Celtic moves on multiple fronts, but there’s no logic to any of it.

Celtic’s scattergun signing policy continues to inspire disbelief because today we are linked with a young Chelsea striker on loan, a loan deal for a goalkeeper appears to be moving towards completion, and we are still no further forward with a left-back, a right-back or a left-sided attacking midfielder.

All of those are priorities before another striker, yet all of those are areas we seem determined to leave until the last kick of the ball.

There are players we have scouted in all of these positions. There are players we know about. There are players we have looked at repeatedly. There are just, apparently, very few players Celtic is currently willing to spend actual money on.

Later today I am going to write a little more about that subject, because I think there is another important point buried inside all of this.

For now, though, just marvel at the incomprehensible panic which appears to be unfolding at Celtic as we once again do what we always do and leave as much possible business as we can until the latest possible moment.

I wrote earlier today about how absolutely crazy that transfer policy is, and it does not become any saner the longer you look at it. Who knows who is responsible for drawing up the priority list, because from the outside there is very little evidence that one exists at all.

There is at least some movement on the goalkeeper situation. Celtic are reportedly closing in on a season-long loan for Sam Johnstone from Wolves, with the former England international expected in Glasgow to complete the move. That is something which has been staring us in the face for months and is now, finally, apparently going to be resolved.

At the same time, we are now reportedly trying to bring in 18-year-old Chelsea striker Shim Mheuka on loan, with the player said to be undergoing a medical in London. He is clearly highly rated, has already made his senior Chelsea debut and has an excellent record for England at youth level, but this is where the priorities become baffling.

We already have Kasper Høgh and Camilo Duran, although our big striker did not train today. We have spent serious money on the central attacking position. Yet the left-back problem is still not fixed, the right-back situation remains unresolved, there is still no obvious left-sided attacker coming through the door and there is no sign on the horizon of us going for another central defender. That is what I mean by scattergun.

I am pretty sure the left-sided attacker and central defensive reinforcement are the two areas which are going to be neglected in this window, only for us to discover somewhere down the line that, amazingly enough, we needed both. We have seen this movie often enough to know how it usually ends.

Frankly, having conceded five goals against LASK during that disastrous collapse, if the need for some additional central defensive strength is still not obvious then I do not know what it will take to get us there.

Yet people at Celtic seem perfectly content with the situation as it currently stands, although if some completely unexpected deal suddenly appears on the final day, at the final kick of the ball, I would not be terribly surprised either.

That is how random this whole thing feels.

I wrote earlier in the window that any deals Celtic gets done now are going to create another problem. Either some of the new arrivals will not make the European squad, or their inclusion will come at the expense of players who were previously expected to be in it.

That situation has not got any easier.

We are still carrying an awful lot of deadwood in this team, and much of the problem manifests itself among the locally trained players we require for European registration. That creates an issue with no easy solution, as everybody at Celtic knows, but which nobody at Celtic seems particularly eager to tackle.

I will not pretend that this is entirely the club’s fault in the short term. In the last European squad we listed six players developed at Celtic itself and only one senior player who had come through another Scottish club, Luke McCowan.

We have unquestionably missed some good Scottish-based players who might have helped. Josh Mulligan at Hibs was the standout example for me. I did not believe the stories at the time that Celtic had made a formal offer for Falkirk’s Calvin Miller, and I still do not think there was anything concrete there, but amidst the dearth of Scottish-developed players it no longer looks remotely stupid.

In fact, it increasingly looks necessary.

A Scottish-developed player who can genuinely improve the team potentially solves two problems at once. He strengthens the squad and also helps with European registration.

That does not mean filling the Celtic team with Luke McCowans.

Nobody wants that.

There are better Scottish and Scottish-developed players out there than Luke McCowan, and Celtic is going to have to become much more serious about identifying them because it is now impossible to escape the conclusion that we are going to need some of these players if we want to construct viable European squads without constantly handicapping ourselves.

That means better domestic scouting.

It means monitoring players at Hibs, Hearts, Dundee United, Motherwell and elsewhere and asking seriously whether any of them are capable of taking the next step. It means treating the Scottish market as part of the recruitment structure rather than somewhere we look only when every other avenue has failed.

It will be costly. God knows it will. But until we sort our academy out this is just another price we’re going to have to pay.

I actually thought we might sign another Scottish-developed player in this window. Perhaps that helped explain the interest in Justin Devenny at Crystal Palace, because his development in Scotland could have offered some registration value as well as a football solution.

But these are short-term fixes to a long-term problem.

At some point Celtic is going to have to tackle the academy system properly and get it working again.

That is the real answer.

If we consistently produced two or three genuine first-team footballers from our own system, the European registration issue would become dramatically easier. Instead, we are constantly trying to patch around the consequences of years in which the pathway from academy to first team has been nowhere near productive enough.

But even that is only part of the problem. Right now I think Celtic has bigger concerns than filling all 25 European squad places.

The overall squad needs to be bigger and better than that. The eight locally trained places do not offer any excuse for the poverty of our squad depth.

Nobody wants to see Tony Ralston starting important games because there is no better option available. Nobody wants Johnny Kenny or Luke McCowan appearing in a Celtic starting eleven because injuries have stripped the alternatives away.

So even if Celtic ends up signing three or four players who cannot all be registered for Europe, then so be it.

If they are the right players, bring them in.

The season does not consist solely of eight Europa League fixtures. We have league football, two domestic cups and an enormous number of games in which the manager is going to need to rotate the squad.

We need players capable of competing for places rather than players who exist simply because UEFA regulations require a certain passport history or development background.

If that means one or two perfectly useful players miss the European list but strengthen us domestically, I can live with that. What I cannot live with is Celtic deliberately keeping the squad weak because the European registration structure is awkward.

We have already left ourselves a mountain of work to do and a ridiculously short period in which to do it. That is the club’s own fault.

It does not now get to use the consequences of its own delay as an excuse for failing to finish the job. The more signings we make over the next 24 to 48 hours, the better, whether every single one of them ends up registered for Europe or not. We need a squad capable of competing on multiple fronts and we need to get those players through the door quickly.

That is simply the reality now.

We are where we are because Celtic chose to leave itself here.

Today and tomorrow will tell us a great deal. We will find out whether the goalkeeper deal gets finished, whether the young Chelsea striker arrives, whether the full-back situations are finally addressed and whether the club has anything at all planned for the left side of the attack or central defence.

Hopefully we will like what we hear and what we see.

But this is Celtic, and with Celtic you are always waiting for the other shoe to drop. You are always braced for the one position to be ignored, the one deal to collapse, the one obvious weakness to be left untouched.

That is how conditioned supporters have become now.

We no longer approach the final days of a transfer window expecting Celtic to complete a carefully prepared plan.

We approach them hoping the chaos happens to produce enough good players before the clock runs out.

Choose The CelticBlog as a ‘Preferred Source’ on Google News for quick access to the news you value.