If Jota is so important to Celtic, we have to wait until he’s ready.

Earlier today, Paulina wrote an excellent and very emotional piece about why Celtic cannot hurry Martin O’Neill back to the dugout, and I agreed with every word of it. But there is another version of that same risk developing inside Celtic Park.

There is a very real danger that, in order to avoid signing another left-sided attacking player, Celtic starts looking at Jota’s recovery not as something to be managed carefully, but as a solution to a squad problem.

That would be selfish, stupid and completely counterproductive.

Jota has been out for around 16 months with a serious knee injury. He has only recently returned to light first-team training and, according to the latest updates, is still working his way towards genuine match readiness rather than standing on the verge of walking straight back into Martin O’Neill’s starting eleven.

Returning to training is not the same thing as being ready for competitive football.

Being able to participate in drills is not the same thing as being able to start matches, change direction at full intensity, absorb contact, repeat high-speed actions and cope with everything a professional football match demands.

And after a layoff this long, nobody should be pretending otherwise.

I am not Jota’s doctor, I do not know the details of his rehabilitation programme and neither does anybody else sitting outside Celtic Park. The decision about when he is ready belongs to the medical, rehabilitation and performance staff working with him.

But that is exactly why the football department should stay out of the way. The transfer window should not determine Jota’s rehabilitation timetable. The fact that Celtic needs somebody on the left should not determine it either.

As I said in the Claudio Braga piece, I completely disagree with the assertion that Celtic is adequately covered on that side. We are not.

Yang Hyun-jun has spent much of the recent period being used as a right-sided attacking option. Sebastian Tounekti has not suddenly become a different footballer simply because Daizen Maeda is no longer there.

You cannot remove a major presence like Maeda from the side and simply announce that the players who were previously behind him in the pecking order now constitute an adequate replacement. That does not maintain the strength of the team.

Celtic is materially weaker on the left than it was. That is a fact. And the temptation now will be obvious to a club where every penny is a prisoner.

Jota is back on the training pitch. Photos appear. Supporters become excited. The club starts talking about how encouraging his progress is, and suddenly somebody somewhere convinces himself that perhaps we do not need to spend money there after all.

That is exactly the thinking Celtic has to resist. Because Jota’s return should have absolutely nothing to do with whether we sign somebody for that position.

If anything, the importance of Jota to Celtic is an argument for being more cautious with him, not less. Should Celtic genuinely see him as a major part of the long-term solution on the left, then protect him. Give him every day he needs.

Let him train. Let him build strength. Let him progress through football-specific work. Let him play whatever controlled games or minutes the medical team believes are appropriate.

Then introduce him gradually when he is actually ready.

Do not look at the transfer deadline and begin counting backwards from it. That would be madness. Medical research around ACL rehabilitation increasingly emphasises that return to sport should be based on whether the player has met appropriate physical and functional criteria rather than simply saying a certain number of months has passed. Jota’s case has already been unusually prolonged, which is all the more reason not to make assumptions about what he should be capable of on some arbitrary date.

Celtic needs to behave as though Jota is unavailable until Jota is actually available.

Anything we get before that should be treated as a bonus. If that means signing somebody on loan for a season, do it. If it means bringing in another winger permanently and creating competition when Jota eventually returns, even better.

What Celtic absolutely cannot do is leave the position inadequately staffed because it hopes an injured player will become ready quickly enough to save the club a transfer fee. We have all watched football long enough to know how foolish that would be.

There is another element to this which I find interesting, and that is insurance.

Professional football clubs can arrange specialist insurance covering various injury-related risks. The precise arrangements vary enormously, and there is no public information that I am aware of telling us exactly what Celtic’s policy relating to Jota contains. So, I am not going to claim that an insurer has been paying Jota’s wages or that Celtic has recovered a particular amount of money during his absence.

We simply do not know that.

But the existence of insurance arrangements in professional football highlights an important distinction. A club can insure itself against some of the financial consequences of a player being injured. It cannot insure itself against the football consequences of having nobody capable of playing his position.

An insurance policy might protect part of the balance sheet.

It cannot play left wing. That is the point Celtic needs to understand.

Jota is not a line in the accounts which has to be hurried back into productive use. He is a footballer recovering from one of the most serious injuries an elite player can suffer. And if Celtic has any financial protection against some of the cost of his absence, then all the better. That should make patience easier, not harder.

Even if it does not, the conclusion should be exactly the same.

The money has already been spent. The contract already exists. The injury already happened. Nothing Celtic does now can change any of that. The only decision which remains is whether the club handles the recovery intelligently.

There is not a single Celtic supporter who does not want Jota back.

We remember what he can do. We remember the player who gets people out of their seats, who carries the ball at defenders and who can change matches. Everyone wants to see that footballer again. But wanting him back is not the same thing as needing him back tomorrow.

And Celtic has made mistakes of this sort before. Football clubs in general have repeatedly discovered the danger of bringing players back before they are properly prepared for the demands being placed on them.

The return from an ACL injury is not merely about the reconstructed ligament surviving. Research in professional football has highlighted the risk of subsequent serious knee injury after players return to competition, which is precisely why proper preparation and objective return-to-play criteria matter.

So why take an unnecessary chance? Why put ourselves in a position where the football department is hoping the medical department can accelerate something because recruitment has failed to provide adequate cover?

That is backwards. Recruitment should protect rehabilitation. Rehabilitation should not rescue recruitment. That should be written on a wall at Lennoxtown.

Celtic has already allowed too many positions to deteriorate to the point where we are now scrambling around trying to prioritise one need against another.

That is not Jota’s fault, and he should not be asked, implicitly or otherwise, to solve a problem created by poor squad planning.

If the left side needs strengthening, strengthen it. Should Jota then return in October, November, December or whenever his medical team determines he is genuinely ready, fantastic. Suddenly Celtic has two strong options.

What a terrible problem to have.

There seems to be an almost pathological fear inside this club of having too many good players. I would rather have that problem than discover in September that Jota needs longer and that we deliberately went into the season without enough quality because somebody wanted to save money.

And there is a wider principle here.

Earlier Paulina was writing about Martin O’Neill and saying Celtic must put the human being before the football problem. The same rule applies to players.

Martin must not be hurried back because Celtic lacks leadership. Jota must not be hurried back because Celtic lacks a left winger. In both cases, the institutional failure belongs to Celtic. Neither man should be required to compensate for it with his health.

That is the part which bothers me most.

If Jota is as valuable to Celtic as the club apparently believes he is, then treat him like it. Protect the asset. More importantly, protect the man.

Give him the time to get properly fit, properly strong and properly confident, and build the squad so that nobody inside Celtic Park is looking at the calendar thinking, “Christ, we really need him back next Saturday.”

Celtic may or may not have insured itself against some of the financial consequences of Jota’s injury. But there is no insurance policy in the world which can protect the club from stupid squad planning.

Sign the player we need on the left. Then let Jota recover without a transfer window hanging over his head. When he is ready, he is ready. Not one day before.

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