There were reports this morning that Celtic will consider letting Joël van den Berg go out on loan in January.

Now I am going to say this very clearly. Those reports appear to have surfaced on the utterly discredited junk website Football Insider, a site which has zero credibility, zero reliable inside information on anything in football and which has embarrassed itself over and over again by demonstrating all that it is lacking.

The Daily Record is now pinching stories from there and trying to turn them into something. The only actual news here is that Keith Jackson has apparently attempted to verify the claims, although why anyone would bother trying to verify a Football Insider story is beyond me, and has been – shock horror – unable to do so.

You would be as well trying to establish the truth of a Follow Follow rumour, or indeed a Follow Follow conspiracy theory, as you would trying to unwind a Football Insider story.

Jackson claims that rumours are sweeping Glasgow about this. Well, I would suggest they are probably sweeping Glasgow only amongst people who read that stupid site.

Nevertheless, it does raise a question worth asking.

If this story were true, if there were even the slightest shred of truth in it, what would that tell us about what is going on inside Celtic?

It would tell us that we spent around £3.4 million on a player and have so far been unable to get anything meaningful out of him, other than questions about why we spent £3.4 million on him in the first place.

And those questions would not disappear simply because he was sent out on loan.

In my view, if a player who cost Celtic that kind of money cannot make a single first-team appearance before being moved elsewhere temporarily, then the odds of him coming back and becoming an important first-team player would look pretty bleak.

And that would mean that one of the only significant chunks of money we spent in the dying days of the transfer window may as well have been blown on one enormous party and then pissed up against the wall.

Frankly, it is the kind of decision for which somebody would ordinarily have to pay with their job.

This is not a club which can afford to have multi-million-pound assets sitting in the stand doing absolutely nothing, particularly when we know there were obvious holes in the squad which needed filled and were not.

So, I suspect this story will turn out to be like so many other Football Insider stories: a flight of fantasy from somebody with no real standing and no basis in reality.

But if there is even some truth to it, then serious questions need to be asked about who signed this guy and what exactly they thought they were buying.

Because if he is now being considered for a loan move without having made a single first-team appearance, then it is very difficult to believe that this was a player the coaching staff were desperate to have. It is very difficult to believe that this was somebody the manager identified as an immediate need.

Those people are football professionals, and with this club enforcing some version of austerity on the people actually trying to build the team, you simply do not spend £3.4 million on someone unless you are convinced he can contribute.

If that conviction was never there in the first place, then who exactly made the decision?

Now, van den Berg has been injured, and that is why he has not been involved in recent matchday squads. That is perfectly fair and it has to be acknowledged.

But he was not always injured. There were several games after he signed when he was available, and he did not get a single minute on the pitch.

That matters. One of the things which made it particularly frustrating was watching players such as Luke McCowan being used ahead of him.

We all knew where Celtic needed reinforcement. We needed a defensive midfielder. Van den Berg is not one. No matter how good he eventually turns out to be, that remains true. So that £3.4 million was money which could potentially have been allocated towards addressing a position which everybody knew needed strengthened.

That does not automatically make the signing a bad one. He may come into the team, play brilliantly and make all of this look ridiculous.

I sincerely hope he does. But right now, nobody can quite work out what the signing was actually for or how it fits into the wider transfer strategy. And that is the real reason this Football Insider story has gained any traction at all.

Under normal circumstances, something like this would have been laughed out of town the moment it appeared.

Nobody serious would have given it a second thought.

But these are not normal circumstances, and Celtic is not operating like a normal, coherent football club right now.

That is what makes stories like this dangerous. Not because the source suddenly deserves credibility. It does not. But because the claim itself sounds like exactly the kind of thing this club might do.

That is a problem entirely of Celtic’s own making.

If the transfer policy made sense, if supporters understood how players were being identified, if the squad looked as though it had been constructed according to an obvious plan and if expensive signings were clearly being brought in for specific roles, then nonsense like this would die on contact.

Instead, supporters look at the claim and think: “You know what? I could actually believe that.”

That should worry the people running Celtic far more than anything Football Insider publishes.

Because once a club loses enough credibility in its own decision-making, even rubbish rumours begin to sound plausible.

And that is exactly where Celtic are right now.

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