Celtic should not sign players before we have a manager. It doesn’t mean we won’t.

I know there are people in this business who just want clicks every single day and don’t really care what they’re putting out there. Whether it’s accurate, speculation, gossip or outright nonsense doesn’t matter to them. Content is content. Traffic is traffic. Under normal circumstances, Celtic fans would be able to ignore transfer stories right now without a second thought.

The window is closed. It won’t reopen for months. And more importantly, we don’t even have a permanent manager.

In any properly run football club, that combination alone would make transfer speculation laughable.

But here’s the problem. It isn’t laughable.

And the reason it isn’t laughable is because Celtic no longer operates in ways that feel normal, structured or even particularly sensible.

We’ve all seen too many examples of decisions being made out of sequence, out of context and without any obvious plan behind them. So, when stories appear linking us to players now, they don’t feel ridiculous. They feel grimly possible.

I’m not saying there is any real credibility in today’s reports linking Celtic with two players from Plymouth Argyle, although that level of recruitment would hardly shock anyone anymore. What I am saying is this; those stories should be absurd and they’re not.

Celtic should not be signing players before a manager is in place. Not “shouldn’t ideally”. Not “should try to avoid it”. Should not be doing it at all.

Yes, it can be done. Clubs have done it. We’ve done it.

But every time you recruit without a manager, you are guessing. You are building a squad for a system that doesn’t exist yet, for a style that hasn’t been defined, for preferences that haven’t been expressed. You are buying tools before you know what you’re building.

And that isn’t efficient. It’s idiotic.

Every manager who walks into a club wants to shape the squad in his own image. They want different profiles. Different attributes and personalities. Different tactical options. Sign players before he arrives and one of two things happens. Either he doesn’t want them or he forces them into a system that might not suit them.

That’s how you end up with dead money, bloated squads and another rebuild six months later. And if this sounds theoretical, it shouldn’t.

We’ve lived through it.

There’s another way to think about this. Anyone who plays strategy games knows this instinctively. There is an “optimal build order” for this stuff.

I love X-COM, the game where you must run an organisation protecting the Earth from alien invaders. There is no “storyline”, and you can do your tech research in whatever way you want. The game doesn’t stop you or hinder you in any way.

You’ve got multiple paths, multiple choices, total freedom. But experienced players know something important. There is an optimal order.

Weapons first. Armour. Satellite coverage. The foundations. Ignore that order and the game doesn’t punish you immediately. It just makes everything harder. The enemies scale. Your squad falls behind. Resources tighten. Suddenly every mission becomes a crisis.

You can still win. But you’ve chosen hard mode for no reason.

That’s exactly what signing players before appointing a manager does. The correct order is obvious. Manager. System. Roles. Then players.

What this site has called the “manager as architect” theory.

And you know what the beauty of that optimal system is? You rarely get transfer misfires. Because you are not signing the player, you are signing the guy who best fits the role. Reverse that, and you’re guessing your way through the rebuild.

And here’s where the psychology matters.

Fans don’t think in terms of structure. They think in terms of activity. Players leaving? Panic. Weak positions? Panic. No transfer stories? Panic. Signings feel like progress. Rumours feel like movement. Silence feels like drift. But activity is not the same thing as strategy.

The first signing of any rebuild isn’t a winger or a striker.

It’s the manager. Because until that man is in place, you don’t know what formation he prefers, or how he wants to press or how quickly he wants to play. So you don’t know what players he wants to keep and which ones he wants gone.

You have no idea what roles he has in mind, what profiles he actually needs and so anything you do before that point is guesswork.

And guesswork is expensive.

This is why the timing matters so much.

If Celtic start signing players now, before the new manager arrives, they are effectively telling him that parts of his squad have already been built and that does not allow him the freedom or flexibility to do his own work.

Look at the guy in the picture. That is Odin Thiago Holm.

Celtic scouted and signed him without any managerial input.

It’s the tip of the iceberg.

He might have been a good player. He was certainly not a Brendan Rodgers player.

So who signed him and why? Someone who has no understanding of football beyond what he’s read in The Daily Record.

Rodgers was never going to be happy at that kind of treatment.

That’s not how you attract a strong manager. That’s how you undermine him before he even walks through the door, and this is the deeper problem with those Plymouth stories.

It’s not that they’re likely. It’s that they feel possible.

Because Celtic club has a history of doing things out of sequence. Of acting first and planning later. Of making decisions to create the appearance of movement rather than the reality of progress. In a properly run club, the current situation would be clear.

No manager, no signings. Full stop.

Instead, we’re at a point where any rumour, no matter how odd, no matter how ill-timed, no matter how illogical, lands in an environment where supporters are conditioned to think they are signs of real work going on behind the scenes.

But it’s like designing a kitchen before you’ve constructed the building it’s going in. You have no idea what the floor plan is like, what sizes the rooms will be, whether they will have windows facing north, south, east or west. Where the water pipes are or where the heating system will be. It’s not just pointless, it’s counter-productive.

And yet this is how we choose to do things. That’s why these stories are dreadfully believable. That’s why I can’t just waive them away.