Farès Ghedjemis’ move to Celtic was doomed by his club’s daft strategy.

Farès Ghedjemis is not to blame for what appears to have happened to him. Let us be clear about that from the beginning.

By all accounts, he was well on his way towards becoming a Celtic player and appeared perfectly happy with that state of affairs. Then the people handling the deal decided to play a game.

And I said immediately that it was a mistake.

This was not really a game of Celtic against the selling club. It became a game in which the club across the city was apparently introduced as leverage, and the intention seemed obvious enough: create the impression of competing interest and encourage Celtic to increase its offer.

I said at the time that Celtic would not be suckered by that. It did not take a genius to recognise the risk in the strategy.

The example I used was the sale of the Hitler Diaries. Stern, the German publisher, believed it had an incredibly valuable asset and attempted to play prospective buyers against one another while demanding more and more money.

Eventually, the entire negotiating position collapsed. The supposed competition disappeared and the remaining offer was considerably lower than what had previously been available.

The lesson is straightforward.

Should you intend to manufacture a bidding war, you had better be certain there is actually more than one bidder.

My suspicion from the moment the story appeared was that the supposed Ibrox interest in Ghedjemis was largely phantom interest, or at the very least greatly exaggerated.

It looked like an attempt by somebody involved in the negotiations to frighten Celtic back to the table with a larger offer.

Celtic’s response appears to have been simpler. We took our money somewhere else.

Now, as the club across the city were never seriously involved, there is no alternative buyer waiting with anything approaching the money Celtic had been willing to spend. That leaves Ghedjemis’ club hoping that the reported interest from Monaco or elsewhere is genuine and develops into a serious offer.

Otherwise, they may simply be left holding the player.

That is not necessarily a football disaster. Ghedjemis is a good player and presumably remains valuable to them. But should the club have been relying on his sale to finance other business, then turning down Celtic’s money may become considerably more painful.

There are always consequences when you push your luck too far.

Sometimes the elastic snaps. And this outcome was entirely predictable.

What appears to have been forgotten was twofold.

First, they were dealing with Celtic.

Like it or not, this is an extremely conservative football club in the transfer market. Celtic does not normally become frightened into throwing additional money at a deal merely because somebody whispers that another club might be interested.

We simply do not operate that way.

In fact, we have lost good players precisely because we refuse to operate that way. That tendency drives me, you and probably every other Celtic supporter completely insane. We have repeatedly watched deals collapse over amounts of money which seemed entirely manageable.

But anyone negotiating with Celtic should understand that reputation before attempting to use artificial urgency against us.

You might dislike the way Celtic negotiates.

I certainly do.

But threatening this club with another buyer is unlikely to work unless that buyer is demonstrably real.

The second problem with introducing the Ibrox club into the equation is that Celtic understands the Scottish market rather better than a foreign selling club or agent probably does. The idea that the club across the city was suddenly prepared to spend somewhere around £8 million on this player was always going to be treated sceptically at Celtic Park.

Nobody there was likely to spend a sleepless night contemplating the horrifying possibility that a player Celtic wanted might end up at Ibrox because they had suddenly decided to pay significantly more than we were prepared to offer.

There was never going to be panic. There was never going to be some emergency meeting where Michael Nicholson burst through the door shouting that we had to increase the bid before Derek McInnes got there first.

Celtic operates on cold, hard logic. And that is not logical.

For all the criticism I have made of this club’s transfer conduct – the lowballing, the endless negotiations, the insulting opening offers and the apparent desire to shave every possible pound from a deal – those habits also prepare Celtic perfectly for moments like this.

We are almost impervious to this kind of pressure tactic. And I suspect people inside Celtic may even become actively irritated when someone tries it.

What helped enormously in this case was that Celtic apparently had another target available. Haissem Hassan was in a similar financial bracket, and reports suggested that his camp was receptive to a move to Glasgow.

That changes everything. Once you have a credible alternative, you do not have to tolerate games elsewhere.

Paulina made the point yesterday that Celtic may have benefited from whatever difficulties Marseille were experiencing in trying to complete the Hassan deal. That may be true. But Celtic still had to recognise the opening and push through the door.

Should that transfer be completed, the club deserves credit because Hassan appears to be an excellent player and potentially a major asset for the future. None of that means supporters would have objected to Ghedjemis.

I certainly would not have.

But once the negotiation became unnecessarily complicated and another attractive option existed, Celtic had a decision to make. It appears to have made it.

The way Celtic conducts transfer business remains thoroughly infuriating.

It takes too long. It leaves supporters scrambling for scraps of information and wondering whether the club possesses any ambition whatsoever. Deals should be completed more quickly and there should be a greater willingness to go the extra mile for priority targets.

We have made those criticisms a hundred times.

Oddly enough, however, those same characteristics make Celtic exceptionally difficult to manipulate in negotiations.

A club which hates being pushed into spending an extra £500,000 is not going to suddenly surrender because somebody leaks a story saying Ibrox might be interested. Quite the opposite. It may decide that the negotiation is no longer worth the trouble.

There is, of course, no reason why Celtic could not have reached a revised agreement over Ghedjemis. An improved offer, structured differently, might well have unlocked the transfer. But I get the distinct feeling that the people at Celtic were unimpressed by the apparent attempt to use the Ibrox club as leverage.

I would not be remotely surprised if somebody inside Celtic decided at that point that we simply were not doing business on those terms.

Because another option existed, we could walk away. We could take the necessary money and attempt to complete that deal instead.

I am not saying with certainty that this is precisely what happened because none of us will ever know every conversation which took place behind closed doors.

But it would not surprise me in the slightest.

The tactic was obvious enough. Leak supposed rival interest, suggest that another Scottish club might steal the player and hope Celtic returns with more money. Anyone advising that approach badly misunderstood Celtic.

From the moment the Ibrox story appeared, I thought there was very little chance of Celtic responding by increasing the offer simply because of that supposed threat.

Now the reports suggest that the club across the city has “cooled” its interest.

That is quite amusing to those of us who suspected all along that the interest may never have been particularly warm in the first place. Meanwhile, Celtic has moved decisively towards another target.

That more or less closes the story from our side. The awkward conversation may now be happening elsewhere.

Somebody involved in Ghedjemis’ transfer strategy may have to explain why Celtic’s money is no longer sitting on the table.

If the Monaco interest becomes serious, perhaps none of it will matter. Perhaps Ghedjemis will get his move, his club will receive the money it wants and everybody will be happy.

Good luck to him if that happens. But there is also a possibility that the player remains where he is because the people around the deal attempted to squeeze too much from a buyer which was perfectly prepared to walk away.

That would be unfortunate for Ghedjemis because, again, none of this appears to have been his fault. I have no reason to believe that he devised the strategy himself or demanded that anybody manufacture competing interest in the hope of forcing Celtic to bid more.

This looks far more like the work of agents, executives or people involved in negotiations, perhaps assisted by friendly media contacts who were happy to put the story into circulation. They wanted to move the needle.

They succeeded. Just not in the direction they intended.

Celtic did not increase its offer. Celtic moved on.

And that is always the danger when you try to convince a buyer that somebody else is waiting at the door. Sometimes the buyer does not panic. Sometimes he simply opens the other door and leaves.

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