Celtic’s transfer strategy is not to plan. It’s to panic.

Last night, Celts Are Here ran a piece on Celtic’s reported interest in Jordan Lotomba, the Feyenoord right-back who can also cover on the left.

They were pretty scathing about Celtic’s approach to this whole market and said that everything about it now looks chaotic. Frankly, that is not a bad summation of where this club finds itself.

Chaotic is the word.

I know there are people on the Celtic board who believe they are special. I know there are people on the Celtic board who believe they understand this game better than the rest of us do. But when you reach the closing days of a transfer window, after you have already gone out of the Champions League, and suddenly you are scrambling around trying to do deals across half a dozen positions, the whole thing starts to look ridiculous.

There is no coherence here. There is no obvious structure. There is no evidence of a plan which was laid out months ago and simply executed badly. This is not even making it up as they go along. It is almost entirely reactive.

Celtic has known for months what this squad needed. We knew where the gaps were. The manager knew where the gaps were. The recruitment department presumably knew where the gaps were. Yet here we are in the final days talking about right-backs, left-backs, midfielders, goalkeepers and other positions as though somebody has just handed the club a list of problems it had never seen before.

That is not strategy. It is a scramble, and it is the same scramble we seem to watch every year. I have said for a long time that these people do not appear to have a tactical or strategic thought in their heads, and windows like this only reinforce that belief.

They have had months to get their act together and months to do some of the deals they are only now attempting. Where is the evidence of a plan? Where is the sequencing? Where is the preparation?

Where is the sense that Celtic knew in June what it wanted the squad to look like in September and spent the summer methodically getting there? Instead, every year seems to arrive at exactly the same place: deadline week, phones ringing, targets changing, prices moving and suddenly everybody is urgent.

Deals which could have been done weeks ago are now apparently essential. Players we could have integrated throughout pre-season are being discussed after the biggest qualification games have already been played.

The maddening thing is that Celtic should already know this does not work because we have lived through the consequences often enough.

People are always telling us that spending before Champions League qualification would represent some enormous gamble. We are told Celtic cannot possibly commit too heavily until it knows whether the Champions League money is coming. But that argument collapses the moment you look at what this approach has actually cost us.

Last season, Celtic went into the Champions League play-off against Kairat Almaty after weakening its own attacking options. Brendan Rodgers had been clear about the need for attacking reinforcements, yet Celtic failed to score across two legs and extra time before losing on penalties. We needed one goal. Just one.

The opposition was not some European superpower. But Celtic had denuded its own firepower to such an extent that it could not find that goal over 210 minutes of football.

How much would it have cost to properly replace the right-sided attacking player and central striker the manager wanted? £8 million? £10 million? Even £12 million? Whatever the number, it would have been dwarfed by what Champions League qualification was worth.

Instead, Celtic tried to save money at the moment when spending it had the greatest potential return and left tens of millions sitting on the table. That is not prudence. It is false economy. Then we did it again.

This season Celtic went into the decisive Champions League games carrying a transfer surplus and obvious gaps in the squad. We then found ourselves four goals ahead on aggregate against LASK with an hour of the second leg remaining before somehow losing the tie 5-4. Think about how insane that is. We were four goals ahead.

Does anybody seriously believe that using the transfer surplus to strengthen two or three obvious areas before that tie could not have helped us protect that position? Maybe we still collapse, because football offers no guarantees, but nobody can tell me that going into the biggest games of the summer with an incomplete squad improves your chances.

It doesn’t. It reduces them. That is the gamble Celtic repeatedly makes, except somehow the people running the club have managed to persuade themselves that not spending is the cautious option. Sometimes not spending is the biggest gamble in the room.

Celtic has now failed to convert major qualification opportunities repeatedly, often against clubs operating with a fraction of our resources. The common feature is how frequently we enter these games still talking about what the squad needs rather than admiring the squad we have already built.

Eventually, a pattern becomes a policy. The policy appears to be to wait. Wait for the qualifier. Wait for certainty. Wait for the selling club to blink. Wait for the player to become cheaper. Wait until the deadline gets closer, and then, when the most important football has already been played, suddenly become aggressive.

What possible strategic sense does that make?

The club is now trying to finish deals for midfielders, exploring defensive options and looking at other areas which should have been addressed earlier. Oliver Sørensen is reportedly coming in, Joël van den Berg looks like joining him, and Celtic has been looking at full-backs and goalkeeping options.

Good. Do the deals. I want the squad strengthened.

But if Celtic succeeds in bringing this team up to something approaching the required level now, that does not vindicate the strategy. It makes the strategy look even more ridiculous. If these players are good enough now, they were probably good enough three weeks ago. If the positions need filled now, they needed filled before LASK. If the squad requires a right-back, a left-back, midfield reinforcements and another goalkeeper today, then those needs did not suddenly appear because the calendar reached September.

They were there all along. That is what drives supporters mad.

Every summer we raise the same concerns, and every summer we are told to be patient. We are told that the window is still open, that there is plenty of time, that the club is working behind the scenes and that all our questions will eventually be answered.

Yes, they usually are. Just not in any way anybody wants to boast about afterwards.

The Champions League answer this year was five goals conceded in Austria. The answer last year was 210 minutes without a goal against Kairat.

At some point, patience ceases to be a virtue and becomes an excuse for inertia, and Celtic seems incapable of learning that distinction.

There is also a financial stupidity to all of this which deserves much more attention. For the sake of saving perhaps £5 million or £10 million by delaying signings, Celtic repeatedly exposes itself to the risk of losing many times that figure in Champions League revenue. Worse than that, waiting until the final days can itself make deals more expensive because selling clubs know the deadline is approaching and they know Celtic is under pressure.

They know we have already been eliminated from one competition and desperately need to strengthen for another. Our negotiating position does not improve simply because we spent eight weeks refusing to move. Sometimes it becomes considerably worse.

You either pay a premium early for certainty, preparation and integration, or you risk paying a different premium late because everybody knows you are desperate. Celtic somehow manages to combine the worst parts of both approaches.

We delay the spending, lose the sporting opportunity and then scramble anyway.

That is some strategy.

If the squad Celtic finishes this window with is significantly better than the one which started the Champions League qualifiers, the obvious question will be why the hell it was not assembled earlier. Because that is when it mattered most. Not after the Champions League money had disappeared. Before.

That was the moment to give the manager what he needed, integrate new players, build relationships on the pitch and ensure Celtic entered those qualification games with every possible advantage.

Instead, we once again chose uncertainty. The uncertainty became failure, the failure became urgency, and now the urgency has become chaos.

That sequence is not accidental anymore. It is what Celtic does.

This is why the description of the current window as chaotic lands so hard. It is not really about Jordan Lotomba. Lotomba himself may be a perfectly sensible signing, an experienced right-back with international football behind him who can cover more than one position.

The problem is not necessarily the player. The problem is that it’s only now that we are apparently trying to get him.

The problem is that an experienced full-back suddenly becomes an urgent requirement after the European damage has already been done. The problem is that Celtic’s recruitment machine appears to move at its fastest after the moment when speed mattered most.

That is completely backwards.

A properly structured football club should enter the summer knowing the priorities. It should know the budget, the positions which are essential before qualification, the primary targets and the alternatives to those targets.

It should also know which deals it is prepared to pay slightly more to complete early because the sporting value of having the player available outweighs the marginal saving achieved by waiting. That is what strategic planning looks like.

That is why there is such a difference between being cautious and being passive. Caution evaluates risk. Passivity simply delays choice. Celtic is far too often passive and calls it caution. Then, when events finally force a decision, we discover that the club can move pretty quickly after all.

Funny that.

We were told lessons had been learned after last season. We were told the club understood what went wrong and that things would be different. Yet twelve months later we have repeated the same basic process, reached the same frantic late-window scramble and watched supporters who warned about it for months once again get accused of impatience.

What lesson was learned? Where is it? Show me.

Because I cannot see it.

I see another summer in which Celtic failed to prepare properly for Champions League qualification. I see another enormous financial opportunity lost, another deadline-week scramble and another collection of positions everybody knew needed addressed long before now. I see another year in which the word “patience” was used as a shield until patience became impossible.

This is so stupid. It is pointless and infuriating to watch the same mistake repeated by people who appear incapable of recognising that their own method is part of the problem.

There is a saying, usually attributed to Einstein although almost certainly not actually his, about insanity being doing the same thing repeatedly while expecting a different result. Celtic should probably have it framed in the boardroom.

Whatever the precise definition of insanity might be, repeatedly approaching the most important transfer window of the season in the same way, suffering the same consequences and then promising once again that lessons have been learned comes frighteningly close.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I find the idea of people running Celtic without any apparent capacity to learn from repeated failure pretty damned troubling. Because I don’t want this club run by people who are crazy … and in the way we never learn that’s exactly what they often appear to be.

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