Celtic’s likely Champions League seeding is another warning not to drag our feet.

If you’ve been following Celtic fan social media today, you’ll know there’s been some chatter about the likely access list for the Champions League. And at the moment — and I have to stress, at the moment — we’re in the unseeded category going into the draw. This isn’t set in stone. There are still a few things that could happen to change the outcome significantly, but it’s the most likely scenario for us.

Being unseeded means there are some teams we’d really rather avoid who we now stand a chance of getting in the draw.

One of them is Bodo/Glimt — a side I’d want us to avoid at all costs. Based on their ability to get results against very good European clubs, it’s vaguely possible they could win the Europa League and save us all this trouble by qualifying directly for the group stage. But we shouldn’t count on that, because it almost certainly won’t happen.

Dinamo Zagreb are another side in there, and most of these teams seem pretty secure in their seeding positions. Red Star Belgrade have a qualifying round to play, and if they go out at that stage then obviously that moves us up into the seeded category. So that’s probably the result we most have to watch out for — but again, we can’t count on it, and so it’s incumbent upon us to be ready.

This has complicated things quite a bit. It’s complicated our chances of getting through, and it means there is no room for messing around, or dragging our feet, or taking our time. Our squad has to be pretty much in place for that game.

The players need time to work with one another and to know each other’s moves. Nothing short of that is going to suffice.

The prize for getting there is going to be around £40–50 million. It’s a prize so great that taking a risk on it would be ludicrous.

If the people running our scouting department are even vaguely competent, they should be well ahead of this. They should have identified the kinds of players the manager wants. The manager should know who’s on a shortlist, and the club should be ready to move swiftly to get those guys in.

The cynic in me is well aware that our club doesn’t ordinarily do things that way. I’m well aware of how long deals have taken in the past, and the foot-dragging that’s gone on. I’m well aware of previous transfer windows that have been absolute shit-shows, which have called into question even the ambition of those running Celtic.

But we’ve all talked about the stakes this summer, and how we need — at the very least — to try and convince the manager that he belongs here, and that this club is sufficiently motivated and ambitious to keep him.

As I said earlier today, the club across the city looks increasingly like it’s going to leave things very late in the day to get its pieces in place for the coming campaign. Now it’s entirely possible that we’ll have a window of opportunity, and so it’s imperative that we seize it and try to be as ready as we possibly can be for the start of the season.

But the central thesis here is that we should be aiming to be ready for Europe. The Champions League qualifier is in mid-August. It’s not immediate. It’s not a problem we have to deal with straight away. We’ll have a couple of games under our belts before we need to navigate that tie.

But every day we delay, we hurt ourselves. Players need time to gel with their teammates. If the manager is going to experiment with new tactics, then everyone is going to have to get on the same page very quickly. Very quickly. And if you’re not making signings until the final days of the window, you’re blowing any chance of fully integrating the squad in the manner the manager would like.

It’s alright for some bean-counter to sit in his ivory tower and say, “Yeah, but as long as we get deals done, what does it matter how fast they’re done?”

But managers know better than that. Managers work at the sharp end of this business. It’s their reputations that are on the line. They know what a team requires. And if some accountancy type thinks he knows better than them, they’re not going to be happy about that. They’re not going to like it.

Is it a coincidence that managers the world over all speak the same way about this subject — that they would prefer the business done sooner rather than later? What do they know that the number crunchers don’t?

The easy answer to that is, they know everything the number crunchers don’t. And what many of us had hoped would be a relatively straightforward task now looks as if it will be a lot tougher. So foot-dragging becomes riskier than ever before. There is simply no excuse for it, and there is simply no way it can be countenanced. If we’re not ready when those games come around, we’ll deserve everything we get.