Michael Gannon’s latest alibi for the Celtic board is pathetic.

Today, Michael Gannon produced another piece of apologia for the Celtic board. He did not dress it up entirely that way, but that is clearly what it was.

Gannon is known to be close to the club, and he plainly wants to remain close to it. This is exactly the problem I have with certain people in the media who prioritise access over doing their jobs properly.

It is also why I have always distrusted Celtic’s fan-media scheme. Even if it were operating properly now, I would not participate in it. I do not believe anyone who writes critically about an institution should become too close to the people running it.

Distance matters. Once access becomes valuable in itself, there is always a danger that protecting the relationship starts to matter more than telling the truth.

Gannon’s article is ridiculous. He argues that Marcello Saracchi and Kelechi Iheanacho were players Celtic should not have been pursuing in the first place, and that the whole episode is therefore more of a public-relations problem than anything more serious.

That completely understates what happened.

It ignores the real significance of the failure and the danger it creates for the club. I can only assume he understands that significance and has chosen to minimise it anyway.

It does not matter what Michael Gannon thinks of those players. It does not matter what you think or what I think. It does not even matter what Michael Nicholson or Dermot Desmond thought of the idea.

These were the players Martin O’Neill wanted.

That is the bottom line.

If Celtic’s football department operated with real authority and proper separation from the boardroom, the manager and his football staff would have made the decision. The executive side would then have been expected to complete the deals.

Both players would now be in the squad.

That is the significance of the story.

The manager identified two players and told the club that he wanted them. Both deals were there to be done. In Iheanacho’s case, Celtic merely had to activate the option. Saracchi had made it abundantly clear that he wanted to return.

Whatever Gannon thinks about their quality is therefore irrelevant. He is entitled to believe Celtic should never have pursued them. But Martin O’Neill did want them pursued, and he is the person whose judgement mattered.

The club failed to deliver either one. That is the story.

In Iheanacho’s case, the transfer could apparently have been secured with the stroke of a pen. Instead, Celtic allowed the contractual option to expire and then attempted to renegotiate.

Gannon defends this as a sensible move. He argues that Celtic were right to allow the deal to lapse and then seek different terms.

That leaves only two possibilities.

Either he is performing spin control for the board, or he does not understand the most basic realities of the situation he is writing about.

Anyone could have foreseen that allowing the agreement to expire would not make Iheanacho cheaper. There was no realistic scenario in which the player and his agent would accept less money after being released to negotiate with other clubs.

Why would they? The moment the option expired, they gained freedom and leverage. Other clubs were always likely to become involved. The possibility of Celtic returning afterwards and saying, “We no longer want to pay you the agreed amount, but perhaps you will accept less,” was absurd.

Neither the player nor his representative was ever remotely likely to accept such a proposal. Of all the possible outcomes, getting him more cheaply was the complete non-starter. If the people inside Celtic Park genuinely believed that allowing Iheanacho and his agent to negotiate elsewhere would somehow reduce the cost of retaining him, then the club is being run by people even less competent than we imagined.

It makes Celtic look amateurish. It has also infuriated the manager, because O’Neill trusted the people above him to complete both deals. They failed him.

Gannon dismisses this as a public-relations issue, something which looks worse than it really is. But that argument reveals a second astonishing misunderstanding.

Bad public relations is not a trivial matter.

Gannon works in the media industry, yet appears not to understand that reputational damage has consequences far beyond one news cycle. Celtic now has a major credibility problem with supporters, agents, players and other clubs.

Looking staggeringly unprofessional is not merely embarrassing.

It is consequential.

Other agents will notice how Celtic handles negotiations. Other clubs will remember the way discussions were conducted. Players will consider whether the club can be trusted to deliver what it promises.

The damage spreads. It affects relationships inside the club as well. The manager publicly identified players he wanted, trusted the executive structure to bring them in, and was then left exposed when neither deal happened.

That is not simply bad optics.

It is institutional failure.

Even if this were only a public-relations disaster, it would still matter enormously. Celtic is already drowning in negative perception. Supporters have lost faith in the board. Fan organisations are issuing statements, seats are empty and the manager is repeatedly being placed in humiliating positions.

The last thing the club could afford was another episode which made it look weak, chaotic and incompetent.

Yet Gannon treats the reputational damage as though it were a superficial inconvenience.

It is astonishing that anyone could write something so shallow in a national newspaper while defending conduct so far below the acceptable standard for a major football institution.

I do not know who the intended audience is. Surely nobody who subjected this to even sixty seconds of critical thought could accept the article’s central claims.

Gannon has already been used to push the narrative that the players and their representatives were greedy and unreasonable. That story has since blown up in the faces of everyone who promoted it.

Now we are offered a new alibi. Apparently, the targets were not good enough for Celtic anyway, so the failure to sign them does not matter.

That is not how any of this works.

Gannon does not get to retrospectively decide that the players were unworthy of the club. He does not get to erase the manager’s wishes because he personally disagrees with them.

Martin O’Neill wanted those players. His judgement mattered. The board’s job was to support him. Instead, it overruled, ignored or failed him.

Calling that a public-relations problem is laughable. Pretending that the public-relations damage itself is insignificant is even worse.

This was not simply an unfortunate story which made Celtic look bad. It exposed the fact that the manager does not control recruitment, that the football department lacks real authority and that the people running the club cannot complete even straightforward deals. That is not spin. That is the reality Gannon’s article tries so hard not to confront.

It is as embarrassing as the failures of the club he is trying to defend.

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