The SMSM are only 5 days late to the party on Celtic’s treatment of Kelechi Iheanacho, with confirmation that the £47k per week claim was BS!

Would you look at that?

The Bursaspor President has opened his mouth, and out has tumbled the truth.

The very same truth I and half of fan media had already worked out within hours of Celtic feeding the £47k lie to their ‘media partners’.

Five days ago.

Five whole days.

That’s how long it has taken the Stenography Corps to catch up with a story fan media had put to bed before the ink was dry on their own copy.

Better late than never, boys.

On Sunday I wrote a piece explaining exactly why the Kelechi Iheanacho ‘wage demands’ story was complete and utter shite.

I said the £47k figure – dutifully rounded up to £50k by Michael Gannon, naturally – could be disproved with about ninety seconds and a search bar.

And I said Bursaspor were a debt-ridden second tier side who couldn’t dream of paying those numbers.

I said if the board had come back with something like £25 to £30k per week, then that – at least – would have sounded plausible.

Well.

Guess what the Bursaspor President has just gone and confirmed?

Iheanacho has a guaranteed salary agreement with us of 1.4 million euros. We made a three-year agreement.

There are players in our league who earn 2.2 million euros but are not even half as good as Iheanacho.

– Enes Çelik, Bursaspor President

A three-year agreement.

Not £47k a week.

Not £50k a week.

By the Record’s own maths, £23k a week.

Twenty. Three. Grand.

Half of what our club told you, and told you with a straight face.

And even the £23k is doing the Record a favour, because €1.4 million spread across three years doesn’t get you anywhere near it however you slice the beermat.

But let’s not quibble over the arithmetic, because the arithmetic isn’t the point.

The point is this.

Every single thing I told you on Sunday has been confirmed by the man who actually signed the cheque.

The wages weren’t the sticking point.

The contract length was.

He wanted three years.

Bursaspor gave him three years.

Celtic wouldn’t, so off he went – a game-changer, a title winner, a Cup final scorer – for the sake of a third year the board wouldn’t stomach.

And rather than say that, rather than issue the one honest paragraph that would have covered them, our club invented a greedy mercenary holding them to ransom.

Because it’s always easier to smear the player than to admit you’re a cheapskate.

Make no mistake, this was engineered.

This was a lie designed to make Iheanacho look unreasonable and the club the poor put-upon victims of his outrageous demands.

Fed to a compliant press pack who printed it without so much as a raised eyebrow.

No ‘sources suggest’.

No ‘it is understood’.

Just the board’s word, laundered through the back pages as gospel.

And now, five days on, the SMSM are running the Bursaspor President’s rebuttal as though it’s fresh news.

As though they didn’t spend the first half of the week doing the board’s dirty work for them.

Convenient, isn’t it??

Do you think a single one of them will hold their hands up?

Of course they won’t.

There will be no correction.

No chance.

There will be no ‘we got this one wrong’.

There will be no follow-up asking why Celtic briefed a wage figure that turned out to be double the real one.

Because that would mean turning on the hand that feeds them the lines, and we can’t have that, can we?

Meanwhile, the President of a newly-promoted Turkish side – a man with no reason to flatter us and no dog in our fight – has more or less called Silent Mike’s Celtic liars in a pre-season press conference.

And he did it while paying a genuine compliment to the player we were too tight to keep.

There are players in our league who earn far more, and are not half as good.

Let that one sit for a minute.

A club we’re told couldn’t afford Iheanacho’s wages looked at him, valued him properly, gave him the security he asked for, and got themselves a double-winning centre forward for £23k a week.

While our board sat on their hands, let a free option lapse, and then briefed the press that he was the greedy one.

This is what ‘instructed incompetence’ looks like in the wild.

None of the men on that board are stupid.

They knew exactly what they were doing when they let the option run out.

They knew exactly what they were doing when they lowballed the contract.

And they knew exactly what they were doing when they picked up the phone to their media partners and dictated the £47k line.

The only people who didn’t know what was going on were the ones being told to swallow it.

You.

Me.

Us.

Except we didn’t swallow it, did we?

We had it worked out before the SMSM had finished their morning coffee.

And now the truth has come from Bursaspor’s own mouth, five days late for the men who are paid to report it, and not a day late for the fanbase they take for mugs.

The Stenography Corps got there in the end.

They always do – long after the rest of us have moved on.

Sad, but true.

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