Desperate hacks rip off Celtic sites all the time. That’s what will kill some of their jobs.

One of the most pitiful things in the world, to me, is watching the media rewrite a story that the Celtic fan sites have already covered in detail. And when the story itself is not terribly important to begin with, when it’s really not that big a deal, it comes across as even more desperate.

That’s exactly what happened with the story all over the press last night — the one about how Celtic won’t net the full fee for Nicolas Kuhn because of FIFA regulations on payments to his previous clubs.

It was a complete non-story. When the Celtic sites covered it, I understood why although it’s the kind of thing that happens all the time in football. These clauses are common in contracts — they’ve been part of player sales and purchases for decades.

Almost every player we’ve ever signed or sold has involved this kind of agreement. Still, I understood the fan sites running with it, even though it’s not something I would’ve written about myself. There’s only so much Celtic news out there every day, and writing seven days a week is hard sometimes when you cover just one club.

That’s why I try to write about the broader picture — issues affecting Scottish football and other clubs too. This was always meant to be a site about the game in Scotland, written from a Celtic perspective, not just a Celtic-only bubble, and I am glad for that because even a club like ours can only generate so much information on a daily basis, especially with so many sites covering it.

I thought that story was a nice wee bit of additional colour. That’s what it’s called in fiction writing, a little extra texture for the walls. It’s an obscure wee detail that not a lot of people would have been familiar with, so I appreciated it.

But when a mainstream outlet grabs a story like this — one that’s already been covered by fan media — and repackages it as if it’s a bombshell, it reeks of laziness.

These people have the whole world of football to cover. Scottish football might be small, but it still, as a whole, generates news every day. The mainstream press could be covering any number of legitimate stories, but instead they’re lifting content aimed solely at Celtic fans and republishing it — badly — under their own banner. That’s not just lazy. That’s bad journalism, and in the modern context it’s also dangerous. To them. To their business model. Yes, even to the jobs of the writers who churn it out.

When fan sites covered this, it came across as a nice wee curiosity for those who might not have been aware of it. And honestly, the only reason I knew this stuff was because I’ve played so much Football Manager over the years that I’ve internalised how this stuff works. If you’ve played FM, you’ve seen it — transfer income breakdowns showing 1% to this club, 5% to that one. It’s just how the system functions.

So, when I saw it covered by the Celtic sites, I took it for what it was — a small nugget of info that some people might appreciate. Not something to turn into clickbait. But that’s what the media did. They slapped a lurid headline on it, knowing full well what the story really was, because it wasn’t written for people like me. It was written for readers who maybe thought they’d missed something — that Celtic had made some error or lost out through incompetence or carelessness.

It was sensationalised. That’s all it was. There was no real meat on those bones. And because the Celtic sites had already covered it days earlier, it was already in the public domain. That makes it pathetic — a blatant case of the press scraping the barrel and pretending it’s journalism.

And this isn’t the first time it’s happened.

I’ve lost count of how often the mainstream media have lifted stories from the fan sites and passed them off as their own. It’s not just the stories, either — it’s the perspectives, the talking points, the arguments.

I’ve watched debates unfold in the media based on articles that first appeared on fan sites — and occasionally even on this one. And I don’t mind that, not when it shifts the narrative in a way that’s more accurate or more Celtic-friendly. If the media picks up on something one of us has written or said, and uses that to reframe an issue, that moves the conversation closer to the truth. That’s all good. Steal away.

If they want, they can go over the full unvarnished truth about Murray, or the Survival Lie on this site and all the others and reshape the current narratives to their hearts content; it would be a welcome break from the sycophancy and the mental gymnastics some of that must take. It would restore some honour to the public square.

But I’ve also watched so-called journalists pass off those ideas as their own, presenting them as dazzling new insights when they clearly aren’t. And you know, and they know, that they didn’t come up with it. It’s not original thinking. It’s plagiarism with polish — nicked from people who understand the club and the sport far better than they do.

The truth is, I would never have written about this so-called “story” otherwise. Because it was nothing more than a background detail on a quiet day. That’s all. There are days like that in the summer — slow news days where you’re scratching around looking for something to write about, and then there are days when five big stories break at once and you’ve got to bump some of them to the next morning. This one was background noise, and that’s all it ever should have been.

And that’s how the Celtic sites treated it. The media tries to pretend its news. Second hand news in this case, although they won’t acknowledge it.

I am ever appalled by how they consistently find new ways to demonstrate their complete lack of standards. The fact that they’ve blown up something this minor into headline news — all for a handful of clicks — is the kind of thing that just lays bare the state of that industry.

We’re talking about maybe a million and a half off the transfer fee, paid to his former clubs via sell-on clauses. One club might get £1.5 million, another £200,000, and a third might get £40,000. That’s barely a rounding error. It doesn’t affect our transfer budget. It won’t impact what the manager can spend. It’s just how these things work.

And the real kicker is this: because stories like this generate traffic — even if it’s only modest — these publications have no incentive to improve.

They don’t need to hire better writers or real journalists. They don’t need to raise their game, and when I said this is dangerous, I meant it. If AI really is the future, it could replace all these guys tomorrow — because this is exactly the kind of thing AI can do. It can scan every Celtic story posted in the past 48 hours and churn out a knockoff with a clickbait headline. Which is basically what’s happened here.

So, the real question is — do these people know they’re destroying their own industry? Or do they just not care? Because when your standards are this low, what does it matter if a machine replaces you? Would anyone even notice?

Actually, yeah. I think we would.

The quality would almost certainly improve.