Claudio Braga to Celtic? A story with more holes than Swiss Cheese.

Yesterday, a story spread quickly across Celtic fan media after a tweet suggested that we were looking into the possibility of signing Claudio Braga from Hearts. The story went viral, and as I explained the other day, this is where you have to know what you are looking at during a transfer window.

You have to know which stories deserve attention, which ones might contain a grain of truth and which ones should be dismissed almost immediately. This one has now effectively been dismissed twice, yet it still continues to circulate.

The first reason I dismissed it was the source.

Football Insider is a website so relentlessly focused on hits and clicks that, if it told me the sky was blue and the grass was green, I would probably still look out the window to make sure. Peter O’Rourke, its supposed transfer expert, strikes me as being about as plugged into the inner workings of Celtic as the average guy you would meet in the pub.

That alone made me deeply sceptical.

But just on the off chance that this permanently broken clock happened to be right on this occasion, I gave the story a little thought. There was one reason why it might have had some superficial logic. If Celtic is to play with two strikers, there is an argument that the squad could use a third senior option.

That was enough to make me wonder whether there might be something behind it.

Then Shaun Maloney more or less blew that possibility out of the water at his press conference by saying that, as far as he is concerned, Celtic is covered up front.

I disagree with him, by the way. But I am not remotely surprised that this is the thinking inside Celtic Park.

There are simply too many other positions which need filled during this window for a third striker to be treated as a priority, especially while young Callum Osmand is fit and available.

That is one of the unfortunate consequences of allowing the squad to deteriorate to this point. Celtic is now going to have to prioritise.

We are going to have to sacrifice some of the things we would like in order to get some of the things we absolutely need.

A third striker would be nice. It is not mission-critical.

Should injuries hit, Celtic could revert to one striker with another on the bench. That would not be ideal and it may not be what O’Neill wants to do, but it is at least a workable alternative. There are other areas where no such comfort exists.

The priorities are obvious enough. Celtic needs to complete the deal for a right-sided attacker, strengthen the midfield, sign a right-back and a left-back, and bring in a new goalkeeper. Those are the mission-critical positions.

Every one of them needs addressed before the window closes.

Everything else can wait.

Where I completely disagree with Maloney is his apparent belief that Celtic is well covered on the left of attack. I do not believe that for a second unless Jota is suddenly much further ahead in his recovery than we have been led to believe, and Celtic should not even consider rushing him back simply to avoid paying a transfer fee for somebody else.

I do not believe that Sebastian Tounekti and Yang Hyun-jun provide adequate cover on that side. That feels like exactly the sort of assertion I feared we would hear after Daizen Maeda left: that the club would convince itself existing options were sufficient rather than properly replacing one of its most important attacking players.

Celtic has done that far too often. It fixes half the problem and then congratulates itself for completing the job.

The one thing which made the Braga story slightly more believable was his versatility.

He does not only play through the middle. He can operate in wider attacking areas as well, and that would at least have given Celtic additional cover in positions where the squad presently looks thin. It would also have reduced the temptation to rely too heavily on Jota making an immediate and spectacular return after such a long period out.

Celtic is not going to project the attacking strength it needs while the left-hand side remains this weak. It may not be the single biggest priority today, but I hope O’Neill recognises that it is still a problem which needs addressed before the window closes.

For every one thing about the Braga story which made some sense, though, there were at least two things which did not.

Above all was the idea that dealing with Hearts would somehow be easier than dealing with clubs elsewhere. It would almost certainly be harder.

Hearts would not make the transfer cheap, and they would not make it straightforward.

Braga would represent a significant financial risk at the kind of fee they would likely demand, and as I have said repeatedly, Celtic now has to accept that buying established players from within our own domestic league comes with a tax attached.

We will be quoted more because we are Celtic, and how exactly do people imagine Hearts feels right now about making our lives easier?

That was the biggest reason the story never rang true to me.

Everybody at Celtic knows what Hearts’ likely response would be to an attempt to buy one of their better players. They would quote us an enormous fee, assuming they were prepared to quote us a fee at all.

There are clubs Hearts would willingly do business with. I am not convinced Celtic is high on that list. And after a certain point, Braga simply ceases to be worth the money.

At that stage, all Celtic would be doing is validating Hearts’ transfer policy, putting a substantial pile of cash into their hands and helping legitimise Tony Bloom’s entire strategy. I would rather we did not do that.

I would rather leave Hearts to deal with the financial consequences should their European campaign disappear altogether.

If they are left scrambling later in the window and trying to plug a hole in their finances, then perhaps it might be amusing to go back with a cheeky £3 million offer, assuming Celtic even rates Braga highly enough to bother.

But in the here and now, this story looks dead.

Maloney has effectively said that another striker is not an area Celtic is prioritising. The source itself is highly questionable, and the economics of trying to buy Braga from Hearts make very little sense.

That should be enough to put the rumour to bed.

The day Peter O’Rourke possesses genuine insight into what is happening inside Celtic is the day you could pull somebody off the street, hand him a Twitter account and a blog, and you would get a better hit rate than half the people currently calling themselves transfer insiders.

In the present circumstances, the Braga story is ludicrous.

Celtic is not going to pay what Hearts would likely demand, even if there were some level of interest, and Maloney has made it clear that the position is not viewed as an immediate priority after the money already spent in attacking areas.

There are more important problems to solve.

The goalkeeper situation matters more. Both full-back positions matter more. Midfield matters more. The right side of the attack matters more.

That is where Celtic’s attention should be focused.

And that is where I expect it to be focused.

Stories like this should be filed under F. Not for fiction. For fantasy.

Which, unfortunately, is exactly the world Football Insider seems happiest living in.

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