A history of Celtic's Scouting

This article on our Scouting History is quite a good read; especially the quotes from David Moss where he details the scouting process through to bidding. Also, and to my surprise, this article contains no bullshite - considering it's a Record story that is very surprising. Anyway, here it is.

Link removed

It's safe to say player recruitment has changed since football's early days.

The most successful Celtic team ever, the Lisbon Lions, was comprised almost entirely of players from Glasgow - with the most exotic of its members being Bobby Lennox, all the way from sunny Saltcoats some 30 miles away down on the Ayrshire coast.

But as the years have gone by, things have progressed to the point the club is now reliant on finding young diamonds at home or abroad who they can develop and sell on to stay in the black financially.

Over the past few years, the likes of Virgil Van Dijk, Victor Wanyama and Moussa Dembele and the exorbitant fees they've been sold for have been the lifeblood which keeps the club going.

Further back in time, you think of the likes of Henrik Larsson who was picked up for £650,000, the Three Amigos and Lubomir Moravcik. Yep, the Hoops haven't done too badly in the transfer market over the years.

Recruitment is also a topic fans are acutely aware of at the moment, with talk surrounding the potential return of John Park and Lee Congerton's possible departure.

With that in mind here's a look at how the scouting system has developed for Celtic over the years and the key men involved since the more modern era of recruitment really kicked in.


John Kelman
Kelman was brought in by Billy McNeill in 1978 originally with a remit of completely reorganising the scouting system. He would go on to implement a robust structure throughout Scotland and the Republic of Ireland.

The likes of Paul McStay, Peter Grant and Derek Whyte were all signed thanks to Kelman's links he had developed in Scotland and he headed up the scouting system throughout the 1980s.

After 15 years at Celtic, Kelman moved on to Partick Thistle, Aberdeen and then Stoke City before his death in 2007.

Davie Hay & Andy Ritchie
Both of these men served Celtic well on the scouting side and were highly involved in identifying Jorge Cadete, Van Hooijdonk and Paulo Di Canio to the Celtic board.

Ritchie served as chief scout and was massively influential during the Tommy Burns era and Davie Hay worked very closely with Wim Jansen in particular when he was appointed as Hoops boss.

Burns and Ritchie were watching a scout's video one day when van Hooijdonk's tape showed him scoring all sorts of goals. Both men were impressed and Celtic followed up. Ritchie also revealed it was Bobby Robson who put him on to Cadete and an Italian pal who made him aware of Di Canio. All about contacts in the scouting game.

It was also Ritchie who identified the likes of Larsson, Paul Lambert, Johan Mjallby and Mark Viduka amongst many others. A number of other targets were also highlighted to the Celtic board, with an emphasis on prioritising flamboyant players, entertainers - but never quite made it to Glasgow.

Georgi Kinkladze was once on a list of targets but proved a bit too expensive and Japan's first footballing superstar, Hidetoshi Nakata, was identified before the 1998 World Cup when he shot to prominence. Talks took place but the deal never went through in the end despite reports of a fee being agreed.

Both men certainly deserve credit for their work during the 90s. Ritchie left the club at the behest of Kenny Dalglish after serving under Dr Jozef Venglos and Jansen, while Jock Brown sacked Hay during his time as Celtic's general manager.

Tom O'Neill
Dalglish appointed O'Neill to the position of chief scout and he served under both Martin O'Neill and Gordon Strachan, heading up operations for the first season and a half of the Scot's tenure before Park was brought in.

So many names ring off the list from that time - from Neil Lennon, Chris Sutton and John Hartson to Joos Valgaeren, Stan Varga and Didier Agathe in O'Neill's time. And then Shunsuke Nakamura, Artur Boruc and Maciej Zurawski to Lee Naylor, Scott McDonald and Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink in Strachan's era.

There was lots of talent recruited during that time and although O'Neill's principal job was to scout the opposition, it was he who oversaw the work of all of the other scouts, including Martin O'Neill favourite John O'Hare, and Ray Clarke - Strachan's main man abroad - during that era.

John Park
Park came into Celtic Park in January 2007, and Peter Lawwell described his appointment as a "major coup" at the time after the Scot had knocked back jobs with Rangers and a number of clubs down south, including Chelsea where Jose Mourinho had targeted him for a youth coaching role.

Park said the fit felt right after talking to Lawwell and Strachan and it was he who identified players such Georgios Samaras, Fraser Forster, Van Dijk and Wanyama for the Hoops.

Although, as is unavoidable for anyone in a recruitment role, there were some duds along the way, Park's era in charge of the scouting is looked back on very fondly. Gary Hooper, Tom Rogic and Scott Brown are just some of the other names on his resume.

He spent almost 10 years at Parkhead before leaving in October 2016, just a few months after Brendan Rodgers joined the club.

David Moss
Moss was Celtic's head of development scouting and chief talent scout, with Park his boss. During his time in the role he worked under Neil Lennon, Ronny Deila and then Rodgers. Moss joined the club in November 2010 and was part of the network responsible for the acquisition of the likes of Van Dijk and Wanyama.

Most notably though, he can lay claim to being the man who opened talks with Moussa Dembele's agent Mamadi Fofana and played a huge part in the Hoops being able to attract the Frenchman to Celtic Park from Fulham.

The club also notably saved plenty of money there as the cross-border development fee was a lot less than if another English club had signed him. In the end Celtic shelled out only £400,000 for Dembele before selling him on for over 40 times that amount just two years later in a fee of £19.8m.

Moss described his Celtic remit in detail in a piece with the Guardian, in which he said: “The most we could pay would be around £3m, and we had two criteria: did the player have the ability and character to compete against the likes of Barcelona, Paris Saint-Germain, Manchester City, AC Milan? And did they have the potential to be sold at a huge profit?

“Victor Wanyama, Fraser Forster, Virgil Van Dijk, Moussa Dembele – all had that huge potential. The big clubs all knew about them but found faults and reasons not to pursue them. If you’re receiving £100m every year, why take risks?

"You can wait for a club like Celtic to do that and if you have to pay through the nose further down the line for the finished article, so be it. But you can see a Rolls Royce of a player early.

“Say we were looking for a box-to-box midfielder, we’d deliver 15 different options and Brendan, very professional, would make notes on each player. We’d go into each one, their strong points, and whittle it down to an absolute maximum of four to focus on. Brendan would say which ones he preferred, and we’d get the go-ahead to explore how much it would cost us, either with the agent or the club.

“Initially, you’re looking at technical and physical abilities, then tactical and football intelligence, such as positioning. And then you’d have his psychological profiling, talking to people in the game or around the player.

"Further down the road we could come together again and update, and then hand over to the chief executive, Peter Lawwell, and (the company secretary) Michael Nicholson to deal with the financials with the player’s agent once we had permission from his club.”

As evidenced by the above quotes, Moss was an important part of the Celtic set-up before leaving for Huddersfield Town where he became head of football operations in the summer of 2017.

Lee Congerton
Congerton's arrival in March 2017, at Rodgers' request, has failed to bear fruit over the past two years.

The Welshman made his breakthrough at Chelsea under Frank Arnesen but he arrived in Glasgow looking to restore his battered reputation.

Congerton had come in for flak from followers of Hamburg and Sunderland over a host a transfer flops.

Expensive duds such as Jack Rodwell and Jeremain Lens set the Black Cats on a downward spiral as the dropped to League One. A particularly damning Rodwell statistic is he cost the Stadium of Light outfit a staggering £4700 per minute he spent on the pitch before his departure last summer.

His track record at Celtic has not been much better and the Hoops simply don’t have £10m and £8m to waste on midfielders as Sunderland did with Rodwell and Lens respectively.

Olivier Ntcham, Odsonne Edouard, Scott Bain and loan star Filip Benkovic are the only ones to receive decent pass marks from Congerton's time at the club and there have been some absolute howlers such as Marvin Compper, Kundai Benyu, and Charly Musonda. You could probably fling Jack Hendry on that list as well.

Overall, there's been an over-reliance on the loan market as well and Congerton has seemed unable to identify players who can be signed permanently within the club's price range, a topic covered in the latest Celtic podcast, which you can find below.

Congerton, although Rodgers is a fan and Anderlecht have also been rumoured with a move, will not really be missed if he leaves Glasgow.

And now?
Leciester City have recently given recruitment Eduardo Macia his jotters and that opens up an opportunity for Congerton to rejoin Rodgers.

 

Didn't take long for the bullshit to begin.

Doubt it was Ritchie that said to Wim Jansen, the guy who already knew all about Larsson.

 

Larsson may well have been scouted before Wim came in, but it was Wim that knew about the buyout clause that allowed it to happen.

 

If true about ritchie hes exactly type we should be looking to sign,an i dont mean larsson.His record if true is brilliant.Moss is worse than congerton,takes the credit for parks signings,while bringing nothing to the table himself since 2010.

 

Links to that rag aren’t allowed.