This Celtic board can’t even stick to the strategy it boasts about.

There is a moment near the beginning of the excellent movie Margin Call, about 24 hours at a Wall Street firm, when its head, John Tuld, played magnificently by Jeremy Irons, is finally presented with the scale of the catastrophe sitting in front of his company. He looks around the room at all the highly paid people who are supposed to understand the numbers and says, “Explain this to me as though I were a young child.”

That is exactly where I am with Celtic right now.

Explain this to me as though I am a young child, because I genuinely want somebody inside Celtic Park to make the last few days make sense.

Before the Champions League qualifier, Celtic had identified transfer targets who fitted the club’s overall recruitment strategy almost perfectly.

Young players, high potential, quality already demonstrated at a serious level, international experience in some cases, affordable within our normal price range and, crucially, significant resale potential if they developed the way the recruitment department believed they could.

These were not vanity signings. They were not thirty-year-old stars being offered enormous contracts with no future value. They were not players Celtic would have had to write off financially the moment the ink dried on the contract.

They were exactly the kind of football assets Celtic constantly tells us it wants to buy.

So, explain this to me. If those players represented good business before Celtic went out of the Champions League, why did they suddenly represent bad business afterwards?

Their age hasn’t changed. Their ability hasn’t changed. Their potential hasn’t disappeared and their possible resale value did not evaporate because LASK put five goals past us in Austria. Their suitability for the Celtic squad did not change either.

We had three key midfield targets identified. All international players, all in their low twenties, all playing football at a decent level. All of them would have been within budget with only Gineitis costing a significant sum. God knows how many other players, in other positions, we were looking at with a view not only to improving the team but bringing in guys with a re-sale profit potential measured in tens of millions.

What happened against LASK demonstrated rather brutally that the squad needed those players even more than we thought. The only thing which changed after we went out was Celtic’s Champions League revenue.

As critics have noted, we will end this transfer window with another eight-figure transfer trading surplus.

The response to losing Champions League money was that Celtic scrapped, immediately, its plans to buying in the kinds of players who were supposed to become future sources of profit, replacing that plan with one of short-term loans and a project punt from Holland.

Explain that to me as though I were a young child.

Because from where I am sitting, that is simply this club inflicting yet another wound on itself to nobody’s benefit.

It is Celtic punishing itself twice; once for the failure to reach the Groups by not getting these deals done quicker and then all over again by scrapping a plan that had huge upside potential and would not have threatened the finances.

The Champions League failure is what it is. Celtic does not learn from the past. It is stupid and it is senseless and it shows these people up as rank incompetents. But it is nothing that we are not depressingly familiar with.

But there is absolutely no law which says Celtic then has to take that failure and use it as the starting gun for another one.

Yet that is exactly what we did.

The stupidity of that is almost mind-bending. Not content with one idiotic set of decisions these people followed it up with another set. It’s like a company which loses a big contract cancelling another contract because it involved spending a little capital up front.

It is a logic that starts to eat itself. What the Hell is wrong with these people? Is nobody inside that building capable of recognising this, or challenging the demented mind that has forced this idiocy upon this club?

The logic seems to go something like this: we wanted Player X because he was young, talented, affordable and capable of becoming significantly more valuable. We wanted Player Y because he would improve the team immediately while also becoming a potentially valuable asset. We believed these deals made strategic sense.

Then Celtic failed to qualify for the Champions League.

So now we don’t want them. We’re willing to forego all of the potential upside because we’ve already lost one major stream of revenue.

A genuine recruitment strategy does not disappear because one result goes against you.

A genuine recruitment strategy should survive individual seasons, individual managers and individual European disappointments. It should be based on what the football club is trying to become over three, four and five years, not whether somebody scored a late goal in Austria. That is what strategy means.

And Celtic has spent years telling us that its model is based on acquiring young footballers before they reach their peak value, developing them, benefiting from them on the pitch and eventually selling some of them at enormous profits.

Fine. We all understand that model. Hell, we’ve gotten some pretty good results seeing it implemented. In fact, when Celtic does it properly, it is one of the things this club has been genuinely excellent at.

But there is one rather important component to a player-trading strategy which occasionally seems to escape the people running Celtic; you have to buy the players first. And over and over again we’ve lost out on potential high-value talents because we are tight and greedy and always have to be the winners in every deal.

You do not get the £20 million sale without making the £6 million purchase. You do not get the enormous appreciation in value without accepting the initial investment risk. You cannot point proudly to every successful sale as proof that the model works and then become terrified of spending money on the next group of players who are supposed to make that model continue working.

A sophisticated player-trading strategy says that Celtic identifies a player worth £6 million today who it believes could become a £15 million or £20 million footballer in two or three seasons. Celtic buys him, develops him, gets two or three years of football from him and, if everything goes according to plan, eventually sells him at a substantial profit.

During that period, he might help us win trophies. He might help us qualify for Europe. He might help us win European matches. He might improve the players around him. He might allow us to sell another player without weakening the team. His sale, then, generates the money which pays for the next cycle.

When Celtic pays £7 million for the right young footballer, the money has not simply vanished. We have converted cash into an asset.

Of course there is risk. Players can fail. They can suffer injuries. They can struggle to adapt. They can lose form. Their value can fall. But if Celtic’s recruitment model cannot tolerate those risks, then there is no recruitment model.

The whole philosophy rests on the belief that Celtic can identify enough good players at the right point in their development for the successful deals to massively outweigh the unsuccessful ones. That is supposed to be one of our great strengths.

But a single defeat over two legs has suddenly invalidated it. This is where the whole argument for doing it in the first place becomes manifestly absurd. It is where we compound the original mistake with what, in my view, may be an even costlier one.

Celtic failed to strengthen properly before qualification. Celtic then failed to qualify. That cost the club a significant amount of immediate revenue. And Celtic’s response is reduce the investment in players who were themselves supposed to generate future sporting and financial returns. Madness. Absolute madness.

Instead, we complete part of the rebuild with cheap deals and loans. One player signed for cash. No re-sale value or development potential in the rest, just one future fee we have to find out of next season’s budget.

This is exactly how a bad decision becomes a cycle rather than an isolated mistake. You fail to invest. The failure to invest contributes to sporting failure. The sporting failure costs revenue. The lost revenue becomes the justification for investing less. The reduced investment increases the possibility of another sporting failure.

Explain this to me as though I am a young child.

How does that make any sense?

And there is an even bigger question here, of course, because Celtic’s financial position is precisely what should allow the club to absorb something like Champions League elimination without tearing up its long-term plans.

What are reserves for? Seriously. We have heard about financial prudence for years. We have heard about maintaining cash reserves. We have heard about protecting Celtic against uncertainty and ensuring the club remains strong when difficult periods arrive. Well, hasn’t the difficult period arrived? Isn’t this the rainy day where you invest now, grow the value of the squad and wait for the fruits to grow?

What is the purpose of all the strength you spent years building, if you are unwilling to re-invest now, when the need is clear and the rewards obvious? Saving for a rainy day only works if you are prepared to spend some of the money when it actually rains.

There is no argument here for reckless spending.

There never has been.

If one of the pre-qualification targets suddenly becomes £5 million more expensive, reassess it. If the player no longer wants to come because the Champions League has disappeared, move on. If wages become ridiculous, walk away. If another player becomes available who represents better value, change the target.

That is what a functioning recruitment department should do.

But if the player is still available at approximately the same price, still wants to come, still fits the age profile, still fills a position Celtic identified as needing strengthened and still possesses the resale potential which made him attractive in the first place, then Champions League elimination is not a rational reason to abandon the deal.

We are told that the failure to qualify, itself, was part of what changed the calculus; the players were not prepared to come here after that. It’s rubbish.

As it happens, not one of the key three targets we were identified with left their clubs to play Champions League football. And here’s the truly hilarious part; none of them are even playing European football. Gineitis remains at Torino. Sigur went to Toulouse. Mahmic went to Corum, in Turkey, where he scored in his first game.

All three sides, like the one from Ibrox, are sitting this European season out.

And this is just the targets we know about. We have no idea how many other high-value, high upside deals were similarly cast aside the moment our fate was sealed in Linz.

Before the qualifier, Celtic apparently looked at these players and thought: “These guys can improve us.” Then Celtic went into the qualifier without them. The existing squad catastrophically failed.

The lesson we took from that is that perhaps we no longer needed to make the improvements we had already identified. It was that having left serious money on the table that we would hamstring ourselves further by scrapping plans already in place which were, at least in part, designed to make more further down the line.

Try explaining that without laughing.

It is the equivalent of discovering that your roof leaks during a storm and responding by cancelling the order for the new tiles because the storm has already caused water damage.

The damage is the evidence that you needed the repair.

It is not the argument for abandoning it.

This is not simply about Celtic failing to get a big deal done yesterday, although if there was ever a day for doing that, it should have been the one before the Europa League deadline which had become the one revealing our level of intent.

It is about whether the board actually believes in the model it constantly points to when defending its financial record.

Because it has failed to follow it here. Failed utterly. Months of scouting reports, analytics data, every transfer meeting between the board and the manager, all of it was rendered redundant in an instant. Needlessly.

You either believe in your recruitment strategy or you don’t. You either believe these players are assets or you don’t. You either believe that Celtic should be investing ahead of value appreciation or you don’t. And if you don’t, stop pretending there is some grand long-term model underneath all of this.

Because in this case, as in many others, the response to Champions League elimination looks as if it followed the same old Celtic reflex pattern. Something goes wrong. Retreat. Something becomes uncertain. Retreat. Revenue falls. Retreat. Opportunity disappears. Retreat.

Then call the retreat prudence.

Sometimes prudence means continuing with the plan precisely because you understood the risks when you created it. That is what long-term thinking is.

If Celtic believed these young, talented, internationally experienced players were worth buying just a fortnight ago, somebody needs to explain why they were suddenly not worth buying last week.

It is a joke. Where we’ve ended up is a joke.

And the consequences go deeper than this season.

Because Celtic did not merely lose Champions League revenue against LASK. As that defeat stopped us signing the players who were supposed to become tomorrow’s £15 million and £20 million assets, we are choosing to lose tomorrow’s money as well.

So now we have to start all over again next summer. Uncertainty. Caution. There are three qualifying rounds to play and already the shape of the next gamble is already clear, and if I were the scouting and development team at Lennoxtown I would wonder if it was worth making any long-term plans at all … because we’re not going to be prepared for those games, and if we lose in any of those ties all they’ve mapped out goes right in the bin.

Explain this to me as though I am a young child.

It’s as I’ve said; this is not a serious football club. These are not serious people.

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