Oh’s successful spell in Belgium does not in any way prove Celtic were mistaken to sell him.

I know there’s a school of thought out there that says myself and my two podcast colleagues, Joe McHugh and Eric Knott, are somehow negative in our portrayal of the club. But this is rubbish, and it’s always been rubbish.

I don’t feel any need to defend myself from such a witless allegation. We give the club credit where it’s due, and we’re as passionate in celebrating its success stories as any dyed-in-the-wool diehard could ever be.

But we also have a very clear idea of the areas where the club isn’t doing so well. Areas where it’s failing. Areas where it cannot seem to progress and move forward.

I wrote a piece today on Shaun Maloney’s appointment—or potential appointment—where I said it was both an excellent development and a troubling one. Excellent, because I think he’ll be brilliant in the job. Troubling, because it’s yet another example of us hiring a former player for a key role without any sign of a serious search outside that very small network.

There are some people who do criticise Celtic without any internal logic to their argument. Some of them are very vocal right now. Some of them seem awfully fixated on pointing out the areas where Rodgers has failed.

One of the areas they’ve identified is in player development.

I can’t understand how these same people will defend failure from others at the club when it’s staring them in the face or how they expect to be taken seriously when the arguments they use are so transparently phoney.

Sometimes I wonder if they’ve ever watched a game of football in their lives or know anything about how clubs operate. They seem to know very little about how the sport works. They seem to know even less about how teams are actually built. They have become experts in how to read a balance sheet though.

Look, I know what propaganda looks like. I know what factional partisanship looks like. I come from an activist background, and I’ve been studying the political scene since I was in my teens. Reading some of these people is not terribly different from listening to one of Trump’s minions speak. They can do it with conviction but you can pull apart everything they are saying with ease.

I don’t care whether their criticisms of Celtic’s squad building over the past 12 months are rooted in a personal dislike of Brendan Rodgers, although it borders on the pathological in some cases. I don’t care whether these people are, as some suggest, stooges for board members, who’ve got their hands up their backs and operate them like puppets. I don’t care if they are just too stupid to know what they’re talking about. Whichever it is, I can’t take them seriously.

Their latest cause célèbre is Oh Hyeon-gyu, who we sold last year to Belgian club Genk, and who is now apparently the subject of a €9 million bid from Feyenoord—if you believe the media over there. And you know what? I kind of do.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they paid that kind of money. I’m sure he’ll do well in the Dutch league. A lot of players do.

But using his relative success in Belgium—and the reported interest from Holland—to argue that Brendan Rodgers failed in his duty to “coach him” and to suggest the Dutch interest proves that he was a superstar in waiting all along takes simplistic reasoning to a whole new level. And it ignores one important fact at the same time.

Let’s start with the fact; Oh has not played many more games as a starter in Belgium than he was doing at Celtic Park. He has not been a prolific scorer there either. One analysis of his time on the pitch suggests that in over 41 “appearances” he’s played for just 867 minutes. Genk remain as unconvinced by his ability to start and complete games for them as the management team at Celtic were; that’s why they are happy to accept Feyenoord’s bid.

There are two further points that these people refuse to acknowledge or which they deliberately omit. The first is that it doesn’t automatically follow that a player who leaves a club isn’t a good footballer or that the manager made a mistake. Players sometimes move on because the club just isn’t a good fi for them. At a club like Celtic, you need more than talent. It takes a certain mentality, a certain resilience. A lot of players brought in over the last few years simply don’t have what the psychological strength that it takes to be Celtic players, where you always have to meet a certain standard, where you always have to give your all.

But there’s something else—and this, above all else, needs to be understood: when footballers are signed by analysts, bean-counters, and others who don’t know what they’re doing, that’s when clubs lose money. That’s when managers lose interest. That’s when it starts to unravel.

The most successful Celtic managers of my lifetime have all been architects. And when people try to force players on them—players they don’t want, don’t need, don’t rate and can’t use—that’s when things go wrong.

The most important person at a football club, bar none, is the man in the dugout. If a club is to have sustained success and if players are to develop properly the team should be built to his specifications. He shouldn’t have to accommodate signings made by an analytics department which expects him to turn a list of 10 vaguely promising signings into a functioning side. That is not how football works.

There’s a good reason that I call this propaganda and agenda driven. Some of this criticism isn’t just anti-Rodgers; it’s a defence of one individual who completely failed two summers ago to provide the manager with a single valuable asset. It’s part of an unfathomable defence of Mark Lawwell, whose time at Celtic was a disaster. I cannot understand why some are so invested in offering him an alibi or trying to rehabilitate his reputation. Ask the wider game what it thinks of him; is he even at another club?

I remember people assuring myself and others that he was a high calibre individual and we would be sorry if the endless barrage of criticism drove him out of Parkhead. We were assured that he would move into a similar role at an even bigger club in no time at all. How strange that it hasn’t happened yet.

Brendan Rodgers, on the other hand, is the second-most successful Celtic boss of all time. He nearly took Liverpool to a title. He took Leicester to their only ever FA Cup and to the brink of a European final. There is no one on the Celtic board who is qualified to question his football judgement. No-one. He knows far more about what it takes to build a winning side than they ever will.

And putting that side on the pitch is his job.

The idea that he’s supposed to turn every dud the recruitment department throws at him into a Celtic player and a saleable asset is laughable. His role is to win games and put trophies in the cabinet—which keeps the fans happy and keeps the money flowing. By any obvious metric, he is succeeding.

If these people are really arguing for a manager who improves players, then this is the guy to do it. But he can’t just work with anything he’s given; there has to be some obvious quality. This is not a club for players who are finding their feet; the requirements are too high. The weekly demands are too great.

If the board wants him to grow footballers into stars it needs to give him players he can work with. I never doubted Oh was a decent footballer. I never doubted that at the right club he’d thrive. But this wasn’t that club. He didn’t suit Ange’s style of play, and he didn’t suit Rodgers’. You bring in players to fit the style; you do not radically transform the style to accommodate the players. No successful manager does that.

Suggesting that Rodgers should have spent more time adapting players who didn’t fit into players who might—rather than just using the ones who already could—is not a credible argument. If Rodgers had wasted time trying to turn Tiago Holm and Kwon Hyeok-kyu into first team players, we’d never have won the title by such a margin. We wouldn’t have reached two cup finals.

We wouldn’t have done anything of note last season in Europe.

The fact is, those players weren’t up to the job—or didn’t suit the style—and expecting Rodgers to persevere with them regardless is either breathtaking ignorance or absolute stupidity. Either way, how are we supposed to take it seriously?

There are even lists doing the rounds today of players who’ve gone on to “prove” they were good enough for Celtic. Iwata was on it. Someone pointed out that he’s played the last year in England’s third tier. He’s done well there. Good for him. I liked Iwata. I thought he had something. But it was never something that was going to trouble midfields made up of players from Real Madrid, Juventus, or Inter Milan. And that’s the level Celtic now operate at. That’s the standard we need.

Bernabei? He had chance after chance to show he had something. He didn’t. He didn’t suit the club, or the style, or even the country. That’s one of the reasons Scottish clubs generally avoid Central and South American players—they often don’t settle here. Signing one from that region is always a gamble.

And most of the time, it doesn’t work out.

Tilio is another name getting thrown around just now—because he’s had a reasonable amount of success playing back in Australia. But let’s get serious: playing in Australia doesn’t even come close to qualifying someone to be a member of the Celtic first team squad. Not when that squad is expected to compete for trophies and play in the Champions League.

We have other players at the club who remain out of favour, and people out there claim not to understand why. Nawrocki and Lagerbielke are two of them. Those two were signed by a scouting department that paid absolutely no heed to the kind of football the manager wants to play: a high line, an aggressive passing game where defenders need to be comfortable on the ball and able to get back into position quickly.

Had the manager himself been in charge of signing the players, he would never have signed two centre-backs who lack pace. But he wasn’t. So he was handed players unsuited to his style of play. He took one look at them—on the training pitch, and in competitive matches—and immediately saw that they wouldn’t work for him. And no amount of coaching in the world is going to fix that.

It’s not the manager’s fault that the people who signed those players didn’t come to him first and ask what he needed. It’s not his fault that these people have shown no understanding of tactics, systems or footballing styles. They think they can second guess him. They think their judgement is superior to his. That has been comprehensively proven not to be the case.

And what I really don’t get is why anyone is trying to mount a defence of such a broken system. A system where players are signed for a manager without even establishing what that manager wants or what he needs. This is why I believe in the idea that the manager is the architect—that he should choose the pieces he needs to build his team, to realise his vision.

And this isn’t even about Rodgers. It’s not just about defending him. Any manager who comes into a club comes with a defined philosophy. A scattergun signing policy—where you simply throw players at him and hope he’ll make it work—won’t work for anyone.

I can’t believe an idea this daft is being presented as a serious proposition. The notion that Rodgers is somehow responsible for turning players who aren’t ready for Celtic—and who don’t fit into the system—into first-team regulars is nonsense. These guys would drag the overall level of the team down if they were playing week-in, week-out and that would cost us points. Perhaps enough of them to matter. It’s hard not to feel like we’re being trolled when people try to push an argument that ridiculous.