At another time in Celtic’s history, the long summer months prior to the start of a new season seemed much more tranquil.

You could relax, secure in the knowledge that there would be a couple of new players in the Hoops – nothing too showy or ostentatious, you understand – but maybe a solid Dundee United or Hearts type who would do you a job at Cappielow in December and keep the engine ticking over.

There wasn’t really a pre-season as we know it now. July was spent waiting for the first friendly games where we might try to gain a sense of what the new term might hold. Thus my teen holidays on the Ayrshire Riviera were spent trying to get to the local newsagent early enough to grab a copy of the Daily Express for news of Celtic’s Irish tour. Sometimes you found that the Hoops had become a little more extravagant and had stretched to Scandinavia or some games against German or Austrian amateurs.

On being questioned about the purpose of arranging matches against foreign amateur teams my dad said that this was actually the Real Madrid model. The Spanish greats would fill their boots with goals against low-quality teams, he said, as a way of reinforcing their confidence. Even as a 12-year-old I thought this was dubious and have never since really researched that concept.

This was in an era when your dad was either a Daily Express man or a Daily Record man. They were the big-ticket football papers of the day before the Express jettisoned its massive Scottish operation in Glasgow and left the Record virtually unchallenged to cover Scottish football before The Sun arrived to drag it even further downmarket. My dad felt the Record was a little risqué for a Catholic family and so had to overcome his distaste for the politics of the Express.

The papers then were a lot less thirsty for every cough and spit of Celtic’s moves in the transfer market. Jock Stein and then Billy McNeill had built personal relationships with Scotland’s football writers, many of whom were men of their own generation whom they’d come to regard as, if not friends, then certainly something approaching it. There was affection and – most importantly – trust.

The increasingly absurd transfer speculation that swirls around Celtic and Rangers now simply wasn’t an option then. The authors of any of these ‘flyers’ (or their bosses) would be told by Stein and McNeill to avoid repeating the fishing exercise unless given a specific licence to do so.   

Some of the new players in that 1970s and 80s era settled well and are remembered fondly by my generation: Stevie Murray; Andy Lynch; Tom McAdam. But the best signing of all was Dixie Deans, a remarkable little striker with a lion’s heart. Few players other than Dixie – and, to a lesser extent, Lubomir Moravcik in more recent times – have commanded such enduring affection among the Celtic support.

There were no transfer deadlines in that era and some players were signed a few weeks into the season after it became clear what positions needed strengthening. In the 60s there had been men like Willie Wallace, Harry Hood and Tommy Callaghan. Later, even after the introduction of transfer windows, there were players like Paul Hartley and Barry Robson.

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But I remember vividly the sense of expectation in the Celtic support when Pat Stanton arrived from Hibs in the summer of 1976. What a stroke that was by big Jock. And what a player Stanton was. That signing, more than any other, propelled the men from Glasgow's east end to an unlikely double following a depressing two-year period. 

In more recent times, with the transfer deadline and the rise of the Celtic blogs and podcasts, the close-season period has become a Hollywood spy thriller. It begins virtually from the moment that the players wander over shoeless to the Green Brigade after the last game while their children take penalties from the six-yard line into an open goal, as wee Jordan Larsson once did.

We’re one week into July and I’m already absolutely knackered. What’s holding up Jota? But look, we’ve got an Argentinian left-back, and he looks like the business (although some of those crowds from his YouTube footage look a bit threadbare). Do we not still need another midfielder to replace Tom Rogic? And maybe a ball-playing centre-back/defensive midfielder option like Nir Bitton?

Ya beauty: we’ve got Jota. But will he not be knackered too after circumnavigating the globe twice during his holidays? In recent weeks our Portuguese winger seems to have become a latter-day Padre Pio, popping up in several places at the same time. I half expected to see him among the Royal Company of Archers greeting the Queen in Edinburgh the other week. Twitter and Instagram have Celtic spotters located all over the planet.

Celtic should mount a Springwatch-style live camera trap in these weeks to track the movement in and out of the front door 24/7. It would attract millions of views. There could be a David Attenborough voice-over: And let’s marvel at how the lesser-spotted Larsson returns to his father’s favourite hunting ground.

I mean, is the Jordan Larsson schtick even a thing? It seems highly unlikely. But in these mental, fevered weeks you can contrive to shoe-horn any player you like into the Ange Postecoglou model.

Then there is those sophisticated analytics, favoured by sites such as this one. They bring a new dimension to player analysis that seems to have been the model for NASA when they’re recruiting their astronauts. This seems to be the model favoured by Postecoglou too (though I’m told others in the Celtic hierarchy are less well disposed to recruitment science).

The newspapers don’t help. Some have sought to place a negative spin on Celtic’s summer transfer activity. Much of this, admittedly, has come from former Rangers players eagerly seeking a punditry role. Thus, the signing of Jota and Cameron Carter-Vickers 'aren’t really new signings because they’d already spent a season here on loan'.

What this fails to acknowledge, though, is the time, effort and uncertainty that would have been involved in identifying replacements for these two and then hoping they’ll gel with their team-mates. It leaves room to concentrate on signing another midfielder and perhaps a third-option centre-back. Almost as crucially, it signals to other possible targets in this market that Celtic are a viable, go-to destination for international players in the £5million to £10million price bracket.

And it means the Hoops go into the new season close to being a well-oiled unit. There were several remarkable characteristics in last season’s successes, but not the least of these was that Celtic virtually handed Rangers a nine-point start in the first two months of the campaign.  

You get the feeling – for the first time since Brendan Rodgers's first season – that Celtic have a manager who is in sync with his CEO and who is beginning to form a back-office team cast in the image of how he wants the team to play.

I feel I can relax now and take a holiday without worrying about this stuff.