Another former player makes our transfer policy madness crystal clear.

Once again, Celtic supporters are presented with evidence of the almost incomprehensible logic – and we are using that word very loosely – which seems to be on display whenever this club goes into the market for players.

It is astonishing how often Celtic sign players in positions where we do not particularly need them. This has been especially obvious in midfield over the years, where it has almost reached the point of parody. Paulo Bernardo’s comments yesterday summed the whole problem up perfectly.

Bernardo has now left Celtic on loan, with his new club holding an option to buy him. He is a good enough footballer that if they can afford to exercise that option and he performs as I expect him to, I suspect they will do it. There is therefore every possibility that we have already seen him for the final time in a Celtic shirt.

I think that would be a great shame because there was obviously a very talented footballer there, and one who was young enough to continue improving. The problem with Paulo Bernardo was never that he lacked ability. The problem was that Celtic never appeared to know exactly what to do with him.

When Bernardo spoke yesterday about what he regards as his best position, I was not remotely surprised. He considers himself a number eight, a player who wants to get forward, get into the penalty area, score goals and create chances.

Of course he does.

That is exactly the footballer we watched whenever he was allowed to express himself properly. Yet Celtic brought him into a midfield where we already had Matt O’Riley and Reo Hatate, two footballers whose natural instincts also took them forward.

At the same time, we had been crying out for something entirely different.

We needed a ball-winner. We needed a proper defensive midfielder. We needed somebody who could dominate the central areas, protect the defence and allow the more creative players around him to do what they were actually good at.

Instead, Celtic signed another number eight.

Bernardo was essentially another version of something the squad already possessed. He offered another option in an area of the pitch where Celtic were already well stocked while doing nothing to solve the obvious weakness elsewhere.

That is what makes the whole thing so baffling.

I do not know whether Celtic knew exactly what type of footballer they were signing and subsequently tried to turn him into something else, or whether they simply signed a talented young player without having a sufficiently clear plan for how he would fit into the team.

Neither explanation reflects particularly well on the recruitment process.

Bernardo originally arrived during Brendan Rodgers’ first transfer window after returning to Celtic. That was the summer when the disconnect between what the manager wanted and what the recruitment operation delivered became painfully obvious.

Rodgers did not immediately establish Bernardo in his side because he already had players ahead of him in the roles Bernardo was naturally suited to playing.

Celtic had brought another footballer into the building and effectively told the manager to work out what to do with him. Yet the pedigree was obvious.

Bernardo came through Benfica’s academy, played extensively in their youth setup and represented Portugal throughout the age groups, including at Under-21 level. You looked at that background and naturally assumed that somebody somewhere had identified exactly how this player was going to improve Celtic.

And occasionally you saw what he could do.

There were games where Bernardo grabbed hold of proceedings and reminded everybody that there was a proper footballer there. One of the most important examples came in the Scottish Cup Final against the Ibrox club, when he drove through midfield, got his shot away and forced the save which Adam Idah followed up to score the winner.

That was a match-winning contribution.

Bernardo had that sort of moment in him. The problem was that we did not see enough of them because we did not see enough of Bernardo, and one of the reasons for that was brutally straightforward.

There were already players ahead of him in the queue.

The same problem eventually followed him into Martin O’Neill’s team. Benjamin Nygren emerged as another footballer whose best work comes from advanced midfield positions, which only made Bernardo’s place in the squad harder to justify.

Again, that does not make Bernardo a bad player.

It makes the recruitment incoherent.

You cannot keep buying good footballers without considering whether they actually fit together. Quality and suitability are not the same thing, and Celtic have repeatedly behaved as though collecting talented individuals automatically produces a balanced squad.

It does not. You would no more ask Bernardo to become a hard-tackling defensive midfielder than you would ask Benjamin Nygren to take over Callum McGregor’s number-six role. Players have particular qualities. Recruitment is supposed to identify which qualities the team is missing and then find players who provide them.

That sounds incredibly obvious.

At Celtic, apparently it is not.

I liked Paulo Bernardo. I would happily have watched him stay at Celtic and play regularly. There was unquestionably a footballer there, and with the right role and the right structure around him I think he could have continued developing into a very good one.

But no matter how many times Celtic reshuffled the team around him, he was always competing against players who were more established in the very position where he was most comfortable.

That is what made him redundant.

And that is the part which should bother everybody involved in Celtic’s recruitment.

This club has spent millions over the years signing footballers it subsequently struggled to use. A few million pounds here, another few million there, wages on top of that, and eventually those individual mistakes begin adding up to serious money.

Then factor in the greater cost.

What does an imbalanced squad cost when Celtic go into European qualifiers without the midfield they need? What does it cost when obvious weaknesses remain unresolved window after window? What does it cost when the club fails to reach competitions worth tens of millions because the squad has been assembled without enough joined-up thinking?

That is where these mistakes stop being small.

Paulo Bernardo is not evidence that Celtic cannot identify talented footballers. He is evidence of something much more frustrating. Celtic can identify good footballers and still sign the wrong ones.

Until somebody finally joins up recruitment with the actual requirements of the manager and the squad, we will continue making exactly the same mistakes over and over again.

And the cost will continue going up.

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