The media will try to play games with Engels. Celtic better be ready for them.

Over the next few days and weeks, Celtic should expect two distinct campaigns to emerge in the mainstream media. Celtic fans should also stay alert to ensure they do not end up amplifying the same nonsense themselves.

It does not take a first-rate journalist, PR operative, or political strategist to work out what is coming. Any third-rate one could sketch out the lines of attack in advance.

Those attacks will move down two parallel roads. The first will aim to unsettle Arne Engels. The second will seek to drive down his value. These paths will intersect, and that is where the danger lies.

If you undermine Engels’ perceived value, you also argue that this was his moment, and Celtic’s moment, to cash in at the peak. The media will push that line relentlessly. I have little doubt this campaign will run right through to the end of the season, with Engels placed under pressure every time he takes the field.

Engels is not the first player to see a transfer bid rejected. He is not even the first in Scottish football. What makes his case different is that the interest was genuine and the price tag substantial, rather than one of the phantom bids the media routinely invents to give the Ibrox club false hope of shifting a player.

I have pointed out before that leaking or fabricating stories about interest in players has not served them well. It leaves players marching into managers’ offices demanding answers about bids that often never existed. In this case, though, we know at least one offer was real. The Nottingham Forest bid existed. I

t was substantial. It would have broken the Scottish transfer record.

The media will now try to focus Engels’ attention on what he has supposedly lost. That strategy works if they can convince him the opportunity has gone and will not return. At the very least, they will try to persuade him that the same fee will never be offered again. That line makes Celtic less likely to accept a future bid at a similar level. That is precisely how these two campaigns merge, and exactly why they matter.

Celtic would do well to put Engels in front of the media and have him restate what he has already said. He is happy at Celtic.

He believes his career is developing along the right path. The right move will come when the time suits both the club and the player.

I have never doubted that moment will arrive. When it does, Engels will command a major fee, one that will dwarf anything the Ibrox club is likely to receive for its own Belgian midfielder, a player who has never attracted a serious offer.

The disbelief among sections of the mainstream media when the bid emerged was striking. The disbelief that Celtic turned it down was even more so. These people do not want to acknowledge serious interest in Celtic players.

They certainly do not want to admit that those who spent months dismissing Engels as a waste of money were spectacularly wrong. Once some of them make up their minds, they refuse to change them, even when the evidence sits right in front of them.

It may be that Celtic and Nottingham Forest have an informal understanding that the deal could be revisited in the summer on similar terms.

At the very least, the bid has advertised Engels to the wider football world as a player capable of commanding that level of fee. When you look at the squad, and when you consider the scale of the rebuild required this summer, £25–30 million would make a significant difference.

That kind of money would give a new manager a serious transfer fund. That may give this board more credit than it deserves, but the reality remains. A rebuild is coming, and it helps to know there is a bankable asset who can fund it without giving the bean counters palpitations.

Ibrox fans like to sneer about the money spent by Ange, but every penny of that outlay was covered in the same window by the sales of Kris Ajer and Odsonne Edouard. If you are going to rebuild, you need to know you can afford it.

That is one reason the board deserves some credit for rejecting the bid. If that money arrives in the summer, many of the financial anxieties disappear. The media understands that too, which is why it will do everything it can to undermine Celtic’s position.

This is where the club needs a far stronger media strategy. It also needs to stop being short-sighted, petty, vindictive, and reckless in its dealings with fan media. Some of us have backed Engels from the start and will continue to do so all season.

We are not surprised to see serious money attached to him. Yet the board has silenced those voices in its obsession with self-preservation.

The danger is obvious. The line of attack is obvious. It has already begun, with Kris Boyd, the village idiot, declaring on Sky yesterday that Nottingham Forest would be mad to pay that kind of money. That was only a taster.

Much more will follow. If Celtic fail to push back, fail to challenge it, and fail to act in their own interests, that too becomes an abdication of responsibility.