John Collins’ comments on how agents play Celtic like a fiddle would make sense if agents played every other team in Scotland like a fiddle. Clearly they don’t…

A fiddle doesn’t play itself.

Somebody has to pick it up.

Somebody has to tune it, rosin the bow, and hand it over.

John Collins is in the Record today explaining, at some length, how agents play Celtic like a fiddle in the transfer market.

And I’ll say this for the man – he knows the tune, because he sat in the building for two years listening to it.

Here’s his walkthrough of how it works.

“You go for number one, first thing you contact the agents. ‘Did you watch him?’ Yes. ‘Does he want to come?’ Yes. ‘What’s his wages?’ Right, okay, we can pay him that. ‘How much is the club wanting for him?’ £3m? Okay, the club can afford that.

“You go for him, the agents say he’s keen, he’s coming. The next thing the agent’s all over England saying Celtic are coming in for him.

“The next thing he’s away to Germany, he’s away to England. You spend a month on that, you’ve watched him three times, you went to Holland – boom, played like a fiddle. You’ve lost your number one.

“On to number two, on to number three. So the players that come in are usually not the ones at the top of their list.”

Every Celtic supporter reading that just nodded along, because we have watched it happen window after window after window.

Number one becomes number two.

Number two becomes number three.

Then number three becomes nobody at all, and then Silent Mike goes back to sleep until the last Monday in August.

But then John Collins said the bit that made me put my coffee down.

“It’s the same for every club, it’s not just Celtic. But what happens is the agents use Celtic, and often do, to get more money, more transfer fee.”

Read that back.

Go on, read it twice, because I had to.

It’s the same for every club.

But it happens to Celtic.

Which is it, John??

Because those two sentences cannot both be true, and he managed to fit them into the same breath.

If agents played every club in Scotland like a fiddle, then every club in Scotland would be signing their third choice.

So let’s check, shall we?

Has anybody, anywhere, at any point this summer, heard another Scottish club explain that a pesky agent ran off with their number one?

Hearts have been busy.

Aberdeen have been busy.

Hibs have been busy.

The Ibrox side have been throwing money about like a sailor on shore leave, and Staunch Del is out there posing in his platform brogues alongside every one of them.

Not one of those clubs has produced a single soul to sit in front of a microphone and explain that the agents were “just too clever” for them.

They don’t have this affliction.

They just sign the players.

Meanwhile, we’re the ones grandstanding over £257k with Paderborn with a £40 million qualifier a fortnight away.

Funny that, isn’t it?

The agents of the world have apparently selected one club in this country to torment, and it’s the one run by a CEO who couldn’t negotiate his way out of a f*****g wet paper bag.

Being played like a fiddle is not something that happens to a football club. It’s something that happens to a negotiator.

I said it on Sunday when the Fares Ghedjemis ‘saga’ was rumbling on, and I’ll say it again here.

Silent Mike suffers badly from Agentophobia.

It is a chronic, untreated condition, and the whole of European football knows he has it.

An agent uses your interest as leverage for two reasons, and only two.

Because your interest is worth something.

And because he knows you will sit there and let him.

The first one is a compliment to Celtic Football Club.

The second one is an indictment of the man doing the talking.

Leverage doesn’t work on somebody who moves quickly.

You cannot shop a bid around Europe for a month if the bid expires on Thursday.

And do you know who explained that, in plain English, in the very same interview?

John Collins.

“My theory is you’ve got to move quick and give ultimatums to agents and players.

“Here’s the offer, it’s 24 hours, come back and say yes or no, that’s how that would work out. So you’re not using this to go elsewhere.”

There it is.

The cure, handed over for free, by a man who has actually sat in those meetings.

Twenty four hours.

Take it or leave it.

Now ask yourself, honestly, when was the last time Celtic Football Club gave anybody an ultimatum about anything?

We don’t do 24 hours.

We do 24 days, then a cheeky £300k below the asking price, then a wounded statement to our media partners about how the deal ‘collapsed’.

Because here’s the thing about a 24 hour ultimatum.

It requires somebody with the authority to actually make a decision.

And every decision at our club has to be walked up the hill to the absent meddling golfer, who is somewhere between the ninth green and the beta blockers, and who thinks £3 million is the going rate for a first team footballer in 2026.

You can’t do a 24 hour ultimatum when your final answer is being putted for in Barbados.

The agents aren’t reading our transfer targets. They’re reading our club.

I wrote this morning about Wilfried Nancy and his line about “chronic instability for years between the fans and the board”.

A man passing through for eight games clocked it on his way out the door.

Now, if a failed manager can see that from the safety of a French podcast, what exactly do you think a super-agent in Lisbon or Rotterdam can see?

They can see a club that has sold 15 players and signed 2.

Then they can see a manager publicly hoping, rather than a CEO privately delivering.

They can see a captain having to go to the papers to ask his own board for reinforcements.

They can see a Champions League qualifier a fortnight out and a squad that couldn’t fill a minibus.

That isn’t a negotiating position.

That’s a man in the desert being offered a glass of water.

Every agent on the continent knows Celtic are desperate, and desperate clubs pay more, wait longer, and blink first.

The instability isn’t just costing us our dignity.

It’s costing us money on every single deal we attempt.

And that is why ‘the agent talked him out of it’ has become the most reliable statement to ever come out of Celtic Park.

It isn’t an explanation.

It’s an alibi.

It’s what a CEO reaches for when he has been outmanoeuvred by somebody who does this for a living, and it has been trotted out so often that a section of our support now accepts it as weather.

Just one of those things.

Bad luck, lads, the agent was too fly for us again.

Bollocks.

Give credit where it’s due, John Collins diagnosed the illness and prescribed the medicine inside the same interview, which is more than anyone in our boardroom has managed in five years.

He just couldn’t bring himself to name the patient.

So allow me.

Agents don’t play Celtic like a fiddle because agents are uniquely wicked.

They play Celtic like a fiddle because Celtic keep handing them the bow…

I rest my case.

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