am certainly not going to call it that.

But I’m underwhelmed rather than thoroughly disgusted, and this time last week I would have been thoroughly disgusted had things progressed along the lines they seemed to be.

Underwhelmed is a weird emotion.

It’s not great disappointment. Disappointment, ha! I’m past disappointment. I’m past being disappointed in these people. These pygmies. These amateurs who run our club. I’m past disappointment with them. It’s over. It was over a long time ago.

They don’t know how to run a modern football operation. They don’t have certain parts of the skill set. They’re good commercially. But nobody deserves a pat on the back because we’re not a basket case like the club across the city.

This is a window where we have done the bare minimum.

We replaced Matt O’Riley. We all knew we needed a centre back, a left back, and a goalkeeper – the mission critical positions. We’ve signed three midfielders in Engels, Bernardo and McCowan. And McCowan, I’m happier about than you might believe.

There are people who are going to say “Ah, but they spent money.”

Well, we haven’t spent money, actually; our transfer trading for this window comes to £41 million in the door and £31 million out the door.

So again, this club has a transfer surplus and key areas of the team remain problematic. Aside from the transfer cash we’ve taken in, we’ve got guaranteed Champions League wonga; not one red cent of that money went to the manager for players. Not one bean.

To not use it, you might as well not have it.

Even spending that £10 million transfer trading surplus, and finishing the window revenue-neutral, was too much to ask these people to contemplate. We needed a third striker who the manager wasn’t allowed to have. We needed another wide player and he didn’t get that. We needed a permanent solution at left back instead of a sticking plaster.

So, I have no problem saying we did the bare minimum, because that’s exactly what we did. A massive trading profit, more money to pile on top of the rest, and key parts of the side still without reinforcement and one – one – player who goes straight into the team ahead of a player currently at the club, the first in five windows, so congratulations for that I suppose.

The squad is not significantly stronger. The manager’s options are not significantly better.

So why underwhelmed and not disgusted? Because we didn’t go backwards. Are we that much farther forward? Not that much, but an inch in the right direction.

They don’t get a medal for that, any more than they get one for not bankrupting us all these years; this club has been “getting by” at executive level a long time now, and I think one of the reasons that these guys won’t go is that they know that the next set of guys can come in here and run this club even better than they do and then all the magic dust they sprinkle on their fan-club to get them to sing their praises will be revealed for the handful of sawdust it is.

They’ve deprived the manager of a proper summer to bed in the new signings, a decision only non-football people without the first clue, and staggeringly unqualified, could have made.

We know Adam Idah could have been signed a hell of a lot sooner and a hell of a lot cheaper had we not had to push the deal through in a panic after Kyogo got injured and even the happy clappers could no longer kid themselves about how reckless our policy choices had been.

The sight of Mikey Johnston playing through the middle as a striker will do that to you every time.

Even Engels could have been signed quicker; he was telling people close to him that he was coming to Celtic weeks ago. That story has been online this whole time, it’s widely reported. So why didn’t we move sooner?

Because we wanted Matt out the door before spending. Disgusting choices to force the manager to live with; bean-counter choices, not the sort football men would make.

And nobody is going to tell me that we couldn’t have spent £1 million on Luke McCowan weeks, if not months ago. Our closest competitor was Hibs, and they didn’t even get around to offering £800,000 until this afternoon.

But Celtic left that to the last day to announce it, along with Engels. Why? I’ve told you why: real work plus the appearance of work equals actual work.

These people did the bare minimum.

They did virtually nothing for the whole summer and then, on the last day, announced a couple of big deals to get everyone off their backs.

Lazy pricks and incompetents have been getting away with this stuff for more years than I’ve been on the planet. I know this because I was one of the lazy pricks once.

I worked with masters of those dark arts; I was on a school groundskeeping squad that filled empty branded Parks Department bin bags with full branded Cleansing Department bin bags to make it look as if we’d been out in the rain all day instead of sitting in the van drinking coffee – and me in the back reading some Stephen King novel. I know this stuff by heart.

Because we left it to the last day, I’m sure that certain deals we hoped to get didn’t go through. This is the suicidal stupidity that could have cost us big time, and that can’t happen again. And everybody who’s in such a hurry to congratulate the board of directors better stop and think about whether congratulating them for that strategy makes any sense.

It was needless and it was reckless, and who said so?

Blogger guy who just likes to moan?

No, the manager of Celtic himself said it, at the end of last week.

Argue with me? Don’t waste your time; you’re arguing with Rodgers, and you better understand that before everything else. He knows this is a shitty way to do transfer business, and he said it in plain language.

He acknowledges that this window has been a farce. That’s why he’s talking, again in plain language, about rebuilding the scouting system into something that fulfils his purpose. And that job is so long overdue. This club needs a director of football to go with it – someone who works with the manager and according to his needs rather than against him.

The risk-taking has been mind-blowing.

What people are congratulating these guys for is betting the house and the kid’s university fund on red or black at the casino and getting the right colour. If a relative did that to you, would you pay tribute to them for guessing right, or would you kick them squarely in the nuts? You know the answer, I won’t labour the point.

Here’s the question some of you will be asking.

I sound disgusted. So, why am I not disgusted? Why am I, instead of being disgusted, actually simply underwhelmed? And I’ll tell you, as I said, we’ve made progress. Small steps, an inch or two maybe. But progress is not to be knocked.

The thing is, when was the last time we paid so much money on average per player in a transfer window? We knew we were going to lose Matt O’Riley anyway – all of us did. But I also think all of us expected his replacement would be some £2 or £3 million player.

The logic would have been, “Well, Matt only cost us £1.5 million when we signed him, so if we spend £3 million, you never know.”

Except, we’ve been down that road before. And before. And before.

And although Luke McCowan hasn’t cost the earth, and we brought in the boy from Spain on a loan fee, our backup keeper only cost a million, and a first-choice keeper was also a free transfer, the four big signings have been big, and they’ve cost a few bucks.

Bernardo and Idah didn’t make the squad stronger than it was at the end of last season, but we would have been a weaker squad without them. Everyone involved deserves credit for spending the money we did on them.

That was a big deal, and I remember when I wrote the piece about how it was a lot of money to spend to stand still and got a lot of stick for it. I told people “I’m only pointing out the facts and speaking sensibly.” Not that some people reacted sensibly, but I stand by what I wrote and I spoke sense. And I said then that if we spend that money on those two players, compromises would have to be made elsewhere, and that is exactly what happened.

This board was never going to spend more than it brought in.

No chance. They don’t do it.

And I’ve said my piece on that already in this article. It makes me sick to think that they’re about to ask fans for more money when they won’t spend what we already have. Why they need to feel like they’ve made a trading profit coming out of this window rather than spend on the team, putting it on the park where it belongs, I can’t even fathom. It makes me sick.

But knowing that that’s the policy, I explicitly warned people not to get their hopes up in the event that we spent £12 million on two players who were here last season on loan. “That will affect the manager’s budget,” and of course, it did.

But the club didn’t have to spend that money; they didn’t have to sanction that. The club could have taken the attitude that it was too much to spend just to maintain the strength of the last squad. They did it, quite possibly because Rodgers gave them no choice, but they did it anyway – they spent the money, they splashed the cash on those two guys.

We spent £6.5 million on a central defender, the only player in this transfer window who automatically enhances both the team and the squad.

I regard that as a personal triumph for the manager.

He must have made a good case, and he must have got his way because that’s more money than I thought we would spend on that position for one player. And we did in the end, and we backed the manager’s judgement, and that is all to the good.

And on the Engels deal, what can you say?

The underwhelming feeling that I have is certainly nothing to do with that signing.

It’s about opportunities that have been missed elsewhere and the opportunity to really push the boat out in terms of the midfielder, the wide area, the forward line.

But I can’t complain about that signing, and I won’t complain about that signing – a piece of genuine quality. To actually have Matt O’Riley leave and bring in somebody who can fill those shoes and can do it quickly … amazing. And they’ve spent a lot of cash on getting that guy.

That is a signing vastly in excess of anything I would have believed we would do in this window when it opened. The only signing, along with the one for Trusty, that did not just meet but exceeded the expectations.

And again, let me go back for a minute and talk about Bernardo and Idah. I only mentioned them briefly, and I want to discuss that in more detail.

When you spend £4.5 million on a midfielder, some people will naturally believe he’s the replacement for the guy going out the door. It’s to the credit of the club and the manager that we paid the money for Bernardo and then Engels on top.

He has something, does Bernardo, and he adds real quality to the midfield. And it’s a big important signing, not just for the squad’s depth.

And spending £9 million on Idah? I wouldn’t have believed that was going to happen in a hundred years. I’m not even sure we should have spent that kind of money on Adam Idah, but if you want to talk about the manager getting backed with serious money, that’s an example of it right there.

I know it’s cost him in the short term; he’s had to make compromises elsewhere and has probably lost out on a third striker because the board won’t go beyond a certain point, and shame on every one of the penny-pinchers who never had to build a football squad for not giving the boss even the luxury of that additional player.

But when it comes to the manager’s first choice, he got what he wanted. He got that striker, the player he thinks can make a big difference, and they paid that money for him – over and above what they wanted to pay. They paid it because Rodgers demanded it, and Rodgers got his way.

The kid from Spain, who I’ve not criticised, no matter what some people evidently believe… Again, people who read without understanding, or people who just don’t read and think they understand based on a headline or something they’ve heard about the article from someone else. Or because they’ve read some negative commentary on Twitter or Facebook and just can’t help but join the herd like brainless sheep, one following the other.

You know what else I didn’t I say during those articles about how underwhelming that signing was, considering we waited two years for it and got a loanee – some 20-year-old kid? Well, what I didn’t say, and what I’ll say now, is that I would take him over some of the other options being talked about, like Owen Beck, all day long.

It doesn’t mean that the policy is right. It doesn’t mean we’ve arrived at the right conclusion after a two-year search, because we are miles away from where we need to be after waiting for two years for this problem to be solved.

When the manager talks about bringing in a player to “compete” with Greg Taylor, I want to scream, because by this point, we shouldn’t be looking for a player to compete with Greg Taylor. We should be getting ready to play a guy who has hoisted Greg Taylor off his feet and planted him firmly on the bench or in the stands.

But progress comes in many forms. And I think we emerged in better shape in some ways than I would have thought, and as usual some of that is down to the boss himself.

It helps the board – and how glad they must be of this – that Nicholas Kuhn looks like a new player, and is a triumph of Rodgers’ development skills. It helps that Luis Palma has done enough to convince the manager he has a future, and that Maeda can play as a striker in a pinch when needed. Although Brendan has known that for 12 months and didn’t consider him a third choice at any stage.

Thank God he didn’t make that point sooner, otherwise the world would never have heard of Norwich’s reserve, Adam Idah, because they certainly wouldn’t have signed him in January.

They have done the bare minimum.

I don’t think we’re Champions League ready yet, and in a better, tougher group we would be in real bother. Whether we have enough to get past the teams we’ve drawn is going to depend an awful lot on the order of the fixtures and what state the team is in when each game comes up. If we get a couple of injuries in certain positions, we are in bother.

And that £10 million transfer trading surplus will end up an albatross around the necks of this board – and it should be. Maybe they’ll get lucky in that regard.

So, no, I’m not getting out the pitchforks.

I already thought that all these people should have been shamefaced and walked when they failed the manager in January, and then they’ve gone through this entire window in the same lackadaisical fashion. If they had any sense of responsibility or accountability, some of them would walk. Because it has been a shambles, regardless of the outcome, regardless of the fact that we’ve gotten a semi-reasonable result out of it. I won’t call it a good result, it’s semi-reasonable progress, but only by an inch. And it’s no less of a shambles for that.

In the last two press conferences where Rodgers spoke about this, he talked about lessons being learned. He talked about changes he wants to implement—things he believes we need but don’t have behind the scenes.

Yes, revamping the scouting system is part of that. And hiring someone to take responsibilities away from Michael Nicholson, who is clearly not equipped to deal with them, should be another. Call it a technical director, or a director of football, but for God’s sake Celtic stop pissing about and put in place the infrastructure of a modern, forward thinking club.

Their whole sense of priorities is wrong, wrong, wrong.

This club’s sense of what its mission is, and the directors’ sense of what their place is, are both fundamentally flawed. “Balance sheet before team sheet” remains the active policy of the Celtic board. Rodgers may have won some of his battles, but he’s still fighting his war, and he will have to fight every day he is here, for everything he wants.

I don’t intend to abandon him in that fight, and I don’t intend to step back just because this window has shut.

This guy has only just started his revolution, and if we want to keep him here beyond this campaign and the next, he’s going to need support—a hell of a lot more than he’s had from certain people this summer, people who’s faith in this board is akin to that enjoyed by Trump, more cult-like than directors of any football club have ever had as far as I can tell, and every bit of credit they get is a bit stripped from the people who genuinely earned it.

But there are things that can wait, and there are things that will keep and is a blessed relief to put them and this subject to bed for a spell. I’ve done my bit; I’ve held their feet to the fire for the whole summer. And right now, I just want to cheer on my team.

This is the longest piece I’ve put out over the course of the transfer window, and I trust that my feelings on it are 100 percent clear: it’s been a failure, but it hasn’t been a disaster, and that, I suppose, is good enough for some people. I doubt the manager is entirely satisfied, and I have a feeling he will make that clear in his own way and in his own time.

This is the hand he’s been dealt. These are the cards he’s been given. And I had no doubts about Rodgers at the start of the window and I don’t have any now. There are opportunities, both domestically and in Europe, and we have to focus on them for a while.

But that doesn’t mean that Michael Nicholson, the CEO, Chris Mackay, the finance guy, Brian Wilson, and the other board members who as far as I can tell offer nothing, get free pass.

Nor does Dermot Desmond, the largest shareholder, who delegates responsibility to a handful of his cronies and lets them do things in this business that he wouldn’t allow in any other company in which he has an interest. This is a guy who doesn’t even have a majority of the shares, but he controls the board like they’re his hand puppets.

Which brings, me at last, to the chairman, whose feeble defence for this fiasco is that he doesn’t do anything anyway—nothing except draw a salary and drag the whole club’s credibility into the gutter with a large section of the fan base.

As long as he’s there, no one trusts any of them, and he is the one most in need of considering his position because our perception problem is overwhelmingly down to his presence, and if he does nothing anyway we’re paying too a high price for him.

But this club is more than they are.

Even if they’ve forgotten that, I haven’t, and most of the fans haven’t.

That’s why, for a while at least, we can turn our attention to what happens on the pitch, where the real stuff happens. Where the successes are made, where the points are put on the board, where the trophies are won. Where the glory and the glamour originate, and where the credit belongs—with the manager and the players.

Where it’s always been, and where it will always be, with those of us who care about Celtic more than we care about Celtic PLC.