Pissed off Celtic fans have no faith in the promise of January jam.

News in the media last night that Celtic may return to the Gvidas Gineitis deal with Torino in January is hilarious because it is the club doing its normal version of spin control to people who have seen the routine so many times that they are bored to death with it.

There are large sections of the Celtic support perfectly satisfied with how this window went. They are happy to overlook the Champions League exit. They are happy to overlook six signings in the final days, three of whom did not even make the European squad. They are happy to overlook holes all over the team, including the big one at defensive midfield.

That is cool. They can retain their total confidence in the people running this club. For the rest of us, January is another insult to our intelligence.

This deal will never be revisited in January.

Why would it be?

The people who did not do this deal now, when it might have mattered and when it could have achieved something, simply cannot be trusted to do it at the turn of the year. They will probably finance it with the sale of a key player anyway. I am only glad Duran does not already have 12 months in the building, otherwise it might be him.

These people have no shame. Trusting their word on anything is idiotic because they cannot be trusted on anything. The section of the Celtic support sufficiently attuned to what we have just watched is not interested in promises of jam tomorrow because jam tomorrow is always promised to us.

In January, when we sold Kyogo, the jam was supposed to come within weeks.

It never did.

But we were promised everything would be different in the summer because lessons, of course, had been learned.

Of course it did not come in the summer.

Summer came and went. No jam.

Ther was a lot of waiting for jam between Kyogo being sold and his being properly replaced. When we failed to replace him immediately, people automatically assumed that somewhere, somebody was buying jam.

But that summer dragged on and on, Brendan Rodgers grew increasingly pissed off and everybody kept waiting for the jam.

In the end, we did not even get as much as a lick of the spoon.

It has happened elsewhere too.

It took far too long to replace important attacking players. Idah left and jam did not come. Nicolas Kühn left and we spent a year and two windows trying to put the right side back together properly. All the while, promises of jam.

Sometime. Sometime soon. The jam is coming.

It never does.

We are out of the Champions League. In an organisation with any meaningful concept of accountability, somebody’s job would already have gone.

I said that when the transfer window closed these people had literally nothing to do until January and this would be an excellent time for some of them to step away from the table because they have no business still being at this club when that window opens.

If they think most people are going to trust them with another transfer window, they are crazy. Some people might be willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. For the rest of us, that expired a long time ago.

Their appeasement strategy is going to cut no ice.

I knew when I saw the headline in the Record that Michael Gannon had written the story because every Celtic board, every Celtic chief executive and every shuffling of the deckchairs eventually seems to produce a pet journalist through whom the latest reassuring noises are delivered.

I have no interest in being force-fed propaganda from inside the Celtic boardroom.

I have no interest in being told yet again some hard-luck story when the real story has emerged elsewhere: a board of directors which had Martin O’Neill’s list and did not even seriously pursue some of the names on it.

A board which allegedly had a summer plan to sign a number of key footballers and then watched that plan fail to survive the Champions League exit. A whole plank of the strategy was sawn up and turned into woodchip on the back of a single defeat.

That tells you how serious the strategy was.

If Gineitis was such a key target, we had months to get the deal done. Forgive me if I do not believe for a second that these people warrant another try. If they have not got it done already, why should anybody believe they are going to get it done in January?

We’re not getting the jam. It is like the big pot of stew bubbling away in the corner of one of those Russian gulags during a prisoner interrogation. It is never explicitly promised, so it never has to be served. It never will be.

It is tiresome reading this rubbish. It is tiresome reading how, for the want of £1 million or £2 million, this club was willing to risk major money.

As I said in the piece yesterday, this guy was not simply someone we were looking at to get us into the Champions League, not that we bothered to make the move while that issue was still live. He was supposed to be a blue-chip signing.

In other words, he was supposed to be the kind of signing Celtic could develop into a genuinely top-class player and then sell for a major profit somewhere down the line.

Nothing changed in that equation except that we failed to qualify for the Champions League.

If he was a blue-chip asset before that game, he was still a blue-chip asset after it. The money was there to do the deal. We finished the window sitting on an enormous transfer-trading surplus.

Reporting throughout the final days consistently put Gineitis in roughly the £8 million to £10 million range, with Torino holding out for its valuation and Celtic repeatedly trying to find a structure it would accept.

The precise versions of the negotiations vary, but the basic disagreement was not some enormous gulf in valuation. Celtic wanted the player. Torino was willing to sell him at the right price. The deal still did not happen.

Stephen McGowan’s reporting suggested the difference between the parties had essentially become a matter of structure and degrees, with Celtic trying to keep part of the valuation in add-ons while Torino wanted more of the money guaranteed.

Somewhere between those positions was ground on which a deal could have been done. How difficult is this? If Celtic believed this guy was the next big thing, the next blue-chip asset, if we took the manager’s wishes seriously and if we believed our own scouting and analytics department when it identified him as the player to go and get, then the difference between money paid now and money paid later in achievable add-ons starts becoming close to meaningless.

If you genuinely believe the player will succeed sufficiently for the add-ons to be triggered, then you are already assuming you are eventually going to pay the money. So why not pay it? Get the deal done. Get the player. Enjoy the success.

Every excuse they offer somehow makes the whole thing more inexcusable.

Every reason they provide strips away another possible defence and leaves only the conclusion that they made a mess of it.

Remember the Mika Baur deal.

That dragged on for weeks after personal terms were reportedly agreed because the clubs could not settle the fee. At one stage the reported difference was only around €300,000. By the time the deal finally happened, reporting put Celtic’s eventual outlay substantially above the earlier offers. That is the Celtic way.

Delay. Haggle. Try to shave the number. Try to win the deal.

Then necessity arrives, the clock starts screaming and suddenly the negotiating position is worse than it was weeks earlier.

We have seen the same basic behaviour before.

Adam Idah is the obvious example.

Celtic knew the player. Brendan Rodgers wanted the player. Idah wanted to come back. Norwich knew Celtic wanted him.

Celtic opened with a £4 million bid which was rejected. Things sat in complete limbo until Kyogo got injured, we panicked, we made an improved offer worth more than £6 million plus add-ons which eventually restarted talks.

Celtic ultimately agreed a package worth as much as £9.5 million, with £8.5 million guaranteed, £1 million in add-ons and a 15 per cent sell-on clause.

The exact counterfactual price Celtic might have paid had it acted differently can never be nailed down; it certainly would not have come close to that fee.

They knew what the player was worth to them. They did not want to pay it. They wanted to negotiate it down. They wanted to mess about. They wanted to win the deal. And that is where this club so often gets the whole concept of negotiation wrong.

A transfer negotiation does not have to be a contest in which one party walks away victorious and the other one walks away humiliated. There should be a cooperative element to any successful deal.

This is essentially the logic of Nash bargaining.

The two parties have different interests, different valuations and different alternatives if no agreement is reached. But if there is a zone where both sides are better off by reaching agreement than by walking away, the sophisticated objective is to find a way to divide that value and complete the transaction.

It is not necessary for the other guy to lose before you can win.

If Celtic values a player at £10 million because of what he can contribute on the pitch, the money he could help generate in Europe and the resale value he may eventually create, and the selling club is prepared to accept £9 million, then there is a deal to be done.

If Celtic gets him for £9.2 million, the selling club wins. Celtic wins too. Everybody can win. That is the point. That’s Nash.

If instead you turn every transfer into us against them, sure, you will win some of the time and lose some of the time. But ultimately it becomes self-defeating.

It is stupid. You acquire a bad reputation from doing it. Other clubs learn how you operate. They know not to soften. They know to dig in their heels. They know that by the time Celtic gets serious it is often because the club is desperate and the deadline is closing in. And there is very little incentive for goodwill when your starting assumption appears to be that successful negotiation requires the other club to feel beaten.

That is not clever. It is not hard-nosed. It is not sophisticated.

It is bad business.

Sometimes you save £500,000 and lose a month of preparation. Sometimes you save £1 million and risk tens of millions in Champions League revenue. Sometimes you refuse to pay £10 million for a player because you want to get him for £8 million plus add-ons, even though your own assessment apparently says he has the potential eventually to be worth many times that.

Celtic has spent far too long keeping score of the wrong thing.

Always there is jam tomorrow promised to the supporters. But that promise depends on the club actually being willing to follow through on it.

Nobody trusts them to do that because nobody trusts them on anything.

More than that, revisiting Gineitis in January would require Celtic to go back to the table in a cooperative frame of mind. But that’s not how we work. Instead we’ll spend every minute between now and then waiting to see whether something happens which can be exploited to drive Torino’s price down.

Those are the only circumstances in which I can seriously imagine this club revisiting the deal. If something changes. If the player falls out of favour. If Torino suddenly needs the money. If his contract position alters. If the market weakens. If there is some circumstance which allows Celtic to go back and lowball them even harder.

And if that opportunity does not appear?

I suspect we will once again lose a blue-chip possibility for the sake of a sum so small as to be virtually insignificant to Celtic. A sum which does not alter our ability to post a large pre-tax profit. A sum which does not fundamentally change the vast cash pile sitting in the bank. A sum which, in the grand scheme of this football club’s finances, is barely more than a rounding error. And for what?

To give the shittiest poker players in the business the thrill of believing they have called the other guy’s bluff, only to discover that maybe the other guy was never bluffing in the first place.

This is the jam tomorrow we are being asked to believe in again. If we pay the asking price. If we can get the lid off.

Celtic is under no obligation to buy Gineitis in January. Jam tomorrow is just talk, it’s a promise never said out loud because then someone might expect us to keep it. They leak it through pet hacks so it never has to be explicit.

And after watching them fail to buy him when the deal actually mattered, neither are we under any obligation to buy this story.

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