Yesterday saw the best Celtic manager rumour of the summer.

One of the things I have always found highly amusing about the blogosphere is how a story written for a specific audience can backfire when the readers know more than the writer does.

One of the finer stories that caught my eye yesterday was clearly not written by someone who knows anything about Celtic. For whatever reason, someone fancied putting together a piece aimed primarily at Celtic fans, and I had to applaud the brazenness of it while laughing at its complete inadequacy.

It was a story about how Celtic had targeted Arne Slot and placed him on the managerial shortlist. It was a fantastically imaginative piece. In another universe, it might even have been a great piece.

Except for one glaring error. The writer clearly does not know his subject.

He does not know that, to get a story like that into the mainstream, there has to be something credible about it. There has to be at least one tiny thread of believability.

There has to be some part of the story which makes Celtic supporters pause for five seconds and think: aye, maybe. This did not have that.

If you saw that story and laughed, as I certainly did, that means it missed the mark.

I do not know why the writer chose yesterday to attempt his highly imaginative article aimed at Celtic fans, but nobody took it seriously because nobody could take it seriously. We know our club too well to believe anything like that. We know the people who run it too well to believe anything like that.

The writer obviously does not understand Celtic at all, or he would never have written such a wild and fanciful piece.

Understand that this went far beyond a silly piece of speculation. The idea that this Celtic board, having put together that abysmal shortlist and then picked the 74-year-old guy from it, would ever have contemplated going for someone like Slot is beyond the realms of ordinary fiction.

It always makes me laugh when people who do not know the audience they are writing for, and do not know the level of credulity among that audience, miss the mark by this much.

In another world, maybe this story would have had legs. Maybe people would have believed it for five minutes. Maybe it would have spread across social media with a few folk pretending they had heard similar things.

But no. Not this one. Not now.

Celtic fans are battered and bruised, but we are not stupid. We know what ambition looks like. We also know what this board’s version of ambition looks like, and those two things do not belong in the same sentence unless the sentence also contains a joke, a sigh and possibly a cry for help.

Celtic targeting Arne Slot would require a football department with imagination, nerve, timing and a serious recruitment process. It would require people who understand the kind of managerial profile a modern club should be chasing.

It would require us to have a shortlist based on football philosophy, coaching style, recruitment structure, development pathway and long-term strategic vision.

In other words, it would require Celtic to be run like a serious football club. That, unfortunately, is where the story collapses into dust.

We have just spent days reading about a shortlist involving Martin O’Neill, Robbie Keane and Craig Bellamy. Sky’s reporting had all three names in the frame, alongside other speculation, before O’Neill emerged as the man set to continue, with a one-year deal and the option of another year. That is the reality.

Not Arne Slot. A nice fantasy, but that is all.

See, the writer is aware of Celtic as a giant club and obviously thought the story would have traction for that reason. He didn’t know of Nicholson. He didn’t know of Desmond. He doesn’t understand that these people, those running Celtic, do not see it as a huge club at all and would never have the stones for a move like this. So, when someone writes that Celtic have targeted Arne Slot, the joke almost writes itself.

Because, aye, why not?

Maybe Pep Guardiola turned us down after Michael Nicholson forgot to send the Zoom link. Maybe Xabi Alonso was desperate for the job but Dermot Desmond could not get him on the phone because the signal in Ireland was patchy that day. Maybe Carlo Ancelotti was waiting outside Celtic Park with his CV, only to be told the board were busy interviewing someone who once played here on loan.

The writer went too high. That was the mistake. But it was also the genius of it.

Of course, it was not long after that piece came out that we found out Martin O’Neill was going to get the job, so the story did not even have time to gain traction as a piece of comedy writing. That was bad luck for the writer, who deserved a wider audience for the sheer brass neck of it.

Because there is a lot of bad writing out there. There are a lot of people taking wild punts. Clearly, that is what this writer was doing. But at least he did it with elan. He did it with swagger. He aimed high.

And if you are going to write one of those stories, do not lowball it. Do not write “Celtic After David Moyes” or some other boring, dull piece of recycled nonsense like that.

Shoot for the moon.

Go mad.

Give us Slot. Give us Nagelsmann. Give us Iraola. Give us a manager Celtic would never approach in a million years because doing so would require a level of ambition which might cause several people in the boardroom to faint clean through the carpet.

That is what made the story funny. Not because Slot is a bad manager.

Quite the opposite.

It was funny because it accidentally exposed how far our expectations have fallen. Nobody looked at it and thought: that sounds exciting. They looked at it and thought: Celtic? This Celtic? The Celtic that has spent months somehow arriving at the shortlist everyone feared it would arrive at? Come on.

Even the most optimistic supporter has limits.

And that, in its own way, is tragic. Because in a better-run club, a story like that might at least spark debate. Supporters might argue about whether he would come, whether the money could work, whether the style would fit, whether the timing was right.

At Celtic, it provoked laughter.

That tells you everything.

The issue was not that Celtic supporters lacked imagination. The issue was that we know the people running the club do. We know their habits. We know their comfort zones. We know their terror of genuine modernity. We know that if an idea looks bold, progressive or even mildly interesting, there is a decent chance Celtic will walk briskly in the opposite direction while muttering something about sustainability.

So, I cannot be angry at the writer. In fact, I almost admire him.

He tried to sell a dream to an audience that has spent too long watching the dream get strangled in committee.

He tried to tell Celtic fans that our club had aimed at the kind of appointment ambitious clubs talk themselves into.

Unfortunately, Celtic supporters know better.

We know the board. We know the process. We know the drawer is empty.

And when someone tells us Arne Slot was on the shortlist, we do not gasp.

We laugh. Because sometimes laughter is all that is left.

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