The John McGinn story is a warning about how Celtic still operates.

Listening to John McGinn’s recent interview was one of the most depressing exercises I have gone through in a long time, because there was so much in it which confirmed what many of us have said about that transfer saga for years. There was a deal to be done. Celtic simply had to pay a little more money, and instead we behaved as though the player’s desire to come here gave us all the leverage we needed.

McGinn’s account on Stick to Football is painful precisely because there is so little ambiguity in it. Hibs told him they would not stand in his way, but Celtic had to pay what he was worth. He was desperate to come here, he met Brendan Rodgers and waited for Celtic to get the deal done, yet our bids never reached the required figure. Aston Villa eventually paid around £2.75 million and took him to England instead.

We did not necessarily have a brilliant hand because Hibs were under no obligation to sell their best player cheaply and Petrie wanted to squeeze us. But there was a deal available if Celtic were prepared to meet a perfectly manageable valuation. That is the bit which has always made this story so infuriating.

The part I have always believed was that Celtic relied far too heavily on McGinn’s family connection and his emotional attachment to the club.

What I did not know until this interview was quite how far that went. McGinn revealed that Celtic actually contacted his grandfather, former Celtic chairman Jack McGinn, in an attempt to influence the situation. His grandfather’s response was essentially that if Celtic had the money, they should pay it and John would play for them.

That tells you everything.

For years, my understanding of that deal has been that Peter Lawwell and Celtic simply assumed there was no realistic circumstance in which John McGinn would sign for somebody else.

We were not merely complacent about his desire to come here. It almost became a point of principle that Celtic would not pay what Hibs wanted because McGinn wanted Celtic badly enough that eventually somebody else would have to blink.

Maybe Hibs would cave. Maybe the player or his representatives would force the issue. Maybe Celtic could simply wait until the contractual situation became even more favourable.

Except McGinn had agency. That is the part Celtic seemed to forget.

McGinn could look at the way the negotiations were being conducted and decide that enough was enough. He could look at another club which was actually prepared to make him feel wanted, meet Hibs’ valuation and provide him with a serious career opportunity.

That is exactly what happened.

Villa came in, behaved like a club which genuinely wanted the footballer and signed him. Celtic were left standing there with all their assumptions and negotiating cleverness while one of the most obvious Scottish signings of the last decade disappeared down the road.

The most revealing line in McGinn’s interview may be his observation that the irony was precisely that he was a Celtic supporter. His view is that Celtic thought his attachment to the club meant the move would simply happen. Hibs would eventually crumble, nobody else would intervene and McGinn himself would keep waiting because Celtic was where he wanted to be.

That attitude has always bothered me because we have played versions of the same game more than once. Celtic have pursued players and behaved as though the size of the club, the attraction of the move and an indication of interest from the player meant we no longer had to treat the selling club’s position with sufficient seriousness.

Worse than that, sometimes we have behaved as though we don’t have to treat the player himself as an independent actor either. The footballer becomes a little wind-up toy who will eventually walk in whatever direction Celtic points him.

That presumption has blown up in our faces before.

Alfie Doughty was another case which always stuck with me. Celtic wanted the young Charlton player in 2020 and made more than one unsuccessful offer. When the deal was not done, the obvious alternative became waiting until January when he could potentially be approached about a pre-contract agreement.

At the time, even I wrote that this was a risky strategy, particularly once injury entered the equation. Put yourself in the player’s position.

You have a contract running down. One club effectively says it can wait because it expects to get you more cheaply later. Meanwhile, you are taking all the risk.

What happens if you suffer a serious injury? What happens if the interested club changes manager or changes its mind? What happens if your form disappears while you wait?

The player is the one whose career is exposed while everybody else congratulates themselves on being clever.

McGinn’s circumstances were little different and the mentality behind Celtic’s approach was exactly the same. We convince ourselves that because Celtic is the biggest attraction in the room, the other parties should eventually bend towards what suits us.

McGinn also spoke about hearing that other players had experienced similar treatment. Watching the discussion, what struck me was that neither Roy Keane nor Gary Neville appeared particularly astonished by the suggestion.

Why would they be?

Football is a small industry and reputations travel.

That should worry Celtic.

Because if this is how the club handled somebody who was practically the perfect target, a Scottish international-level talent, a Celtic supporter, from a deeply Celtic family and desperate to sign, what does that say about how other players and agents might view negotiations with us?

McGinn should have been one of the easiest major transfers Celtic ever had to sell to a player. We still managed to make him feel as though he was being taken for granted.

That is astonishing.

And I worry that Celtic have acquired a reputation for precisely this sort of thing: keeping players hanging around, lowballing selling clubs, stretching negotiations beyond reason and failing to make targets feel that they are genuinely wanted.

Listen, if you identify a player you genuinely rate and genuinely need, and his valuation sits within a range Celtic can comfortably afford, then there comes a point when you stop playing games and go and get him.

You do not pay anything anybody demands. Of course you negotiate. Of course there is a point at which every sensible club walks away. But John McGinn was not priced outside Celtic’s financial universe.

That is what makes the story unforgivable, and the reason it matters today is that we appear to be watching elements of the same culture operating again.

Gvidas Gineitis is within Celtic’s price range. Ermin Mahmi? is within a range Celtic can operate in. We know there are positions in this team which desperately require strengthening, and yet once again we are watching negotiations drag while other clubs circle the players Celtic apparently wants.

Gineitis is reported to be valued at around £9 million, and his agent has confirmed Celtic’s interest while Salzburg have also been involved in discussions around the Torino midfielder. The precise situation may still change before the window closes, but the broader point does not: this is not a player in some financial galaxy Celtic cannot reach.

If Celtic genuinely identify him as the midfielder this team requires, what exactly are we waiting for?

We have said this before on here and I will say it again: this does not look like a football club run by serious football people. Sometimes I wonder whether it is a club run by serious people at all, whatever their supposed field of expertise and whatever they imagine they are achieving during the working day.

The McGinn story matters because although Peter Lawwell is no longer running the club as chief executive, much of the institutional culture established during his era appears to have survived him.

That is what concerns me far more than any individual executive.

People leave. Cultures remain.

Lawwell was undoubtedly the principal executive figure during the McGinn fiasco, but removing one person does not automatically remove the philosophy which developed around him. If the organisation has spent years teaching itself that transfers are primarily exercises in extracting maximum financial advantage rather than securing the footballer’s services, that thinking becomes embedded.

Then the people underneath learn it. The people who succeed them inherit it. Soon nobody even regards it as unusual. It simply becomes how Celtic does business.

That is what I fear we are still watching.

Even players Celtic genuinely want sometimes do not seem to be made to feel particularly wanted. That should terrify everybody involved in recruitment.

A player and his representatives are not simply examining wages and transfer fees. They are evaluating the seriousness of the club pursuing them. They are asking how much the manager wants them, what their role will be, whether the organisation has a plan for them and whether the people negotiating the deal appear committed to completing it.

If Celtic spends weeks haggling, changing positions, waiting for other deals to happen and assuming the player will still be standing there when we finally make up our minds, we should not be astonished when somebody else walks through the door and takes him.

That is exactly what Aston Villa did with John McGinn. They did not possess his childhood allegiance. They did not have his grandfather’s history with the club. They did not have Brendan Rodgers sitting there managing the team he had grown up supporting.

They had something much more useful. They behaved like they wanted him.

Look at what followed.

McGinn helped Villa win promotion, became their captain, played hundreds of games and has now captained them to European success. The £2.75 million Celtic refused to stretch to looks more ridiculous with every passing year.

There is no guarantee that his career would have developed identically at Celtic, of course. That isn’t the point. The point is that all the available evidence at the time said this was exactly the kind of player Celtic should have been buying, at exactly the kind of price Celtic could afford, who actively wanted to come here.

And we still screwed it up.

With a week of the current transfer window remaining, I suspect most Celtic supporters’ expectations are now subterranean.

The John McGinn interview is a painful reminder of why.

We can see echoes of that saga in deals which appeared to be progressing this summer and then didn’t. We can see it in negotiations which stalled until Celtic eventually had to move towards the selling club’s price anyway. We can see it in the wider conduct of a club which habitually spends little or nothing beyond what it brings in through sales and constantly searches for a shortcut, a bargain or another cheaper option.

Sometimes clever recruitment means finding undervalued players. Sometimes clever recruitment means refusing to overpay.

But sometimes clever recruitment means recognising that the player in front of you is exactly what you need and paying the fucking money.

Celtic have never entirely learned the difference.

That culture cost us John McGinn.

And I believe the same culture is still costing us today.

It contributed to the unfinished squad which travelled to Austria on Tuesday and produced one of the most appalling results this club has suffered in Europe. It is still visible as Celtic enter the final week of another transfer window with glaring requirements unresolved.

That is why the McGinn interview is more than an interesting story about a transfer which went wrong eight years ago.

It is a warning from the past. The people change. The targets change. The numbers change. But when the philosophy remains the same, the outcomes have an awful habit of looking familiar. Peter Lawwell may no longer be Celtic’s chief executive.

The culture he helped create looks very much alive.

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