A national title has smeared Jota. Of course Celtic will allow that.

Yesterday, the manager sat in front of the media and offered clarification on the injury situation involving our Portuguese winger Jota. It was not the news any Celtic fan wanted to hear. It was not the news the Celtic board would have wanted either.

He has had to undergo a new operation. He will not play again this season.

How do we know people inside the club are angry, and not sympathetic?

We know that because someone from inside the club has been speaking out of turn again.

However it happened, that information found its way to Keith Jackson at the Daily Record.

My two colleagues on the podcast have already covered this on their own blogs. I wanted to return to it today because O’Neill has now settled the matter. His comments were clear. Jota is not hiding. He is not skiving nor taking the piss. He is legitimately still some way from fitness.

That clears the issue up nicely, if in a way which disappoints us.

Which means that whoever spoke to the Record either lied outright or bitched and moaned about something they did not understand. If you were trying to narrow down the list of possible culprits, you would not need much paper.

As I said on the podcast the other night, this might not even have been a direct leak.

It might not have involved someone deliberately going to Jackson and handing him a story. It could simply be people in executive roles inside Celtic Park once again running off at the mouth. I say “once again” for a reason. This is not new behaviour.

I was genuinely shocked at one episode on the Graham Spiers’ podcast last year.

He revealed that senior figures inside the club had openly criticised Brendan Rodgers and his team selection in front of journalists. It was almost as if they hoped those comments would find their way into the mainstream media.

So this does not require a formal briefing. It only requires certain people at Celtic Park who lack discretion, cannot keep their mouths shut, and feel entitled to offer opinions on matters they barely understand.

Worse than that, they do not seem to care whether those opinions end up splashed across the papers as major news stories.

If someone inside Celtic Park recognised themselves in Jackson’s article yesterday, that person should walk into the nearest office, hand in their resignation, and then go and apologise to Jota.

Of course, that will not happen.

The last person publicly smeared from inside Celtic Park was Brendan Rodgers.

Nobody apologised to him. Nobody lost their job.

The club carried out no meaningful internal investigation.

Then, when Rodgers finally left, they stabbed him in the back again on the way out the door.

Deeply unprofessional behaviour inside this club is not a new allegation. It is a matter of record.

There is another issue here which should not be ignored.

If someone went directly to Jackson and briefed him, that is one thing. But if Jackson picked this up through gossip, and Celtic never wanted that grossly unfair opinion of the player placed in the public domain, then there is no justification for allowing him or his newspaper back inside Celtic Park.

We have been over this ground countless times.

If the club can ban fan media simply for operating on a different wavelength from the board regarding signings and strategy, then newspapers whose business model depends on attacking and undermining Celtic to sell copies should not be allowed near the place.

That is the double standard, and it is a scandalous one.

The club treats its own supporters as a threat while allowing the real threat to operate freely from the press box.

That policy is not just unfair, it is self-destructive.

Who does it benefit? It does not help Celtic. It does not make the club stronger. Instead it actively undermines the work of people inside the club who actually care: the manager, the players, and those trying to do their jobs properly.

Whoever bears responsibility, and however the story made its way into print, Martin O’Neill has now dismissed it as nonsense.

Part of the problem may simply be that Jackson is such a clown.

Maybe he saw a nine-month rehabilitation estimate and assumed that meant Jota should already be back.

With an ACL injury, nine months is not a guarantee, as it represents the minimum recovery time.

Still, I have little doubt that someone inside Celtic Park has been grumbling and complaining. It is because Jota has not returned yet and because his absence might force the club to sign a replacement.

Either way, someone inside the club needs to speak to Jota.

They should make it clear that this is not the club’s view, regardless of whether someone actually briefed it or not.

You would think that much would be obvious.

Then again, I did not think the club would tolerate a personal attack on Brendan Rodgers appearing on the record while he was still in the manager’s office either.

But it did.

Whatever you think of the journalist involved, and whatever you think of the rag he writes for, the conclusion is unavoidable.

The people running Celtic are perfectly content to let newspapers write whatever they want, whether those stories come from briefings or from gossip, even if they are damaging. If they were content for this, they would ban them in exactly the same way they banned fan media.

This is what we have instead of standards.