We investigate the problem of counting the real or complex Hadamard matrices which are circulant, by using analytic methods. Our main observation is the fact that for $|q_0|=...=|q_{N-1}|=1$ the quantity $\Phi ={\sum }_{i+k=j+l}\frac{q_i{q}_k}{q_j{q}_l}$ satisfies $\Phi \ge N^2$, with equality if and only if $q=\left(q_i\right)$ is the eigenvalue vector of a rescaled circulant complex Hadamard matrix. This suggests three analytic problems, namely: (1) the brute-force minimization of $\Phi$, (2) the study of the critical points of $\Phi$, and (3) the computation of the moments of $\Phi$. We explore here these questions,...