Celtic’s transfer window problem is largely down to perception.

There has been a lot of talk, as everyone knows, about the transfer policy at Celtic this summer. There has also been a lot of talk about the transfer policy across the city, and inevitably the two are being compared. Who has had the better window? Which club has supported its manager more fully? Which approach looks stronger?

The Ibrox club has spent money. They currently have a net spend, although perhaps not quite as large as some people imagine. But it is a net spend nonetheless. They do not seem particularly frightened of spending money. In fact, history tells us that they are capable of spending it to a degree which borders on reckless. But they spend it, and perhaps that matters more than some Celtic supporters would like to admit.

Celtic have spent plenty too. We have brought in a better class of player. We have also generated substantial transfer income, meaning this window may ultimately leave us in profit. There are people who will say that makes Celtic smarter. We have refreshed significant parts of the squad, brought in players with genuine quality and resale potential, and done it without blowing a gigantic hole in the balance sheet. Those people have a point.

But is that the whole story?

I always say that the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If you spend heavily on transfers, give your manager apparently everything he asks for and those players subsequently fail, was that really a successful transfer window? If the team does not improve, what exactly did all that spending accomplish?

That is where this debate becomes more complicated, because I hear variations of the same argument from Celtic supporters all the time: “At least they back their managers.”

That is probably the most common version of it, and when you look at what has happened across the city this summer, you can understand where that perception comes from. Their manager identifies a position and they go looking for somebody to fill it.

They needed a striker; they went looking for one. They needed a right-back; they went looking for one. They wanted players in wide areas; lists were compiled, deals were pursued and bodies started coming through the door.

From the outside, that looks decisive. It looks strong. It looks like a football club which knows what its manager wants and is determined to give it to him.

But numbers alone do not impress me. Celtic have had transfer windows where we signed huge numbers of players and ended up with very little of lasting value to show for it. There have been summers when we virtually rebuilt an entire squad and discovered twelve months later that most of those players were not good enough.

Then there are windows like Ange Postecoglou’s first one, where the players coming through the door visibly improved the team. I think we are seeing elements of that this summer too.

Look at the profiles Celtic have pursued. Look at Kasper Høgh, Haissem Hassan and Mika Baur. These do not look like names somebody produced by pulling names at random from a transfer-market database. They look identified, scouted, considered and planned.

Inevitably, that slows things down.

That does not excuse everything which has happened at Celtic this summer. Far from it. I am not here to defend the board of directors.

They have failed to put Celtic into these European games in as strong a position as they should have, and I will defend that criticism to the hilt because the evidence for it is sitting directly in front of us.

We have not adequately replaced Daizen Maeda on the left. We do not have the right-back cover we need with Alistair Johnston unavailable. Allowing Arne Engels and Paulo Bernardo to leave while bringing in only one midfielder who has barely had time to get himself completely up to speed was an enormous gamble.

I hope we do not pay for it.

But nobody is going to convince me that every player signed across the city this summer has emerged from some immaculate long-term scouting process. At times it looks much more like a club saying to agents: we need a right-back, who have you got? We need a winger, who’s available?

And there is nothing inherently wrong with that either. Sometimes you have a hole in your squad and you need somebody capable of filling it.

This is where I think some of the people defending Celtic’s board have framed their argument badly. They say transfer business is difficult, then somebody immediately points across Glasgow and says: well, they seem to be finding it pretty easy.

That sounds like a contradiction. But it really isn’t.

The better argument is that signing players is easy. Signing good players who genuinely improve an already successful team is considerably harder.

If a footballer is good enough to walk into the Celtic team and improve it, there is a decent chance his current club knows exactly how valuable he is. There is a decent chance they want to keep him, other clubs are interested and the player himself has options.

Getting those deals done can take time. Over and over this summer Celtic have apparently tried to take players away from clubs which had perfectly good reasons not to sell them cheaply. That is different from simply filling a vacancy.

Maybe it is the gamer in me. Maybe I have spent far too much of my life playing Football Manager to be impressed merely because a club signs lots of footballers.

Anybody who plays that game seriously knows how easy the first part is.

Need a right-back? Go to your scouting database. Filter by position. Look at the transfer list. Look at players whose contracts are running down. Look at loans. Look at players offered by agents. You will find right-backs.

The difficult part is finding the right right-back.

The one who fits your tactical system. The one who is actually better than what you already have. The one whose wages fit the structure. The one with development potential. The one you might eventually sell for considerably more than you paid.

If your only objective is filling the slot, you can usually do it quickly. If your objective is making the team better, the job becomes considerably harder.

That is why Martin O’Neill’s phrase “quality over quantity” matters.

When you are already the champions, you do not need to rebuild an entire football club. You need five or six players of the right quality, players capable of making a genuine difference. That can produce a quantum leap without requiring fifteen new arrivals.

And so far, I am still waiting for the signing across the city which genuinely changes my mind about their strategy. I am waiting for the player who makes me think: I wish Celtic had signed him. The player who walks straight into our team. The player who would seriously challenge one of our established starters.

I have not seen him yet. What I see instead is a club engaged in an extraordinary volume of recruitment. Maybe some of those players will turn out brilliantly. That is entirely possible. But I associate that kind of signing strategy more with the Motherwell’s of this world than with a club like Celtic which is already successful.

There is a difference between playing darts and throwing darts at the board.

When you are playing darts, you care enormously about what you hit. When you are simply throwing darts in roughly the right direction, eventually something will stick. I know which approach I would rather Celtic took.

The real argument here is not about who signed the most players. It is not even about which club has the biggest net spend.

I am not a net-spend fanatic.

If Celtic can significantly improve the squad and emerge from a transfer window having made more money than we spent, I do not consider that a failure. Quite the opposite. That would represent excellent squad management, provided the players brought in are of the right calibre and genuinely improve the football team.

I would like Celtic to be more willing to push the boat out when the manager identifies somebody he really wants. I would like us to understand that spending £6 million or £8 million on the right player is not money disappearing into a furnace.

A good footballer strengthens the squad. He helps win matches. He helps win trophies. He helps generate European income. And if recruitment has been done properly, he may eventually generate another transfer profit anyway.

But I cannot call a model inherently bad simply because Celtic sometimes finish a window in surplus. The real problem is perception.

And that is where Celtic are in enormous trouble.

I have written about this club’s perception problem for years. I was warning about it when there was still time to fix it relatively easily. That time has passed. Celtic’s perception problem is now acute, and under this board it may even be permanent. Nobody gives them the benefit of the doubt anymore.

There is almost no reservoir of trust left. Every decision is now viewed through the most cynical possible lens, and the people running Celtic have nobody to blame for that except themselves. They have been given multiple opportunities to change the narrative around the club and they have repeatedly failed to take them.

Even these last few weeks, when Celtic finally started spending serious money and bringing in players I genuinely like, have been accompanied by arguments about why the deals were not completed earlier. Why did it take so long? Why were these particular positions prioritised? Why were others ignored? Why did players arrive so close to a massive European deadline that they barely had time to train with their teammates?

The underlying business might eventually prove excellent. The perception surrounding it is still dreadful. And that is where the comparison with Ibrox becomes damaging.

Supporters look across the city and see a dozen players arriving. They see a manager who is very obviously being backed. Every few days he appears to identify another requirement and somebody else arrives.

Then they look at Celtic and they are not quite so sure.

Why? Because our board has let managers down before. Repeatedly.

In Brendan Rodgers’ case, relations deteriorated so badly that some supporters became convinced the failure to support him properly was deliberate. Whether that interpretation was fair or not almost misses the point. People believed it, and they believed it because the board had already destroyed its credibility.

Celtic are not perceived as a club which instinctively puts the football manager first. We are perceived as a club which bargains, delays, negotiates, waits, reassesses and looks for another £300,000 saving, then occasionally discovers that the fixture we were supposed to be preparing for has arrived.

That is the perception, and the board built it.

If Celtic made another three signings before this window closed, all of obvious first-team quality, and Martin O’Neill looked at the squad afterwards and said, that’s exactly what I wanted, then nobody would care how many players had arrived across the city.

They could sign fifteen. Twenty. Thirty.

It would be irrelevant because Celtic would have done what Celtic needed to do.

That comparison only becomes powerful when we leave gaps. When we dither. When four straightforward pieces of business take months. When we reach major European fixtures with obvious weaknesses still sitting there.

That is when supporters look across Glasgow and ask why the other club appears capable of moving quickly while ours cannot.

I would still caution anybody declaring a winner in this particular transfer-window contest to wait until the window is actually closed, because what is happening across the city looks like madness to me.

If they really finish this window having signed fifteen or more players, they are making an enormous bet on Derek McInnes.

What happens if he falls flat on his face? Are they seriously going to give the next manager the resources to rebuild the whole thing again?

Or does the next guy walk into the job, open the treasury and find the football equivalent of that famous note left by an outgoing government: sorry, there’s no money left.

That is the risk they are taking.

They are betting big that McInnes works. Because if he doesn’t, the consequences of building an entire squad around one manager’s immediate requirements could follow them for years.

Martin O’Neill’s recruitment, by contrast, looks designed to leave something behind. That matters enormously if this really is his final campaign.

The players Celtic are signing generally fit an age profile and a football profile which should outlast the man currently sitting in the dugout. Martin has the judgement and experience to understand that his job is not merely to build a team capable of winning tonight. It is to leave the next Celtic manager something worth inheriting.

That deserves support. And he deserves to be backed properly.

Because however reckless the spending across the city might eventually prove to be, strip away the risk and strip away the potential consequences and one fact remains undeniable: they are visibly backing their manager. Celtic’s problem is that nobody looking at our club can say that with the same certainty.

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