Celtic may be about to prove that a “good transfer window” can still be a riot.

Tonight, the window effectively closes as far as Celtic’s European registration is concerned. UEFA’s deadline for the Europa League list is 2 September, although the Scottish transfer window itself remains open until 5pm on Thursday.

So, I am not convinced Celtic will cease doing business when the European deadline passes. We still need squad players domestically, and given the way this club operates, I would fully expect our business to go right to the wire.

I am not the kind of person who is going to be hypercritical of signings before I have watched them play. There are players you sign where the warning signs are obvious.

When you sign a striker from the Japanese second tier as the replacement for a Japanese international, you can immediately question whether he is equipped for that spotlight. When you sign a midfielder from the second tier in Korea, that is obviously not the same thing as signing somebody with experience of winning championships in Denmark and then playing in Serie A.

Likewise, if you sign a right-back who is a Swiss international, the fact that he had one bad game against your own team, or has occasionally had bad games against other sides, is not some automatic deal-breaker. Footballers have bad games. I would rather watch these guys play for Celtic before deciding what they are.

This could ultimately become a transfer window characterised by epic weirdness.

We may look back on it years from now and talk about the number of good players who were signed during it, because I am very confident that the two midfielders whose deals are either across the line or very close to it are going to do well for us. I am convinced the boy from Chelsea is sufficiently talented to enhance our forward options as well.

I am less convinced about the left-back situation, except to say this: if the player we eventually sign is the guy Celtic has been trying to get all summer, then there has to be something more to him than simply being another project. Chelsea have apparently had Championship interest in Landon Emenalo and would have had other places they could send him, but if he wants to come here, that is interesting. It does not guarantee anything, but it gives me reason to think there might be something good there.

The goalkeeper has not convinced a lot of people either, but again, I am not entirely sure what some of that certainty is based on.

I read very negative things about Fraser Forster before he signed. I read endless negativity about Cameron Carter-Vickers from people who appeared to have decided what kind of footballer he was before he had played a minute for Celtic.

There are always players Celtic signs who get this kind of social-media treatment.

I would rather judge Sam Johnstone on what he actually does here rather than what people think he did somewhere else. He is certainly a better alternative than Ross Doohan and would give Viljami Sinisalo genuine competition, which I think Sinisalo badly needs.

The perverse thing about all of this is that this could still turn out to be a very good window.

Had the window moved more quickly at the beginning, if Celtic had signed these five or six players in the first couple of weeks rather than the final couple of days and added them to Høgh, Duran, Hassan and Baur, everybody would have raved about the business we had done. They would have been right to.

The fact that we have somehow reached a point where we are demonstrating intent in the final days, after we have already been knocked out of the Champions League, is another example of the perverse way Celtic does things. It is utterly inexcusable.

If everything currently in motion actually comes about, including Gvidas Gineitis from Torino, then even this cynical bastard will have to conclude that it has been a hugely successful transfer window in terms of the players brought in and the rebuilding of the squad.

I will have no other honest choice. Celtic are reported to be close to an agreement for Gineitis, with Sørensen already in, Van den Berg on the way and several more deals still being worked on.

I can say that is good business because I am not going to latch onto a narrative simply because it suits my contention that the people running this club are not fit for purpose. If they do good work, I will say they have done good work.

Because I can congratulate them on a good transfer window whilst also acknowledging that the most important parts of it came far too late to make a difference in the game which really mattered. I can call this board out for waste, neglect, time-wasting, incompetence and basic stupidity whilst also acknowledging that, between them, the manager and the coaching staff identified most of the areas which needed fixed and, by and large, have attempted to fix them.

I will retain my fury that they did not do it sooner for a very long time to come. In fact, the lateness of all of this only increases my view that these people should not be running a major football institution.

But if all these deals are completed, I will not be able to deny that Celtic emerges from the window significantly stronger than it entered it.

I am not going to congratulate this board on things it has not yet done. I am saying that if they get the remaining deals over the line, then yes, we can be broadly satisfied with the football business completed.

It is still a big if, but incredibly, it looks as though they might just pull it off, and if they do then Martin O’Neill will be in pretty good shape.

We cannot keep waiting for these people to learn lessons, though. It was painfully obvious during the last three failures in this run of European qualification disasters that the failure to finish transfer business before our European fate was decided played a major part. This has happened so regularly that it is depressing.

I am not willing to give them any further benefit of the doubt, even if this window turns out to be a success in terms of the players brought in and the squad strengthening which has taken place. They do not deserve it because they screwed up the most important part: getting the work done early enough that we had the strongest possible team when that Champions League jackpot was still there to be won.

There has nevertheless been a notable shift in the type of business we have tried to do. Martin said he wanted quality over quantity and, by and large, that is what this is starting to look like. Some of these signings are very satisfying and very exciting, and although there are one or two names I consider major losses in terms of players we might have had, and I will write about those later, there are still some genuinely exciting deals being completed.

When you see so much being done properly, when you see significant fees being contemplated for quality footballers and recognise that Celtic could operate differently and do things better, there is a temptation to give these people another chance to prove themselves. I won’t.

There is no point pretending that these people are better than they are, smarter than they are or more capable than they are. The fact that so much of this has been left until the final couple of days remains incomprehensible and a little bit shameful. But that is where we are, and when the window finally closes the manager should have a much better set of cards to play than he had when it opened.

Mission-critical positions have been filled. The right side of the attack has been strengthened, we have brought in two strikers already and now potentially a third, and those attacking additions give us a much sharper tip of the spear than we have had in years. Mika Baur came into midfield earlier in the window and we are now augmenting that area with two, potentially three, more players.

We have lost Engels, Hatate left last night and Bernardo has gone. All three were useful players, but Hatate had fallen so far out of favour that we were seeing him once in a blue moon, while Bernardo had almost completely fallen by the wayside and did not look likely to force himself back into the manager’s plans.

Engels is a loss. There are Celtic supporters who do not think he is a particularly big one and I disagree with them.

Yet, if Van den Berg can contribute goals, that is something Engels did not do often enough. If Sørensen can offer more protection to the back line, that is something Engels was never particularly suited to doing. If we somehow get Gineitis from Torino and he is capable of operating across the midfield, then you can begin to see a department which has not merely had its outgoing players replaced, but has actually been redesigned.

That is what excites me about it.

The forward line has been rebuilt and the tip of the spear is sharper than it has been in years. The midfield could be completely reconstituted, and I think very much for the better, because Celtic would have brought in different types of footballers capable of playing different roles. We did not have enough of that before.

We will have added players with more energy, more physicality and more drive, and those are qualities we have lacked for a while. This would not simply be like-for-like replacement. It would be an actual midfield rebuild, and that is exciting.

I am not as convinced by Shaun Maloney’s argument that we are fine in central defence. I don’t believe we are, and I think I have made that fairly clear. But his faith in Dane Murray is interesting, and Murray does have the makings of a good player.

In that regard, I would prefer to see Celtic develop Murray than develop somebody else’s young centre-back.

That is the difference between his situation and the young Chelsea striker, for whom there is no obvious Celtic academy counterpart of equivalent quality. It is also different from the left-back, because whoever eventually arrives there is filling a position where the current backup options simply are not good enough.

The defence still needs work, and perhaps that is something we get around to somewhere down the line. We live in hope on that one.

As for the goalkeeper, I have not seen enough of Johnstone to have some grand definitive view, but I will say this about goalkeepers: I have watched plenty arrive at Celtic and excel when people did not expect them to, simply because they had spent their careers playing behind bad defences or disorganised teams.

Celtic seems to have gone through an awful lot of goalkeeper possibilities to arrive at this one, and whether or not you rate Johnstone highly, he is a stronger alternative than what we currently have behind Sinisalo. That gives the manager a genuine decision to make and gives Sinisalo actual competition.

By the end of this window, Celtic may have brought in a left-back, four midfielders, a right-sided attacker, three strikers, a new goalkeeper and perhaps a new right-back either to start games or give us options even when Alistair Johnston is fit.

If we do not sign a left-sided attacker, I will still be disappointed because we have not properly replaced Maeda there.

But I know there are people at Celtic Park, and plenty of supporters too, who hope the answer might already be at the club when Jota eventually returns from injury. In the meantime, we do have Tounekti and Yang, and on their day, both can be effective, even if both remain wildly inconsistent.

But if someone had told me when this transfer window opened that Celtic would do this level of business, that the German midfielder would look quality, that the right-sided attacker would arrive with a big international reputation, that we would sign Kasper Høgh and that somehow the fourth signing, Camilo Duran, who virtually none of us had heard of, might look like the best of the bunch, I don’t think any of us would have had a bad word to say about the window.

Between those four and everything that now appears to be happening, I think most of us would have been delighted, had the person giving us all that information simply left out one critical detail. LASK.

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