Dermot Desmond doesn't normally bother with journalists, unless they bother him. But he spoke recently to Celtic View , the official magazine of Celtic football club, about why he invested in the club almost exactly 20 years ago.

“It was all about saving Celtic . . . As a boy, I had a love for Celtic,” said Desmond who, to be fair, has almost single-handedly kept Celtic afloat with tough love. “Celtic is an emotional investment, although at the same time you don’t want to be throwing money at emotional investments as you could go broke pretty quickly doing that,” he said.

The billionaire would need to bankroll the purchase of Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Zlatan, Bale and Neymar, all at once, before he'd be in danger of going broke. But you can see his point.

“The emotional side of it sways you. If it had been another club on the same basis, I wouldn’t have been interested in investing . . . it was easy for me to look at it closely and I started off wanting to invest rather than from a basis of refusing it.”

I also notice Desmond has settled a bitter defamation and extortion case he took against a business rival in the US, which means now he won’t have to file oral testimony.

Pity, because he usually says something worth listening to when he does talk.