Youth/Development Team Thread

1.8 was the rumoured fee the other day..

 

Gutted Deas has gone. Think he coulda gone on to great things with us

 

New addition to the FC Bayern youth team: The Scottish junior international Barry Hepburn is moving from Celtic Glasgows U18 to Munich. “We are very happy that the transfer of Barry worked. He is an offensive player with a lot of potential that we want to help with his further development steps, ”says campus director Jochen Sauer about the 16-year-old winger.



When signing the contract: Barry Hepburn with campus director Jochen Sauer.

The 1.73 meter tall Hepburn is initially planned for the Munich Under-17 team by Danny Schwarz. At the FC Bayern Campus, he meets an old friend from the academy of the traditional Scottish club: Liam Morrison . The 17-year-old central defender only moved from Celtic FC to Munich last summer. There he is currently training under Martín Demichelis in the FCB U19 .

In order to further promote the development of individual talents, the post " Head coach individual training" was created

 

Huge disappointment. I hope it works out for the lad though but I wish it was in the hoops.

 

Ben Quinn officially signs , highly regarded winger

Sent from my GM1903 using Tapatalk

 

Weird transfer

 

CELTIC have been left stunned after top Australian talent Stefan Nikolic reneged on a deal to sign for the Hoops and opted to agree a new contract with Western Sydney Wanderers instead.

Nikolic - who is the son of former Red Star Belgrade's 1991 European Cup winner Roman Nikolic - has been a prolific goalscorer for Sydney's Academy team, netting 36 goals in just 25 games last season.



And his club confirmed in May that the 16-year-old had agreed to join the Hoops on a three-year deal and would move once the Covid-19 travel restrictions were lifted.

His club's Academy director, former Norwich City star Ian Crook, said at the time: "Celtic have landed a real talent. Stefan is an out-and-out goalscorer. He has just finished his third season with us.

He’s got terrific potential and can finish from many different areas."



However, the youngster has changed his mind and decided to rip up his agreement with the Scottish champions to remain in his Australian homeland.

Nikolic said: "Getting this contract is a massive achievement for me and I want to make sure I do everyone in the West proud.



What I bring to the team is a lot of goals, I like to score and I like to assist my teammates.


I’d like to break through into the first team and score a few goals, I just want to give my all for the members and fans.”

 

How do expect young talent either to stay at Celtic or come to us.
There's no development league or reserve league these players can not develop like the old days where a reserve league they could play with first team players returning from injury .
The whole of the SFA needs cleaned out as this a shocking state for youth football .

 

Just reading on the Beeb website “Scotland can’t keep changing managers” kinda made me think seeing this. In the last 10 years we’ve changed mangers * knows how many times, changed the back room staff and the coaches, they’ve tried to redevelop youth football (absolutely shockingly bad attempt at that btw) then they totally screw the teams with any sort of youth setup by taking away any sort of development leagues (guessing this is more to do with teams like St Johnstone moaning they can’t afford to travel etc) the only thing we have not tried is to scupper our all the SFA/SPFL idiots out of their ivory towers and redevelop from the top down. Funny they don’t even consider that, meanwhile our youth teams and players rot because of their own agendas pushed on them. There are a few teams in Scotland wanting to focus more on youth, the people in charge are hindering them. Colt teams etc will pull more of a crowd than East Stirling/Cowdenbeath and the likes yet SFA are just like naaaaaw.

 

Who cares..

 

We are not half down to the bare bones of the youth team squad with letting players go, which I am all for if they are not going to make it here.

However the youth team seems as horribly unbalanced as our own squad with a lot of midfielders but not many defensive or natural forward options. It’s quite poor that the best option we had for the left back in reserves was Church when it’s been known for a couple of seasons he wasn’t going to make it here.

This would have been an ideal opportunity for someone to come through if they had something about them. I am not expecting another KT to emerge but you would think we would look to recruit talented prospects for positions where our reserve squad is weak, even if it was on deals where we signed them and left them at their current club or loaned them to another like we did with Christie and Ajer for a season or two.

On the midfield it is good to have quality options and I would love all of Robertson, Connell and McInroy to emerge through and be first team ready players but the likelihood is they won’t. I hope the other two go out and get some experience of playing week in week out as they won’t get that under Lennon here.

 

Leaving in droves

 

Feels like we really need to revamp things at youth level. Start from a blank slate as far as our approach goes.

The current system simply doesn’t seem to be working, and with players leaving every few weeks it feels as though the next few years could be pretty barren as far as breakthrough players go.

Another reason why we should be looking at the DoF model perhaps. Somebody here long term, to ensure the clubs overall strategy/philosophy is adhered to and maximised, irrespective of who’s in the dugout, is something we should be looking at going forward.

 

Aye we aren't gonna have the next KT or Mikey etc coming through for a while if this keeps happening..

That's far too many * off..

We aren't the worst club in the world for playing youth player's but we could be better as well..

Maybe after we've hopefully done the 10, we can start afresh and give the youngster's a clearer pathway in to the first team like your Ajax's or Benfica's. Shake up the staff as well..

The youngster's are in and out training amongst the first team squad more than ever but if they're no playing, then what's the incentive. The quality of opposition isn't great in their own opposition age groups and the reserve league is mince..

Annoying thought as Adam was a massive hope..

 

Getting quite worrying how many young players are leaving us.

Something’s not right.

 

It's good that we're getting youngsters to a decent level from our academy but ultimately pointless if we never get to see them play for us or even recoup any kind of worthwhile fee. Must be about 4 or 5 real promising youngsters left us in the past year or so for the likes of Man City and Bayern. The lack of any kind of quality reserve/delevopment league is costing us.

 

Why stay in the youth team when the manager of the full team quite literally isn’t open to giving them a chance. Even the young players getting signed are just being dumped in the development squad, with very little competition.

This is partly the managers fault and partly the SFA not being capable of having a youth domestic league.

 

This is more to do with the youth set up in scotland rather than what we are doing as a club. The current system does not work, we need to expand and play the youth teams from the top clubs in Scandinavia and other "lesser" leagues