At the start of the summer of 1997 a sense of foreboding engulfed Celtic’s stoical supporters.

I’ve always likened this to what a prisoner on remand might feel as the background reports are being conducted. 

What was occurring in Celtic’s background at this time was not pretty. The club had lost its three most iconic players – the fabled three amigos of Paolo Di Canio, Jorge Cadete and Pierre van Hooijdonk – and were preparing for life without Paul McStay for the first time in 16 years. 

What’s more, they had parted company in very messy circumstances with manager Tommy Burns. He remains perhaps the most loved man ever to have played for Celtic beyond Jimmy Johnstone. Indeed, it was felt that the departure of Di Canio, who had formed a close emotional bond with Burns, stemmed directly from the manager's dismissal.

Everywhere you looked and everything you heard from the Rangers-facing national press painted a bleak picture for Celtic. A Light Blues procession towards 10-in-a-row seemed to be a formality. We’d also lost each of our four league encounters against them the previous season and the last hope of silverware – and Burns' managership – had evaporated in a Scottish Cup semi-final defeat by Falkirk. 

Yet amid such desolation and despair, something was gestating which would lay the foundations for the dominance Celtic have since enjoyed over their oldest rivals (minus the EBT years) and the rest of Scottish football. 

Next week marks the 25th anniversary of Wim Jansen becoming Celtic’s manager. A few weeks later, he would conduct what has proved to be the single most valuable business transaction in the history of Scottish football when he signed Henrik Larsson from Feyenoord for £650,000. 

Now, this point may be debatable and we could argue endlessly about it but when Celtic signed Lubomir Moravcik the following season we were treated, I think, to a period when, for the first time since the Lisbon Lions era, we saw two authentically world-class players performing regularly together in the Hoops.

As that summer of 97 began to unfold though, it became clear that Celtic’s chief, Fergus McCann, was very much alive to the emotional and spiritual significance of the season to come. Accompanying Larsson into Parkhead were Craig Burley, Stephane Mahe, Darren Jackson, Jonathan Gould and Marc Rieper, who arrived from West Ham soon after the season had commenced. The total outlay was more than £6m, a quantum that eclipsed anything Celtic had ever before spent in such a short timeframe. That figure would rise by another £2m in November when Paul Lambert arrived from Borussia Dortmund. 

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It's worth recalling too that this was a period in which the ignorance of the Scottish football press and the dark machinations at the heart of the SFA had created a toxic atmosphere around Celtic. 

Jansen’s appointment came less than 18 months after the then president of the SFA, Jim Farry, was found to have held up the transfer registration of Jorge Cadete from Sporting Lisbon. This extravagantly-gifted Portuguese international striker would score 30 goals in 37 games for Celtic but the delay caused him to miss a crucial spell towards the end of the 1995-96 season that included a narrow Scottish Cup semi-final defeat against Rangers which paved the way for a double for the Ibrox club. 

McCann, meanwhile, was facing an orchestrated press campaign of ridicule and ignorance which, at times, seemed designed to foment hostility towards him amongst the Celtic support. This included them mocking his physical appearance and questioning both his business expertise and his emotional commitment to Celtic. 

They chose not to acquaint themselves with the fact that McCann, with nothing more than an accountancy degree from Strathclyde University, had cracked the lucrative US sports business market by pioneering luxury golf holidays to Scotland. 

He’d also lost a small fortune acquiring the rights to screen Celtic’s 1972 European Cup semi-final against Inter Milan to a niche US audience. If the writers had bothered to conduct even rudimentary research they’d also have discovered that he was the social convenor of the Croy No. 1 Celtic Supporters Club and that he’d provided The Herald with a report from Celtic’s trip to Switzerland to play FC Basel in the 1963-64 European Cup-Winners' Cup. He was probably then the first Celtic director who had ever been accustomed regularly to paying his own way to watch the Celts. 

The Herald, like the other Scottish broadsheets of the time, wasn’t in the habit of sending staff to report on Scottish clubs in European competition but had agreed to fund the young McCann’s airfare to Switzerland in return for his providing the match report.  

Such cluelessness also characterised the initial press response to Jansen’s appointment. He had been a wonderful footballer for Feyenoord and his midfield masterclass in the 1970 European Cup final broke Celtic’s hearts. He also played in the World Cup finals of 1974 and 1978 for the best international side in Dutch history. 

Yet this and significant silverware for Feyenoord as their manager wasn’t enough to spare him from the xenophobic narrow-mindedness of the Scottish press. A less than productive spell at Japanese side Sanfreece Hiroshima led to this headline: 'The worst thing to hit Hiroshima since the atom bomb'. 

Again, if they’d conducted any research, the football writers might have learned that the great Johan Cruyff had said that Jansen was “one of only four men worth listening to when he talked about football”.

Similar attitudes would greet Dr Jo Venglos when he arrived at Celtic following Jansen’s shock departure the following season. I was sports editor of Scotland on Sunday at the time and I vividly recall our brilliant football writer, the late Kevin McCarra, expressing disbelief at some of his press-box colleagues’ dismissal of Dr Jo.

"The man took Czechoslovakia to the quarter-finals of a World Cup," Kevin said. "He’s got a better CV than any other manager in the UK."

What would unfold during that mad and gloriously mental season a quarter of a century ago will be the subject of more detailed analysis in the months to come. But despite Rangers lifting the next two titles - aided by a quite extraordinary financial outlay – what happened in the summer of 1997 would resonate at Celtic for the next two decades. 

And it would fulfil McCann’s pledge to stop the 10 and provide the club with the business infrastructure that’s underpinned the successes of the last 25 years.