Celtic briefed us on Friday about why the Howe deal collapsed.

At the time we made it clear, this is what the club were putting out and it wasn’t gospel. We shared it with our readers and our followers on social media.

The crux of the explanation came down to Eddie not being able to get the staff in he wanted [Not through Celtic’s doing] and it quickly fell apart after that.

Since then, we’ve heard noises from the Eddie Howe camp bemoaning a lack of planning.

Oliver Kay wrote a great piece in The Athletic about the whole situation and the uncertainty around a longterm plan was spooking Eddy. Kay wrote that the conditions would not have turned off a ‘Celtic man’ but Eddie was truly clinical about the process and when things got down to the nitty gritty the Englishman wasn’t convinced.

Add to that Phil Mac’s piece on Saturday evening who writes a well placed source told him the agreement between Celtic and Howe wasn’t as tight as one might think these deals are when it came to the detail.

Phil wrote there was ambiguity over what and who was paying for Eddy’s staff to be released from their Bournemouth contracts. Eddie believed Celtic were picking up the tab and it wouldn’t come into his rebuild budget – Dermot was not of that opinion.

He then writes, at the eleventh hour, Eddie wanted a ‘substantial uplift’ in his rebuild budget to which Celtic were not receptive.

If these sequence of events took place, it looks from the outside like a game of chess. Eddie and his representatives knew how far down the line this job was and the anticipation from the Celtic support about his imminent arrival, they could have conceivably used that information to try and secure more funding for the rebuild.

There was no checkmate from either side and in that case Dermot has walked away from the game.

This deal has many layers, of which we won’t ever get the full picture. Maybe one day when Eddie brings out a book we’ll be a small chapter as he describes his time in football.