The Scottish media is trying to sell the same old Ibrox fantasy.

How hilarious are the lot across town? Good grief man. Every summer. There is a point in every transfer window where Scottish football enters the realm of make-believe and fantasy as Ibrox valuations go through the roof … before coming crashing back to Earth.

This is not about rumours. Rumours are part of the game. It’s not about speculation either. Come on, lets be honest; speculation is the oxygen of the summer. If it wasn’t for speculation how we would get by without club football?

No, what I mean here is full-blown fantasy. Castles in the sky. Dragons over Edmiston Drive. Magic beans being sold as if they are prime Manhattan real estate. Beanstalks not necessarily included.

It always happens, but they’ve gone early. We appear to have reached that point already.

The latest nonsense concerns the sudden suggestion that Scottish football is about to enjoy some kind of £100 million-plus transfer bonanza, with Celtic, the Ibrox club and Hearts all apparently ready to “rip up the record books.”

The Daily Record has put Arne Engels and Youssef Chermiti at the centre of this supposed summer gold rush, while other reports have gone even further, claiming that Rangers have slapped a £25 million valuation on Chermiti amid interest from clubs including Galatasaray, Feyenoord, Besiktas and PSV.

And this is where the grown-ups should enter the room.

Because there is a world of difference between Celtic rejecting serious money for Arne Engels and the Ibrox club deciding that Youssef Chermiti is suddenly worth £25 million because someone, somewhere, has decided it would be useful to say so. There are even reporters asking whether Everton “sold him too soon” as though this is a generational talent they have on their hands.

It makes you wonder what they signed Shankland for, right? Between this guy and the new Thomas Muller, I mean … which I covered yesterday, of course.

Engels is not a theoretical asset. Celtic have already had serious Premier League money on the table for him. Nottingham Forest made a deadline-day offer worth up to £25 million in February, with £20 million guaranteed and £5 million in add-ons. That was not a message-board valuation. That was not a fan account with a calculator and too much Irn-Bru. That was an actual bid from an actual Premier League club.

Celtic paid serious money for Engels. Celtic developed him. Celtic used him in big games. Celtic then had a genuine offer which would already have represented major profit. You can debate whether Celtic should sell him or keep him, but the valuation is at least anchored in reality. There is a market reference point.

Chermiti? Remember what I said when he was getting lauded for a handful of goals in big games? A player who can raise it for matches when it suits him, but who cannot be bothered most of the rest of the time. An absolute embarrassment of a signing, and not one who is going to go for Engels style money no matter how much they hope for it.

This is a player Ibrox signed for around £8 million after he had scored three senior goals. Nobody needs to pretend he is hopeless.

But we have now leapt from “he has done well” to “he is worth £25 million” with the sort of wild confidence usually reserved for property developers, crypto bros and people who still think Beale was building something.

FootballTransfers, hardly a Celtic ultras account, currently lists Chermiti’s estimated transfer value at €11.3 million, with a range between €10.2 million and €12.4 million. That is not gospel, of course. No algorithm is. But it is a useful reminder that there is still some distance between “promising young striker with a decent season in Scotland” and “give us twenty-five million quid or don’t bother calling.”

The funniest part is not even the number itself. It is the certainty around it.

Every summer, the Ibrox valuation machine starts up again. A player has six good games and suddenly he is being monitored by half of Europe. A scout appears in the stand and suddenly Real Madrid are “keeping tabs.” A Turkish club is linked and suddenly there is a bidding war. Before long, everyone is worth £20 million, £25 million, £30 million. The confetti cannon goes off, the Record gets a headline, and the Ibrox support are invited to imagine a transfer model which has rarely existed in the real world.

That is the problem here. It is not that Ibrox cannot sell players. They can.

Calvin Bassey was a ridiculous piece of business, especially considering the number of high profile errors he still makes. Nathan Patterson was another. But those deals are the exception, not the rule. FootballTransfers notes that Bassey remains their record sale at around €23 million, and that he is the only player they have sold for more than €15 million.

You do not become a £25 million selling club because you say the words out loud. You become one by building a sustained recruitment model, consistently developing assets, selling at the right time, and proving to the market that your players can step up.

Celtic have done that repeatedly. Tierney. Jota. O’Riley. Edouard. Ajer. Frimpong.

That is why this Chermiti talk is such nonsense. It is not really about Chermiti. It is about the need to project strength. The need to pretend that everything is healthy. The need to sell the idea that the Ibrox club is sitting on a goldmine, even when the evidence suggests a far more complicated picture.

And let us be clear. A club can put whatever price tag it wants on a player. Celtic could say Daizen Maeda is worth £50 million tomorrow. They could say Callum McGregor is priceless. They could say James Forrest is being valued in barrels of North Sea oil.

But asking prices are not market values. The media pretends they are. Ibrox never, ever gets these mad inflated fees they demand. But the market decides the truth. Professionals who watch players for a living will decide the truth.

The same is true of Fernandez, their big defender. What nonsense is being written about him. Arsenal? Other clubs of that stature? Give me a break.

What makes it even more absurd is the comparison with Engels. One player has already attracted a concrete £25 million bid from England. The others are being talked up to that level off the back of reports, interest, supposed valuations and the usual summer media hype which we’ve all seen before. It’s almost funny.

Lumping it all together with the money we seem likely to get from some of our players allows the media to play its wee game, as though Scottish football is in good health. Celtic is in good health. We’re going to bring in a fortune in this window, and we’ll all be pretty pissed off about it if the cash isn’t reinvested. But it’ll be there. It’s real.

Celtic have had our own moments where valuations have run ahead of reality. But the difference is that Celtic’s player trading model has, for all its flaws, delivered real money over a sustained period. When Celtic talk about major fees, there is usually recent evidence behind it.

That is why the Engels comparison is so useful.

Engels represents a club buying high, backing its judgement, getting genuine Premier League interest and then having a real decision to make. Chermiti represents a club and a media ecosystem trying to turn potential into profit before people find out what they’d bought. This is how they ended up overpaying in the first place.

Maybe someone does pay £25 million for him. Football is mad enough. The Premier League has broken the transfer market. Turkish clubs can be ambitious. Young strikers are valuable. Stranger things have happened. But I look around the football landscape and I don’t know how any club, looking at his record, can believe that represents value.

Yet this is Scottish football’s oldest summer trick. Take an Ibrox rumour, add a zero, wrap it in “interest from Europe,” and wait for the clicks. Some of it is designed to spark an auction that will never, ever come. Some of it is just to give their fans something to feel good about for a week or two.

And somehow, they win the Close Season Cup.

They have quite the collection of them now.

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