Is it oxymoronic to say that, for a support which constantly claims to want to know more about what is happening inside Celtic, the more we find out, the less we wish we knew?

I’m going to explain that.

Today, Celtic sites are publishing details from a lengthy interview with Sky Sports reporter Anthony Joseph which pulls back the curtain on some of what is apparently going on inside the club. And it is pretty damning.

Actually, some of it is horrific.

It is one of those situations where the more information you get, the less comprehensible the whole thing becomes, and the more you find yourself wishing somebody over there would just switch off the lights and save us all from further embarrassment.

We all want to know what is going on inside Celtic. But information carries a heavy weight when what it reveals is something like we found out today. There are so many elements to what Joseph has said that I am not going to attempt to cover all of them in one article. There is enough material here for several pieces.

But if you want one glimpse of the apparent insanity of the current recruitment operation, look no further than what he said about Oliver Sørensen.

According to Joseph, Sørensen was a “bizarre signing”, recommended by an agent to fill a hole in the midfield after Celtic realised they were not going to sign Amar Mahmi? and were struggling to get the Gvidas Gineitis deal done.

Think about what that suggests.

This was not, apparently, a player sitting at the top of some carefully constructed recruitment list. This was not the culmination of months of identifying a particular profile, scouting him, analysing how he would fit into the team and deciding that his qualities were exactly what Celtic required.

An agent recommended him. Celtic needed somebody.

And he arrived.

Now, perhaps Celtic did extensive work on Sørensen once his name was put in front of them. That part is not established publicly, and it would be unfair to pretend otherwise.

But Joseph’s account raises the obvious question: how much did Celtic actually know about this player before deciding that he was the answer to a problem in one of the most important areas of the team?

Did we know precisely what he brought? Did we know where he fitted? Did we know whether his qualities complemented the midfielders already here? Did we know whether he suited the football Martin O’Neill intended to play?

Because when you look at how little impact he has made, those questions become very difficult to ignore.

Joseph himself said that, having watched Sørensen, he still cannot work out what type of midfielder he actually is or what he brings to the team.

And that is astonishing.

Not because Anthony Joseph must automatically be right about the player, but because it fits perfectly with everything else we have been learning about how Celtic appears to conduct its transfer business.

Players suggested. Names discussed. Targets missed. Gaps suddenly needing filled. And then somebody arrives. That isn’t recruitment strategy. Sørensen, I’m afraid, looks increasingly like the perfect symbol of all that’s gone wrong.

It isn’t just the way Oliver Sørensen was signed that reveals the complete absence of joined-up thinking here. Anthony Joseph threw something else into the thought pool which we should all consider.

We were told that Sørensen was an attacking midfielder.

Now, we already had Mika Baur in the building. We already had Benjamin Nygren in the building. That was not the area of the team which was screaming out for another signing. What Celtic needed was a defensive midfielder.

Instead, we went out and got Sørensen. Then we spent money on Joël van den Berg, who was also described as an attacking midfielder.

Again, where is the balance? Where is the plan?

Where is the joined-up thinking?

Someone said to me the other day that this is like paint by numbers. Bad analogy. Paint by numbers at least gives you balance. It’s designed that way. It gives you a composition, picks the colours for you and as long as you stick to the plan it should look fine.

This is more like throwing darts at a board blindfolded.

And we’ve seen versions of this before.

Go back to Rodgers’ first summer and think about the way Celtic loaded up on right-sided attacking players while other obvious weaknesses in the squad remained unresolved. At the same time, plenty of us were already warning about the problems we could face with players leaving for the Asian Cup.

And what did Celtic do? We signed even more players who were potentially eligible to disappear to that same tournament.

Nobody will convince me that anybody at Celtic Park is thinking about these things in the way a serious football operation should. Nobody will convince me that this is a group of football people making coherent football decisions.

I’ve compared this club before to raw rookies playing Football Manager for the first time, loading up on certain types of player because they happen to like them and only later discovering that half the squad doesn’t fit together.

But this is serious. This isn’t a joke. This is Celtic’s money being spent. This is Celtic’s squad being constructed. This is Celtic’s potential being squandered.

And it is being done by people who, on the evidence in front of us, have absolutely no business making decisions of this importance.

Because the problem with Sørensen isn’t simply that he came via an agent recommendation. The problem is that even after his name arrived on the desk, there appears to have been no obvious strategic reason for Celtic to make him a priority.

That is far worse. It means the weakness isn’t merely in scouting. It is in squad planning. It is in profile identification. It is in understanding what the team actually needs.

And if the people responsible cannot even identify the problem they are supposed to be solving, what chance do they have of finding the right player to solve it?

It is evident in everything we’re doing.

It is evident in the way, as Paulina pointed out in her excellent piece today, Celtic spent around £11 million on Kasper Høgh and still don’t seem to know exactly what type of striker they bought or how to get the best out of him.

Her central point is right on the money. Høgh did not decide his own transfer fee. He did not choose the valuation. Somebody inside Celtic made that call without even knowing what they were spending the money for.

And £11 million is an enormous amount of money to spend on a footballer whose qualities, role and ideal environment you don’t appear to fully understand.

That is not just a bad look. It could prove to be one of the most spectacular and expensive punts in the history of Scottish football. Because when you spend that kind of money, you are supposed to know exactly what you are buying.

You are supposed to know what the player does well, what kind of service he needs, what type of teammates complement him and what kind of system allows him to thrive.

If you don’t know those things, then what exactly are you paying for? And when you put that alongside the Sørensen story, the picture becomes even harder to ignore.

When you hear that Sørensen was recommended by an agent, brought in to fill a hole, and appears to have arrived without any obvious connection to the area of the squad which most urgently needed strengthening, how can anybody seriously argue that this recruitment operation is functioning coherently?

How can anybody look at these individual pieces of business and conclude that there is a joined-up plan? Because there isn’t.

At least, not one that is visible from the outside.

What is visible is confusion. What is visible is duplication. What is visible is a club spending serious money on players and then apparently trying to figure out afterwards where they fit and what to do with them.

That is the wrong way round. And it is happening too often now to dismiss as bad luck.

That is why Sørensen matters. That is why Høgh matters.

They are not isolated cases. They are examples of the same underlying problem. Celtic are not recruiting from a clearly defined footballing blueprint. They are reacting. They are patching. They are improvising. They are making it up as they go along.

How anyone thinks that is going to improve while the present executive remains in charge, I genuinely do not know. The system isn’t working and the more worrying part is that the people responsible don’t appear to know how to fix it.

And that brings me back to where I started.

Celtic supporters have spent years demanding to know more about what goes on behind the scenes at this club. Well, we’re finding out.

And Christ, sometimes ignorance really was bliss.

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