A Record hack wrote last week’s most ignorant piece on Celtic’s transfer policy.

So yesterday The Record did one of its absolutely idiotic pieces on Celtic’s transfer window, and I could barely believe what I was reading. Almost every single thing that came out of Gavin Berry’s mouth was outrageous and stupid.

He started by claiming that all the deadwood had been cleared out of our squad. Maybe he hasn’t noticed that there are still three or four players we need to move on because they’re not going to play.

I mean, we’re nowhere near the scale of the problem they’ve got across the city, but to pretend we don’t have a handful of players we need to shift is absolutely nuts. Most of the survivors of the Mark Lawwell window are still at the club, although a couple of them look as if they have their moves lined up.

But when he started talking about the number of signings he expects us to make, and the amount of money he speculates we’ll spend, that’s when I thought he’d really lost the plot. Six or seven signings in the £2-3 million range before we get to the “blue chip” players toward the end of the window? He expects us to break our own transfer record not once but twice—and reckons the Scottish record will fall as part of that?

Now, when you consider that we’re only a million off the Scottish record, that might well happen sometime. But I don’t think it’s going to happen in this window, and I certainly don’t think we’ll break our own transfer record twice.

What this kind of talk does, of course, is create an expectation level amongst the fans that’s almost impossible to meet.

I don’t mind the hacks doing that across the city—they do it all the time, and their fans always end the transfer window more disillusioned than when they came into it.

There was already a risk that our fans were going to feel that way this season anyway, but that risk is greatly increased by this kind of nonsense, which makes no sense at all and is probably the furthest thing from the minds of the people inside the club.

There’s absolutely no need for us to go out and break the transfer record just on a point of principle. That’s a stupid principle. It’s a stupid thing to have as an objective. The objective of this club should be to emerge from the window stronger than we went into it.

That’s not going to be measured in how many players at £10 million-plus we sign. It’s going to be measured in the overall strength of the squad in every position, which properly equips us for a multi-front campaign.

One thing Celtic fans know for sure—one thing time has proved over and over again—is that we don’t have to spend high seven-figure or low eight-figure sums to get players of real calibre. They’re out there. We know we can find them, because we’ve found them before, and before, and before. So headline-grabbing numbers? They’re deeply unimpressive, and all they actually do is pile pressure on players anyway.

We’ve seen the pressure that sort of thing puts on players. Look at Adam Idah. Look at Arne Engels. Look, even, at Austin Trusty.

Those are the big three from last season, and they’re probably the three most under-pressure players in the squad because everyone’s watching to see if they can justify their fees. And the truth is, most people I’ve spoken to have concerns about at least one of them—and can’t understand why we ever forked out those sums in the first place.

It’s the newspapers that love the big numbers. And there’s a certain type of Celtic fan who seems to think that unless we’re trying to spend that kind of money every year, we’re going backwards. I totally disagree with that.

That’s why I think it’s both unlikely that we’ll break the Scottish transfer record this summer and that it would be impractical. It would be a waste of resources, especially when you consider how much talent is out there at a much more affordable rate.

For the £12 million it would take to break that record, we could buy two players—and probably better ones.

And let’s be honest, that number has always been ridiculous. It was ridiculous back when the first Ibrox club did it. The £12 million they paid for Tore Andre Flo was the same £12 million we paid for Chris Sutton and John Hartson combined.

So, you tell me who got the better deal out of that one.

That’s how I’d rather we look at this. And I think if you asked most Celtic fans, they’d say the same: we want to see our money spent wisely.

We’ve always been a much smarter club than the one across the city. That’s why, when they were spending a tenner for every fiver, we just made sure our fiver went further and was better spent. That’s why we thrived and they didn’t survive. I fully expect that our future successes will be built on exactly the same principle.

Gavin Berry doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about.