Tonight more media nonsense, this time on player valuations at Celtic.

So today the newspapers are having a bit of fun at Celtic’s expense with the story that our squad is now supposedly worth less than the one across the city, with six Ibrox players apparently sitting among the ten most valuable footballers in Scotland.

This is all according to Transfermarkt.com and its bizarre way of categorising footballers, a system which for years managed to rank Callum McGregor behind the likes of Ryan Kent, James Tavernier and Connor Goldson.

Anyone taking this stuff too seriously is, of course, a moron.

And there is your cue to the Scottish media and the Ibrox fan sites.

Again, this is the media’s focus on triviality and non-issues, combined with the Ibrox sites’ love of anything which paints their club as being ahead of Celtic, even in the most specious and unimportant ways imaginable.

Everyone is entitled to an opinion. When Alan Hutton said earlier this week that not a single Celtic player would get into the Ibrox starting eleven, you had to laugh because the claim is obviously nonsensical.

But okay. Let him have his fun. Let him have his little moment.

They are all having their little moment right now, and frankly that is our fault. Celtic are a mess and we have not done things nearly as well as we should have. That gives people an opportunity to enjoy themselves at our expense.

Fine. I still think Hutton’s claim is ludicrous, but he is perfectly entitled to believe whatever he wants.

The media should know the difference between somebody’s opinion and something approaching objective fact.

Alan Hutton’s opinion is not fact.

Neither is this rubbish.

In some ways, this is even worse than taking the views of someone like Hutton and building a story around them, because Transfermarkt gives the whole thing a veneer of mathematical authority.

I do not know precisely how Transfermarkt calculates every individual valuation. What I do know is that those valuations bear remarkably little resemblance to what clubs eventually pay when players actually become available.

Look at how the market treated some of the players who once sat near the top of these Scottish football valuation lists.

James Tavernier eventually left Ibrox when his contract expired. Ryan Kent left for nothing. Alfredo Morelos left for nothing. Connor Goldson moved to Aris Limassol for an undisclosed fee, despite having previously carried a substantial notional market value.

And I could go on. The point is that an estimated market value on a website is not the same thing as somebody actually putting that money on the table.

Stories like this are not terribly different from the celebrity psychic predicting Celtic’s next manager, which I wrote about recently.

The only thing possibly worse is what will inevitably happen in November when somebody fires up Football Manager, simulates the rest of the season and tells us who wins the league. That story happens every year.

Every year I slate it as gutter-level nonsense.

There is another variation which appears every few months: the supercomputer which predicts who will win the title based on statistical probabilities which have almost nothing to do with how football actually unfolds.

I watched somebody on a Football Manager site last year run a ten-year projection simply by letting his game play itself. During that period, the United States and Norway won World Cups.

So I am not entirely sure how seriously we are supposed to take any of this.

I am not even sure how seriously it is intended to be taken.

These probability models are based largely on existing data and current trajectories. But football does not politely continue along its existing trajectory.

Imagine a club whose manager is failing badly. A projection calculates the rest of the season based partly on what has happened under him.

Then he gets sacked. Everything changes.

The star striker at the club leading the league gets injured. Everything changes.

It rains on a Sunday, somebody slips while taking a penalty and balloons the ball over the bar. His team drops two points. Everything changes.

Yet over and over again these things end up in newspapers as stories we are supposedly expected to take seriously.

When one predicts doom for Celtic, I am never quite sure what they expect us to do. Burn our season tickets in the Celtic Park car park because the computer says there is no point carrying on?

I understand it when a pundit says Celtic have no chance of winning the league. Hugh Keevins effectively wrote us off last season and I laughed at that too.

I laughed even louder when the season finished.

But statistical probability presented as prophecy? That is the real science of hocus-pocus, and Transfermarkt valuations belong in much the same category.

If you were valuing players the way clubs actually do, based on performance, age, contract, potential, demand and what somebody might genuinely pay, I do not think it is outrageous to suggest that Camilo Duran would attract serious attention right now.

Yet Transfermarkt currently lists him at only €2 million, despite Celtic having him contracted until 2031.

That alone ought to tell you something about treating these figures as gospel.

I do not particularly care what Transfermarkt thinks Celtic’s players are worth. I do not particularly care what it thinks Ibrox players are worth either.

What fascinates me is how easily the media gets away with running variations of this same story again and again.

We have been here before.

There have been previous periods when the Ibrox squad supposedly had a higher notional value than Celtic’s, and it did not result in them dominating Scottish football.

The current Ibrox squad is supposedly overflowing with these fantastically valuable assets, yet they are not even competing in European football this season after being eliminated from the Conference League play-off by Jablonec.

Presumably that matters too.

European competition is one of the places where players are exposed to clubs, scouts and recruitment departments from across the continent. If you are not there, you are missing those opportunities.

But this is Scottish football, where tiny things are so often given an absurdly outsized importance.

Anything which allows the Ibrox support to feel good about itself for a day gets seized upon and amplified, and watching so many of their sites suddenly treat Transfermarkt like Bloomberg is genuinely hilarious.

Three weeks ago, many of those same supporters were pillorying this squad.

Now apparently it is packed with Scotland’s most valuable footballers and Celtic players would struggle to get into their team.

They are world beaters again. You could not make that up.

But fortunately with our media, you don’t have to.

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