It’s ‘quality over quantity’ at Celtic, and get as many in the door as fast as you can at Ibrox. So which one of these actually works?

Two clubs, two windows, two completely opposite ideas about how you build a football team.

And the Record has helpfully laid one of them out for us in full this morning.

Alasdair Mair has done the sums on the Ibrox side’s summer, and the headline tells you everything about the SMSM’s mood right now.

The total amount Rangers have spent in this transfer window as club goes all out to back their Jurgen Klopp.

Their Jurgen Klopp.

Derek McInnes.

Jesus wept.

I had to read that twice, and then I had to go and make a cup of tea and come back and read it a third time.

The man has been in the job a fortnight, he’s five points behind us already, and he’s ninety minutes from dropping into a Conference League qualifier on Thursday night.

Jurgen Klopp.

Right.

Anyway, let’s do what the Stenography Corps never does, and actually look at the numbers rather than the adjectives.

Ten in.

Ten out.

Gross spend of £24 million, £12.2 million recouped, net spend of £11.8 million.

And they’ve gone on record saying they want five more bodies through the door before the deadline on September 3rd.

Five more.

On top of the ten they’ve already got.

That is not a recruitment strategy, that’s a supermarket sweep with the trolley on fire.

Make no mistake, ten bodies through the door in one window is not ambition, it’s panic wearing a club blazer.

Ivor Pandur for £6 million, Vanja Dragojevic for £4.6 million, Couhaib Driouech for a proposed £7 million, Olwethu Makhanya for £3 million, Daisuke Yokota for £2.75 million, Ross McCrorie for £900,000, Ben Godfrey on loan with an option, and then Armitage Shankland, Dan Neil and Cammy Devlin picked up for nothing.

Out the other door went Captain Disappointed himself, released, along with Jack Butland, Oliver Antman, Ben Davies, Danilo, Bajrami, and Mohamed Diomande for a proposed £4.7 million.

Ten in, ten out, and a squad that nobody, and I mean nobody, could describe as better than the one that finished last season.

Now compare that to what’s happened at Celtic Park this summer, because the contrast is genuinely remarkable.

Two.

Yes, two.

Fewer than any other club in the SPFL, from the wealthiest club in the country, with a Champions League qualifier landing on us in a matter of days.

And as I wrote yesterday, the entire Scottish football media decided this constitutes a ‘strategy shift’ because Kasper Høgh put three past Kilmarnock inside 45 minutes.

Quality over quantity.

Three magic words, and everybody downed tools.

So there’s your question, and it’s the one every Celtic supporter is chewing over this evening.

Which method actually works??

Let’s be honest here, on paper, quality over quantity wins that argument every single time.

Of course it does.

Ten average players do not beat two good ones, and anybody who has watched Scottish football for more than a fortnight knows it.

Bring in one Høgh and you change a season.

Bring in ten Yokotas and you change a wage bill.

The Ibrox side have spent the last decade proving this point on our behalf, over and over and over again, hoovering up bodies every window and finishing behind us anyway.

So yes, the Celtic method is the right method.

There’s just one wee problem with it.

‘Quality over quantity’ only works as a philosophy when you have actually gone out and bought the quality.

And we haven’t.

We’ve bought one striker.

One.

A striker we haggled over for the guts of an entire summer, while the manager stood there telling anyone who’d listen what he needed.

‘Quality over quantity’ is not our strategy, it’s our alibi.

It’s the phrase you reach for when you’ve signed nobody, and you need it to sound deliberate.

Give me a f*****g break.

Because here’s the bit that should worry you, and it’s the bit the Record piece skips right past.

Their net spend this summer is £11.8 million.

Ours, once you count what walked out the door before a penny came in, is somewhere in the region of hee-haw.

The Ibrox club, run by Americans who arrived eighteen months ago, has committed more actual money to its first team than the richest club in Scottish football has.

Sit with that one for a minute.

The bottom line is, one of these clubs is at least spending its money badly, and the other isn’t spending it at all.

They’ve backed a manager they shouldn’t have appointed, and we’ve refused to back one we were desperate to get.

That is the story of this window, and no amount of hat-trick afterglow changes it.

Now, give credit where credit is due, because I said I’d be first in the queue.

Høgh is exactly what we’ve been screaming for since Kyogo walked, and Sunday at Rugby Park was the most fun I’ve had watching this team in years.

But one striker is not a squad.

Get Haissem Hassan over the line, get a right-back, get a centre-half, and then, and only then, do you get to stand there and lecture anybody about quality.

Do it before LASK, not after them.

Because the honest answer to which method works better is this.

Neither of them is a method.

One club is throwing bodies at a wall to see what sticks, and the other is throwing a slogan at a support to see if that sticks instead.

The difference is that theirs is at least a decision.

Ours is just the same paralysis with better PR.

And on Thursday night, when Staunch Del is sweating on a Europa League tie and we’re sweating on a Champions League one, we’ll find out which of the two is worse.

My money says we both find out the hard way.

It was ever thus…

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