Revisionist nonsense on a Celtic site is still revisionist nonsense.

It used to be said that Celtic fans were the opposite of the media.

We did not play political games involving the club. We did not pursue lazy narratives or push agendas. Celtic sites dealt in what we saw, what we knew, and what we understood about the game.

That has clearly changed.

There are now sites pursuing agendas, pushing lazy narratives, and playing political games. I have no problem expressing my deep and growing disdain for one of them. I have said it on the podcast, and I will say it here as well.

Because the editorials on that site are now more detached from reality than at any point I can remember. The piece published yesterday, on St Patrick’s Day, is one of the worst examples of that I have read in a long time.

It is a piece of staggering revisionism.

It suggests that the first Mark Lawwell summer transfer window was a roaring success. Not because of what those players did at Celtic, but because many of them have since found other clubs.

That is not analysis. That is spin.

This is an attempt to rewrite history into something none of us recognise.

It is an attempt to burnish the reputation of someone who failed at Celtic at every level. It is also an attempt to undercut the achievements of a manager who, by any reasonable definition, has been a success.

Because you cannot praise that transfer window without criticising Brendan Rodgers.

That is the point of the piece.

The argument is that Rodgers failed those players. That he did not turn them into the stars they supposedly were. That he wasted talent which was always there.

That argument does not survive even the lightest scrutiny.

The piece opens by talking about the Korean players and makes a great deal of the fact that all three are now in the South Korean national team, ranked 22nd in the world. Scotland, we are told, sits some distance behind.

So what? The United States national team is ranked 10th in the world. We took a manager from that league, and it did not exactly transform us. International rankings are not the measure of whether a player is good enough for Celtic.

What matters is what they did in a Celtic shirt.

Of the players who left, Oh has done the best. He is now in Turkey, scoring goals, and fair play to him. He has built a good career for himself since leaving.

But the idea that Celtic let go of a future legend is nonsense.

We all watched him play. We all saw the limitations in his game. Ange Postecoglou saw them. Brendan Rodgers saw them. That is why he is no longer here.

Then there is Kwon. This is where the piece drifts from analysis into obsession.

Kwon was signed from the Korean second tier with minimal senior football behind him. There was no evidence then, and there is no evidence now, that Celtic missed out on anything special.

He did not play for Celtic.

He went out on loan to St Mirren and Hibs. Neither club trusted him with regular game time. He moved again. He had a decent match somewhere along the line, and suddenly we are told Celtic missed out on a superstar.

If he was that player, someone would have taken him and built a team around him.

They didn’t.

The same applies to players now operating in the German second tier. Playing at that level does not mean you are capable of dominating at Celtic. It means you are playing at the level that suits you.

Gustav Lagerbielke is another example.

He might be a decent defender. But he lacks pace. He is not comfortable bringing the ball out. He does not suit the style of football Celtic play.

That is the crucial point. It is the point the article ignores.

Clubs do not sign players in isolation. They sign players to fit a system. They sign players to suit a manager’s style of play. If a player does not fit, his quality elsewhere does not matter. He will not function as part of the team.

Luis Palma falls into the same category.

He might have suited a different manager or a different system. He did not suit this one, nor the one Brendan Rodgers uses. Palma did not match the required profile. That is not a failure of management. That is a failure of recruitment.

And that defines that transfer window. A failure.

Not one player from that intake, with the possible exception of Yang Hyun-jun, has secured a consistent place in the team. Even Yang remains a player many supporters still question.

That tells you everything you need to know.

The bigger issue lies in how the club assembled that squad.

The club did not build it around the manager’s needs. The club did not build it around a coherent style of play. Recruitment threw together a collection of punts with no proper alignment between coaching and strategy. That is a structural failure.

No manager could have made that group function as a cohesive unit. You cannot build a team by throwing together players with no clear system and expect them to click. Football does not work that way.

The suggestion that supporters do not understand this is insulting. We watched those players. We saw what they offered and what they lacked. You know what else? We were not imagining it.

Yet this piece tells us not to trust our own eyes. It tells us to ignore the evidence of what we saw on the pitch. It tells us to disregard the judgement of an experienced manager and instead accept a narrative that simply does not hold up.

That is not analysis. That is gaslighting.

What makes it worse is that this is now a consistent pattern.

There is one outlet in the Celtic fan media space that unashamedly backs the board’s strategy at every turn. It does not engage with opposing viewpoints. It does not challenge decisions. All it does is reinforce a preferred narrative.

If you want a break from reality, that is the place to go.

However, pieces like this go beyond that. They try to reshape reality itself.

The claim that the current squad looks threadbare because those players were not kept is particularly absurd. We all know why the squad looks thin.

Key players left and the club did not replace them. Recruitment has not matched departures. The board did not give the manager the tools he asked for. That is not on Brendan Rodgers.

He wanted a right-sided attacking midfielder and he did not get one. He wanted replacements for his strikers who the club sold.

Instead of that, he ended up with loan players, short-term fixes, and a squad that lacks balance.

When he made his “Honda Civic” comment, some people mocked it. Some thought it clumsy. But everyone understood the point. That squad was weaker than the one before it.

And how do we know he was right? The league table tells you.

With games running out, we are chasing.

The squad tells you. It lacks pace and firepower. It lacks depth in key areas.

His assessment has been vindicated.

The uncomfortable truth is that some people would rather ignore that reality. Because narratives like this one suit them.

But for those of us who actually watch the games, who actually understand what we are seeing, failure is not difficult to recognise. That transfer window failed.

The players brought in did not deliver. Some of them have gone on to have decent careers elsewhere. That happens all the time in football.

But at Celtic, they did not do the job, and that is the only thing that matters.

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