Celtic fans will be glad when the transfer window rumour mill shuts its doors.

This is the final weekend of the January transfer window and I will be very glad when it finally shuts. I sometimes wonder how some people survive without it.

Last night, there was a rash of stories across the media offering updates on Celtic’s supposed signing progress. Every single one of them said the same thing. There is no new information. These were the same stories that have been recycled and regurgitated all week and, in truth, for the last four weeks.

It is astonishing how no news can generate so much news.

What offends me most, as a reader, is the dishonest nature of much of the discourse around the transfer window. Someone sticks a suggestive headline on an article and even though you know, deep down, that it will contain nothing of substance, you click it anyway.

Just in case. Just in case this time there is an actual piece of concrete information buried inside. There never is.

Transfer windows are all the same for me.

My tone gets increasingly angry through the first half of them, then drifts into boredom and resignation in the second. I am well into the resignation phase now. I have accepted that nothing substantial is going to happen. We are not going to do meaningful business. This club is going to drift listlessly until deadline day, and if one or two players arrive on loan, the board will declare the job done.

In reality, we need four, maybe five.

I have been doing this for more than a dozen years now, and perhaps that explains my cynicism. I have done it long enough to know that almost nothing you read during a transfer window contains even a scintilla of truth.

The ratio of factual stories sits at about one in twenty, probably worse. Every now and then, a genuinely solid piece of information appears, usually when an agent or a club tips off a mainstream outlet once a deal is close to completion.

Everything else deserves to be ignored. At times, I wish people would ignore it, because if they did, many of the outlets churning out this rubbish would simply stop writing it.

Look at a handful of the headlines doing the rounds last night and you see exactly what I mean when I say the whole thing is fundamentally dishonest. This is why I despise the transfer window.

Take this brazenly misleading headline from the Daily Record yesterday, just before the teams were announced: “Martin O’Neill set to finally see Celtic transfer wish granted by board as Jesurun Rak-Sakyi timeline emerges.”

Reading that, you might think we were on the brink of signing the player.

In reality, the article amounted to Darren O’Dea’s opinion that Rak-Sakyi would be a good signing if Celtic were willing to push the boat out. There was nothing in the piece suggesting O’Neill was about to have a wish granted. There was no timeline to speak of. It was a wholly misleading headline.

Or consider this one from Newsquest’s The Celtic Way, which still masquerades as a fan outlet despite being part of a mainstream publishing group: “Martin O’Neill answers whether Celtic will be signing Ghedjemis and Redzic.”

He does no such thing. O’Neill suggests the names may be accurate and that the club might get one deal done. That is a long way from answering whether Celtic will sign either player. The headline implies certainty that simply does not exist.

The Evening Times, operating under the same publishing umbrella, ran virtually the same story under a different headline: “Celtic transfer update after Martin O’Neill’s latest remarks.”

What was the update? Anyone who listened to O’Neill already knows the answer. There was no update. He offered a bunch of if’s, buts and maybes no different than what he’s been offering all along.

That is what this entire window has been. Some fan media outlets are just as guilty, churning out an endless series of near-identical stories built on the same empty narrative threads. There are no facts, because there are no facts to report. Just slightly different headlines and sentences rearranged into new shapes.

It is exhausting wading through this every day. Aside from being in the media business, I am also a fan, and a fan first.

It would be nice to find information without hacking through acres of absolute nonsense to get to it.

There are a handful of titles I trust and respect.

They do not spend all day regurgitating the same slop back at their readers.

They do not trade relentlessly on the desperation of fans for news.

That behaviour, combined with the attitudes and actions of the Celtic board, is what makes the transfer window frustrating to the point of being almost unbearable.