Why do Celtic seem to be following two separate transfer strategies?

The more questions that are answered during this bizarre Celtic transfer summer, the more new questions appear. It is all starting to get genuinely strange.

It is still not obvious that the club is following any broad strategy. It is not obvious that everybody at Celtic Park is on the same page. It is not even obvious that the people involved fully understand what they are trying to accomplish. The more stories that emerge from this window, the more confused the overall picture becomes.

That picture is complicated by several factors.

Some of the deals Celtic pursues do not appear to fit naturally alongside the others. Targets the manager clearly wants are not being signed, while every so often another story emerges which does not appear to be the manager’s work at all. It feels instead like somebody else’s private project.

Perhaps all of this adds up to something coherent inside Celtic Park.

From the outside, I cannot see what it is.

Let us start with the positive part. Celtic has signed two very good players, and one of them is an exceptional signing. Whether Kasper Høgh ultimately works out or not, the deal itself has to be regarded as a major statement of intent.

Yet it is precisely because it represents all of those things that I find it difficult to reconcile with much of what else we are seeing.

The manager’s comments do not bring clarity to the situation either. In fact, they often do the opposite.

Martin O’Neill insists that he knows what is happening and that work is progressing in the background. Yet when he was asked about the Mika Baur deal, he appeared to have very little idea about its status.

I have already said that if you think spending £11 million on a striker in Norway while haggling over roughly £300,000 for a midfielder in Germany fits a clear pattern, you see something I do not.

Those two approaches do not sit together naturally.

One deal says that Celtic is prepared to act boldly, spend heavily and secure a major target. The other suggests that the club is still willing to risk losing a player over an amount which is almost meaningless in modern football terms.

I also wonder why O’Neill appeared unsure about what was happening with Baur. He did not sound like a manager who was fully invested in the deal or driving it forward. He sounded almost confused by the question.

Once again, he indicated that things were happening in the background and that he remained hopeful of completing another couple of deals. But he did not seem to know the exact progress of that one, and he did not sound particularly familiar with the details.

I might not have gone back and replayed the interview or reread the transcript had it not been for two other stories which emerged last night.

The first concerns Marcello Saracchi.

It now appears likely that he will be sold to a club in the United States for somewhere around £750,000.

That is pocket change for a backup player whose skill set the manager already understands. It is as straightforward a bargain as Celtic is likely to find.

The other important fact is that Martin O’Neill likes the player. He told the club to do what it could to sign him, and everything we know suggests that the deal would not have been especially difficult to complete.

If the player was willing to sign, his representatives were open to the move, his club was prepared to sell and the Celtic manager wanted him, where was the blockage?

What stopped the deal from being done?

That is confusing enough on its own. When you place it alongside the Baur situation, it becomes even harder to understand.

Baur’s deal appears to have broken down over a relatively small amount of money. O’Neill then seemed uncertain about what was actually happening with it. Is it fair to ask whether the manager was truly behind that pursuit?

Was he invested in it and determined to see it completed, or was he largely indifferent to the idea? That question might not even have occurred to me were it not for the second story which broke last night.

According to reports from south of the border, Celtic attempted to re-sign Benjamin Arthur, the Brentford youngster who arrived on loan as emergency defensive cover last season.

Martin O’Neill sometimes chose Dane Murray ahead of him and did not even use Arthur after the split. Are we really supposed to believe that O’Neill identified this player as a priority signing for Celtic’s first-team rebuild?

That feels like somebody’s strange pet project.

It feels like an in-house idea being pursued by someone entirely on their own. It is uncomfortably reminiscent of last summer, when the transfer window appeared to be happening around Brendan Rodgers rather than through him.

The recruitment process seemed to operate outside his sphere of influence instead of within his control. It is almost as though Celtic is currently pursuing two parallel paths.

There are the Martin O’Neill signings, and then there are the other signings: targets being chased separately from what the manager needs, what he wants or what he considers most urgent.

Perhaps I am reading too much into it, but I do not believe for one second that Benjamin Arthur is anywhere near the top of O’Neill’s list of priorities.

I also wonder whether his vagueness over the Baur situation suggests that he was not especially invested in that deal either.

We already know that O’Neill’s judgement only seems to matter up to a point. He wanted Kelechi Iheanacho retained, but the club allowed that opportunity to disappear even though all it had to do was activate the one-year extension.

He wanted Saracchi, and he is apparently not going to get him either, despite that being a deal which appeared to be begging to be completed. The player wanted it. His agent appeared to want it. His club was prepared to let him go.

Yet Celtic did not make it happen.

So, the manager’s judgement is not being fully backed. He is not being fully trusted, and that is both bothersome and difficult to understand.

The Benjamin Arthur story is the giveaway.

Assuming it is true and there is any genuine foundation to it, I find it very difficult to believe that it carries Martin O’Neill’s wholehearted approval. I struggle to imagine that he sees Arthur as someone he needs or that he considers the deal an important part of his plans.

Other than drafting him into the squad during an emergency, O’Neill barely gave him a look last season. We said at the time that the original signing was strange.

Arthur had almost no senior football experience, there were probably better-developed prospects already within Celtic’s academy, and there appeared to be virtually no chance that he would soon challenge for a first-team place.

That is why the suggestion that Celtic tried to sign him permanently was greeted with such complete bafflement by supporters.

As Paulina has pointed out brilliantly in several of her recent articles, nobody inside Celtic Park should be patting themselves on the back because the Høgh deal is done.

The club needs far more than one major, attention-grabbing, headline-generating signing. I intend to write about Høgh in a much more positive light later today, but nobody should labour under the misconception that completing that deal gives Celtic permission to dither, delay and drag out the rest of the window.

I am gratified to know that work is going on, because there does appear to be activity behind the scenes.

But as Paulina wrote yesterday in her piece on the Italian winger, Celtic cannot afford to waste any more time. The club cannot spend weeks chasing deals which are financially unrealistic, but nor can it waste time on targets which make no footballing sense.

Benjamin Arthur makes no footballing sense.

He is clearly not a player O’Neill told the board he absolutely had to have for his rebuilt first team. So, assuming the report is accurate, whose idea was it?

Why does it once again feel as though people inside Celtic are embarking on their own little adventures, treating the club’s money as though it belongs to them and playing Football Manager with real cash?

Why does it feel as though they are impervious to what the manager thinks, what the manager wants or what the manager actually needs?

At almost any other club, that would sound like a crazy suggestion.

At Celtic, we know it has happened before.

This club has repeatedly handed managers players they never requested and could not use because the people responsible for signing them did not understand the game nearly as well as they believed they did.

That only adds to the surreal nature of what we are watching.

Celtic is heading towards a Champions League qualifier on which tens of millions of pounds may rest. The club’s reputation and the credibility of its entire summer strategy may rest on it too. Yet I could not tell you what Celtic’s transfer policy actually is.

I can see one strand which appears ambitious, serious and decisive. It produced Kasper Høgh and demonstrated that Celtic can operate at a much higher level when the club chooses to do so. I can see another strand which involves haggling over modest sums, ignoring attainable players the manager wants and pursuing youngsters who do not appear ready to help the first team.

Those two strands do not form one coherent strategy.

They look like different departments, different agendas and different people pulling in different directions. That is the central problem.

A successful transfer window is not defined by one spectacular signing. It is defined by whether the squad has been properly constructed, whether the manager’s needs have been met and whether the individual deals fit together as part of a recognisable plan.

At the moment, Celtic has produced one magnificent headline. Behind it, the picture remains confused.

The Høgh signing deserves praise, and the club should receive it. But glossy photographs and celebratory stories cannot disguise the fact that the wider process remains difficult to understand.

The more information emerges, the less coherent it seems. Celtic has answered one huge question by proving that it can sign a player of Høgh’s calibre.

It has now created several others.

Who is actually directing recruitment? Which targets truly belong to the manager? Why are the players he clearly wants being allowed to escape? Who is pursuing deals which make little sense for his team?

And why, with the Champions League deadline approaching, does it still appear that Celtic is running two separate transfer strategies at the same time?

Until those questions are answered, nobody at Celtic Park should imagine that one major signing has fixed anything. It has only made the confusion surrounding everything else more obvious.

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