Neil Custis is the follow on Twitter. A total clown but completely hilarious.
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They robbed the Liverpool Echo’s Liverpool correspondent as well.
Signed up for it.
I’d say Miguel and the lads who didn’t get offered the big bucks are absolutely livid.
I’m guessing their NFL coverage will be good.
“Miguel” is an excellent football journalist.
He covers Chelsea very well and I always enjoy his pieces both match report whigh is not journalism per se and his features
Agreed, although he is part of the furniture with the woof crowd I’ve always enjoyed listening to “Miguel” on the radio where he tones down the hot take style of reporting that he, horncastle et al engage in on twitter.
Modern media is great . The enjoyment isn’t really their actual output which is largely shite more the bitterness over who earns more cash
Was Barry the Biffo not poached ?
FAO of @Rocko, @Raylan - I’m looking for 2 articles from The Athletic please.
Oliver Kay’s piece on Michael Owen and Kieran Devlin’s overview of Celtic’s new signings.
Please and thanks.
Owen is an odd individual
And yet … who is Michael Owen?
By Oliver Kay Sep 11, 2019
76 
Michael Owen is wired differently. He has thought so all his life, or at least as far back as he can remember — as a six-year-old kicking a ball around Deeside Leisure Centre and feeling a certainty that others his age simply did not have.
His father Terry could sense it too. “His coordination was exceptional, but it was his mentality that set him apart,” Terry says in the first pages of Owen’s new autobiography Reboot . “He was a forceful character, relentless in his pursuit of getting his own way. I’ve never met anybody with a mind as strong as his.”
Forceful, relentless, fiercely single-minded … and yet there are times when Owen paints a very different picture.
He says his “whiter than white” image during his early career was a commercially-driven fabrication that he never felt comfortable with. He also tells the remarkable story of how, with the transfer deadline looming in August 2005, his move to Newcastle United came down to a ballot among his inner circle — and that, while he and one of his associates rejected the motion, he was outvoted by his parents, his wife, his agent and his tax adviser. And that was that.
At moments like that, Owen portrays himself as a puppet on a string, Pinocchio to his former agent Tony Stephens’ Geppetto — a positive force but one who, in looking to mould his creation, pushed a prodigiously gifted young footballer into areas where he felt less than comfortable.
On a trivial note, this meant being the face of blue-chip companies such as Tissot and Jaguar. More seriously, it meant reluctantly joining Newcastle when, as he provocatively puts it now, he was “undoubtedly lowering my level” by leaving Real Madrid for a “club that had never won anything”.
And by being coerced into that move, rather than holding out in the hope of a return to Liverpool, Owen allowed the course of his career to be changed — and, with it, his legacy.
Owen occupies a curious place in English football’s firmament. His achievements mark him out as a star — England’s fifth-highest goalscorer of all time, Liverpool’s eighth-highest (despite leaving at the age of 24) and the only British player to win the Ballon d’Or in the past four decades — but he has never enjoyed anything like the affection or the reverence that such feats merit.
“Every schoolboy’s dream, a magical story matched only by Harry Potter,” said the publicist before welcoming Owen onto the stage at a book launch at a hotel in Cheshire last week.
Certainly there were moments, as he regaled his audience with stories from the early years, when it sounded every bit as magical as it must have felt at the time. He talked of running rings around the Argentina defence at the 1998 World Cup and then coming home from France to find “hundreds of well-wishers outside my house” as well as journalists, photographers and camera crews.
Owen as the prodigious star of France 98 (Photo: Ross Kinnaird /Allsport)
But that was all part of the process that turned Owen the teenage prodigy into Owen the brand. “Every day there would be sackloads of fan mail for me at the training ground,” he said. “I would be going through them all, replying to them one by one, from 1pm until midnight. My mum would say, ‘You mustn’t get behind with your fan mail.’ ‘I’m trying, Mum. I’m trying … .’ It would get to midnight and I’d have got through one bag. Then another four would arrive the next day.”
That, he said, was the moment that he realised he needed outside help in running his life. “It changed me from being a happy little footballer, scoring goals for Liverpool, into a worldwide footballer that everyone knew,” he said. “Up to that point, I didn’t want an agent. All I wanted to do was play football.”
Then there was the story of the 2001 FA Cup final, in which Liverpool trailed Arsenal until Owen scored two goals, the second a spectacular solo effort, in the closing stages. As a boy he had fantasised about scoring the winning goal in an FA Cup final — “dribbling around a tree, booting into the garage and doing the commentary, ‘Michael Owen has scooooooored’, and going off celebrating” — and then, aged 21, he did it. “I’ve never had a ‘knowing’ like that,” he said. “I could just feel it. The moment I equalised, I knew I was going to finish them off. If I could live one day again, that FA Cup final is the one.”
It often felt, though, that Owen’s personality — or perhaps the image that was projected — diluted the sense of fantasy. He had the boy-next-door look about him, but not, it sometimes seemed, the boy-next-door ordinariness. He seemed a little too polished for some tastes, a little too manufactured. Great for Tissot and Jaguar, but not quite the image that fans warm to.
Liverpool already had Robbie Fowler, who, quite apart from his precocious goalscoring talent, had a personality — all rough edges, spontaneity and mischievous humour — that their supporters loved.
“Robbie was a proper scally from Toxteth and was rough around the edges and people liked that,” says John Gibbons of The Anfield Wrap podcast. “Michael was just as passionate on the pitch, but he was one of the first batch of media-trained footballers and he was always looked a bit safe, if you know what I mean. But he’s best mates with Jamie Carragher, so he can’t have been that squeaky-clean…”
One thing that might surprise in Owen’s book is his suggestion that Carragher’s family “probably had more money than mine when we were growing up”.
The portrayal at the time, presumably encouraged by his advisers, was of Owen the middle-class footballer. He makes clear that his upbringing on the outskirts of Chester was nothing like that. “Yes we lived in our own house in Hawarden, but there were a lot of us and we were mortgaged up to the hilt,” he says. “The money that my parents made was just never enough to cover everything, so the bailiffs were at our door every week.”
Financial hardship was pretty much glossed over in his first autobiography, published in 2004. It is as if the appeal of a rags-to-riches tale was lost on those who were responsible for managing the Owen brand at the time.
Nor is it possible to imagine that in those days Owen would have been allowed to admit to having been “unforgivably nasty” to his mother at times during his career or that he and Louise, his childhood sweetheart, had survived a rocky patch in their marriage. He says he fears they would have divorced had he not been persuaded to seek professional help and adopt a softer approach in the difficult years that followed his retirement.
“If you’re going to do a book, you might as well be honest,” he tells The Athletic in a brief chat at the book launch. “We’ve been together since we were babies, but there were obviously frustrations that were getting on top of me at the time and I probably took my work home with me at times. Arguments or whatever. I would never have raised a finger or anything. We’ve got four kids and they would never have known. We’re fine now, as strong as anything.”
On the subject of his image in those early days, Owen adds, “It’s one of the things I often look back on and … I don’t know if I regret it or not — because I’m convinced that I was with a great agent who really had my interests at heart and looked after me — but if there’s one thing I sort of regret, it’s the whiter-than-white image that he [Stephens] portrayed,” he says.
“I still did things wrong in my football career. I got sent off for two horrific challenges at Old Trafford [in 1998] and I’ve been drunk with the best of them and partied and different things like that, but [Stephens] would always be conscious of my image and certain things like that, so I think it probably hindered me in many ways because people don’t like someone who’s whiter than white.
“If I have one gripe, it’s probably that he made me look a bit whiter than white as opposed to the normal teenage lad with an opinion, with a joke, that can have a drink and do all the things everyone else does.”
Like that infamous Liverpool Christmas party in 1998, when Carragher was all over the front pages of the News of the World , dressed as the hunchback of Notre Dame and cavorting with a stripper, while Owen was reported to be detached from proceedings, drinking water and looking horrified?
“Definitely!” he laughs. “Carra was cast as the bad boy and … don’t get me wrong, I didn’t have a stripper on my shoulder, but I’m pretty sure I wasn’t ‘sitting in the corner, drinking a glass of water’, like it said in the paper. But at the time, my agent had David Beckham and had Alan Shearer and myself and I’m sure the newspapers in question were debating, ‘Well, should we talk about Michael Owen and how many drinks he had or whatever? Or should we just protect it a little bit and keep good relations?’ I was just a young lad at this point, but I can assure you I wasn’t sat in the corner drinking water.”
Those close to Owen have always laughed at the squeaky-clean characterisation. “I am and always have been a practical joker and a wind-up merchant and a gambler,” he says in Reboot , “to the extent that Rio Ferdinand has said to me more than once over the years, ‘I have no idea how you’ve got away with this image for so bloody long.’”
To describe yourself as, among other things, “a gambler” is unusual. It is not the most endearing of vices, particularly when it comes to a professional footballer earning — and at times squandering — vast sums of money. But Owen makes reference to it throughout the book. He mentions his wide-eyed excitement when his father used to have a flutter on the horses every Saturday afternoon and win or lose a tenner over a game of snooker with friends. In his own case, with the stakes considerably higher, Owen casually recalls ending the 2002 World Cup card school with a £30,000 debt to Kieron Dyer.
Are we really to believe that the £30,000 story, which emerged in the media at the time, was as bad as it got? “Oh God, yes,” Owen tells The Athletic . “And bear in mind that this was over a month away and it was accumulative, so if I lost eight grand to one person and nine grand to another, it would just be, ‘Right, you pay him and you pay him’ and it was just like one payment, so to speak. So of course it was [the worst], yes.”
Owen’s love of horseracing is well known. He owned racehorses from an early stage in his career and in 2007 bought and began to develop Manor House Stables near Malpas, Cheshire. That, along with family, has been his over-riding focus, particularly since he retired from football in 2013. A vast and growing team there is led by the trainer Tom Dascombe. Andrew Black, who co-founded Manor House with Owen, also co-founded Betfair, the internet gambling company. It is a serious venture.
One source who encountered Owen in horseracing circles recalls finding him sitting alone in an executive box, reading the Racing Post and giving the impression that this was far from the social occasion that it was for others. He uses the phrase “oddball”. Owen says pretty much the same thing in his book. “The staff at Manor House Stables used to think I was a right weirdo,” he writes. “I would go to the races, sit in the box at Chester on my own, reading the paper, not wanting to talk to anyone. That’s just how I was.”
Owen is a passionate racehorse owner, but says some consider him a “right weirdo” for sitting on his own at meetings (Photo by Sportsfile/Corbis/Sportsfile via Getty Images)
The same source suggests Owen’s mother, Jeanette, always looked after his finances for him, even if that meant writing large cheques to bookmakers. Again, surprisingly, Owen backs up the story unprompted. “As embarrassing as this admission is, I only recently started using my own bank account, at the age of 38,” he writes. “Up until then, my mother paid all the bills and managed everything.
“Even though I’ve lived in a big house since 1998, with all kinds of expenses going out every day, that’s just how it has always been. It’s not a case of me being entitled or lazy. I just never knew any different.”
It all serves to strengthen a certain impression of Owen: fiercely single-minded, yes, but heavily reliant on the support network that his family provided. “Because I was so young when fame and money descended on me,” he says, “between my parents and my agent Tony Stephens, pretty much everything has been taken care of for me.
“I was just focused on playing football and I let my agent do his thing and I just accepted what he was doing. If he told me to do an interview with a certain publication or magazine or whatever it was, then I would do it. If he turned 30 of them away and made me look like a saint and whatever it was, then that was that as well. I just followed what he said off the pitch and just concentrated on my bit on the pitch.”
And, until injuries began to take their toll, he did it brilliantly for Liverpool and England. Does he believe his achievements in the early part of his career, such as the Ballon d’Or, get the respect they deserve? “No,” he says even before the question is out.
He sounds very emphatic about that. “Well it happened so long ago and so early in my career,” he says. “And, to be fair to other people, I was only at the top my game for a short period of time before injuries robbed me. A 20-year-old now might only remember me from when I was 25 onwards. They might think, ‘He’s that guy who came off the bench for Man United a few times, scored the odd goal and is now a pundit.’ Well, I don’t want you to remember me from then (he laughs). I think you’ve got to be certain age to remember me and remember what I did for two or three years.”
“Two or three years” is a surprisingly self-deprecating suggestion from a player who made an unforgettable impact on the World Cup stage at the end of his first season, after winning the first of two Premier League’s golden boot awards, and won the Ballon d’Or midway through his fifth. “Well, four or five then,” he says.
“Sadly in 1999, when I had my first [hamstring injury], that was the absolute killer. You can still get by, in a way, and you’re still young and pliable and springy and whatever, but then it starts catching up with you and you get smaller ones and it just gradually eats away and kills your pace.
“That’s the only thing that went. My touch, my finishing ability, the timing of runs, that all stayed. But that was the start of something. I was still able to be on top of my game for a few years after that, but it was just a gradual decline.”
Throughout that gradual decline, Owen continued to be paid handsomely — particularly by Newcastle over the four-year period that culminated in 2009 in their relegation and his departure on a free transfer to Manchester United. He started well at Newcastle but struggled, inevitably, after suffering a metatarsal fracture and then, when playing for England at the World Cup, rupturing his anterior cruciate ligament. His England career was ended abruptly by Fabio Capello. His popularity on Tyneside went the same way.
“I was wired to believe that I was the best,” he says. “But in the second half of my career, I was running at bang-average players thinking, ‘I’m not fast enough here. I’m not strong enough.’ At Man United, Paul Scholes was getting the ball and I was thinking, ‘I want to make a run in behind, but I’m going to come short again and get it to feet.’ I had been stripped of my main asset, which was my pace.”
He said last year that he “hated” the final seasons of his career. “Well, I wouldn’t go as far as’ hating’,” he tells The Athletic . “But it was progressively worse, so at Stoke, at the end of my career, I was starting to resent myself and then thinking, ‘You’re never going to be playing, it’s lashing down outside and you’ve got to go and train for an hour and a half.’
“I never hated the game, like a lot of people have portrayed it, but absolutely I admit I didn’t enjoy it like I enjoyed the first half of my career, simply because I was no longer able to do the things I was very good at. And I don’t really get how that can be misconstrued or not understood. It’s quite obvious that if you’re doing something well, you’re going to like it more than if you do something really badly.”
In an interview this week, Tony Pulis said that he “never ever felt (Owen’s) head was on it at any stage while he was at Stoke City.” Alan Shearer, of course, has echoed the thoughts of many Newcastle fans by suggesting it was the same on Tyneside. Owen would accept the point to some degree at Stoke, but not at Newcastle, where he suggests history has been rewritten in the search for a scapegoat for relegation in 2009.
“I never said anything bad about Newcastle’s fans or players (while he was there),” he says. “I tried my heart out every game and I really am perplexed by the view of them towards me when I finished. And now it has got worse. It’s almost irretrievable now and I don’t really know what I ever did wrong, honestly. If you ask Newcastle fans, they’ll probably laugh their head off and say, ‘He did this wrong, he did that wrong.’ But I really don’t know.”
Owen signs for Newcastle after losing a vote (Photo: Alex Livesey/Getty Images)
Newcastle’s supporters would simply point to what he says in his book: that his heart wasn’t in it. When he says that, in response to criticism, he remembered feeling “I don’t need to justify myself to fucking Newcastle supporters,” they would say that this attitude was reflected on the pitch — in that final season in particular.
Owen would dispute that, of course, pointing out that he was not fully fit for the closing weeks of that campaign, but it had begun to look by that stage as if his relationship with football was becoming more and more transactional. He cried with joy when one of his horses, Brown Panther, won the King George V Stakes at Royal Ascot in 2011. When did he last appear as if he could be that moved by something — anything — that happened on a football pitch?
Does he cry at movies? OK, that is a joke. He reckons he has watched only five in his life — Rocky , Cool Runnings , Jurassic Park (“I got forced to watch it twice”), Ghost and Heat , which, again, suggests a certain lack of fantasy.
At one point in his book he refers to himself as a “football romantic”, but that is not a label he wears comfortably. He has always given the impression of being unemotional about the game, on the pitch as well as off it. As a player, it always seemed an enormous strength.
In the past week, Owen has sought to cut through much of the mythology of the football industry. In particular he has poured derision on the notion of the local hero whose commitment to the club is unwavering. “I could have written two books and been even more hard-hitting because I know how it was with some people,” he says. “I mentioned one (Shearer) on Twitter the other day and I could say a lot more things. What makes my blood boil is the adulation some are held in and you think, ‘Oh my God. If only you knew … .”
Of players kissing the badge on their shirt, he says, “I reach for the sick bucket. Listen, I did it when I scored in the FA Youth Cup against Crystal Palace because I’d seen my heroes do it. When I used my brain and was more informed, I realised it was just for the fans.”
And yet … Owen’s book could be interpreted as one long act of badge-kissing. He knows his relationship with Liverpool’s supporters, which deteriorated from the moment he left for Real in 2004, got worse when he joined Newcastle and then worse still when he joined Manchester United in 2009. It is unusual to hear him talk of the club he “loved — and still loves now”. He seems determined to build bridges by laying out, in somewhat humbling terms, his disappointment that Liverpool did not take him back.
In December 2016, Liverpool’s official Twitter feed wished Owen a happy 37th birthday. The post got 280 replies, most of them implore the club to “DELETE”. Other replies consist of gifs of, for example, Alan Partridge telling an over-zealous book critic to “Just fuck off” and Colonel John Matrix in Commando , telling one of the bad guys, “I remember you … scumbag.” You get the picture.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Liverpool opted not to test the water with another public happy birthday message to Owen in 2017 or 2018.
Owen, the cup final hero now abused by some Liverpool fans (Photo: GERRY PENNY/AFP/Getty Images)
Does Owen care about any of this? He frequently suggests not — that he is wired differently, that he does not need adulation — but much of what he has said, both in the book and in interviews over the past week, gives the impression of a footballer who, with his playing days behind him, would welcome a reappraisal of his playing career at Anfield, at least.
“He’s a funny one, Michael Owen,” Gibbons says. “What should have happened with him is what happened with Ian Rush: go abroad for a year, come back, score loads of goals and spend the rest of his career at Liverpool. There’s an alternative universe where he’s a real Liverpool legend and I think he knows that and probably regrets it a little bit.”
It really does seem that way. There is one point in the book where he says he has no regrets about his career, but everything he has said about the Newcastle move seems to contradict that. It was perhaps the first time in his career when he did not get his own way. And from that point, there was never any way back to the one place, other than home and Manor House Stables, where he has felt he truly belonged.
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What can Celtic fans expect from their latest recruits? Here’s the inside line…
Greg Taylor — a more defensive left-back?
Signed from Kilmarnock on deadline day, Taylor had already racked up more than 100 appearances for the Ayrshire club and was named in the team of the tournament two years ago when Scotland participated in the prestigious Toulon competition. He also ably deputised for Scotland away to Belgium this June when Andy Robertson and Kieran Tierney were injured.
Taylor, a promising left-back, inevitably invites comparisons to Tierney — with the recent Arsenal recruit just five months older — and is widely considered the more defensive option beside his competitor for the position, Boli Bolingoli, who has already proved his offensive pedigree in his two months at the club.
However, his defensive stats actually aren’t great.
According to Scottish football analytics site Modern Fitba, last season Taylor averaged 0.31 possession adjusted tackles — which accounts for successful sliding tackles, adjusted to how much possession a team has and therefore how defensive they are — per 90 minutes, which was 33rd of 41 full-backs last year.
He won 4.98 possession adjusted regains per 90 minutes last season — aka, successful standing tackles and interceptions — which was also 33rd among full backs, and won 62.9 percent of his defensive duels, which was 29th.
Tierney, however, was also poor in these metrics, with 0.39 successful sliding tackles per 90 and just 61 percent of aerial duels won.
Celtic, domestically at least, will be more or less permanently on the offensive, so Taylor’s attacking stats are pertinent. This is where the disparity between him and Tierney becomes stark.
His expected assists (xA) last season was 0.05 per 90 last season, 23rd of 41, compared with Tierney’s at 0.21.
He’s evidently tidy in possession, is a good decision-maker in the final third and can dribble usefully. Taylor averaged 3.03 progressive ball carries (successful dribbles) per 90 last season, which was 15th among full backs and completed 73 percent of his final-third passes (11th).
It’s worth bearing in mind Steve Clarke’s Kilmarnock were a conservative outfit last season, with their full backs expected to tuck in, blunting Taylor’s offensive credentials – that he is still very young with plenty of time, and playing in the right environment, to improve – and that Tierney was an exceptional, anomalous talent where comparisons are, to an extent, unfair.
Can he become Celtic’s first-choice left back? Given how strongly Bolingoli finished the run of games before the international break, especially in his improved defensive positioning, Taylor’s integration into the first team might be gradual. If Celtic are to play a 60-plus game season again this year though, having two high-quality left backs trying to one-up each other is a good problem to have.
Mohamed Elyounoussi — ‘fantastic move for both parties’
Signed on loan from Southampton without an option to buy, Elyounoussi nevertheless represents, on paper, excellent business. While his career stagnated at the Saints, Mark Hughes’ problematic half-season and subsequent sacking left Elyounoussi in a bit of a lurch, aggravated further by the idiosyncratic methods of Hughes’ replacement Ralph Hasenhuttl. He wasn’t given the time or environment to adapt properly, and his past pedigree more than justifies the transfer.
Ian Burchnall, assistant manager at Sarpsborg while Elyounoussi was breaking through with the Norwegian club and now head coach at Sweden’s Ostersund, is confident Celtic have pulled off a coup: “I think it’s a fantastic move for both parties, really.
“Sarpsborg had just been promoted to the top tier and he was coming through the youth system there as an 18 year old. This was his debut season in the top league and he scored two in a 2-2 draw against Lillestrom in the first game. Quite an eventful introduction to the league.
“You could see he was a level above at Sarpsborg. He was outstanding that season for us. He’s a good boy – humble, hard-working, but extremely talented.”
After that stellar Sarpsborg campaign, he spent two seasons at Molde, where he won the double and was among the goals as they beat Ronny Deila’s Celtic home and away in the 2015-16 Europa League.
In 2016, he moved to Basel and excelled, contributing a goal or assist every 119 minutes from the left wing and scoring against Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City in the Champions League as the Swiss side reached the last 16 in 2017-18. His move to Southampton at just 23 hasn’t panned out, so far, but the parallels between Basel and Celtic — the dominant force in their domestic league, attempting to make waves in Europe — inspire optimism of his capability to deliver.
“A guy like him needs time to adapt from Basel,” Burchnall affirms. “You look at some players in the Premier League and some hit the ground running, and some need a season to adapt, even with a manager that trusts him, and I think he was one of those players. Obviously, the manager sees something different but I’m excited to follow him at Celtic. I think he’ll really fit in.”
Burchnall offers a tactical overview of Elyounoussi, an inverted left winger: “He’s an offensive player that creates a lot and is really good when he gets into those attacking positions. He likes to cut inside, be on the ball, create. He’s a good dribbler, he can finish. I think he needs to play for a team that creates a lot of opportunities and dominates the game, so I think he’ll be a really good asset for Celtic.
“What will surprise the most is how hard he works both ways. If you want him to press and push, he’s got a great work ethic.”
At Sarpsborg, and at Molde, Elyounoussi was predominantly used in a 4-2-3-1 while at Basel, that alternated with a 4-3-3, but he is almost exclusively a left winger. He is just as proficient in patient possession football as high-intensity overloading and for tougher games in Europe, works thoroughly hard as a piece of the defensive line, and as an outlet for countering. “Whatever situation he’ll be in, high press or counter-attacking; he’s very adaptable,” Burchnall describes.
Mentally then, Elyounoussi aligns with the profile that Neil Lennon has proved he admires so far this season: individually gifted but also hard-working and unafraid to commit defensively. “He’s an intelligent footballer,” Burchnall asserts. “He does what the manager wants. He’s not a kid that’s high maintenance. He’s self-driven, really humble. ”
With Scott Sinclair apparently out of the first-team picture and Lewis Morgan unable to thrive in making the step up as a regular starter, Elyounoussi assumes much of the responsibility otherwise delegated to Mikey Johnston alone, who at 20, is still developing and will likely dip in form at some point.
It’s common sense that if a club borrows a player without a permanent deal in view, as in this case, it is to conspicuously and immediately improve their starting XI. Elyounoussi promises that.
The squad players — Moritz Bauer, Jeremie Frimpong, Lee O’Connor
Bauer (pictured above) arrived as Celtic’s second right back signing of the summer, on a season-long loan from Championship side Stoke containing the option to buy. A “Welcome to Scottish football” horror challenge from Jordan Jones was his introduction to Celtic after he replaced the injured Nir Bitton for the final 25 minutes against Rangers just before the international break.
Despite Steven Gerrard’s team imposing their physicality on him from the off, he composed himself well, looking pacy and positionally sound. He is also reportedly excellent going forward, very quick with a decent delivery, but can be caught out defensively at times.
That he was part of a Stoke team relegated from the Premier League before being marginalised from the first-team picture in the English second tier understandably sparks concern but his having three different managers at a club going through a turbulent spell is a significant caveat to his 18 months in Staffordshire. He is an Austria international who was highly regarded during two seasons at Russia’s Rubin Kazan, and Celtic have monitored him previously. Similarly to Elyounoussi, his past pedigree vindicates their decision to move for him.
He also, as witnessed during the Rangers’ game, has an obscenely long throw, which could prove a valuable alternative avenue of attack given the heights of Kris Ajer and Christopher Jullien.
However, sources tell The Athletic it is likely Bauer’s position will be challenged quickly by Frimpong, who has been signed as a first-team player rather than a development prospect.
Frimpong is rapid — allegedly “already the quickest player in Scotland,” according to sources. Having spent nine years in Manchester City’s academy prior to signing, he’s also a good footballer technically and smart in possession. He likes to keep the ball — wary of unnecessary gambles, he’ll always look for the easy and secure pass — but loves pushing forward.
Being very young and more of an attacking full back, Frimpong can be found out in terms of defensive positioning but his recovery pace often saves him.
Although his final ball has historically been his main weakness, often rushing the decision after getting into good positions, it is something he’s improved considerably over the past year or so, and he had already registered a couple of assists for City’s under-23s this season before moving to Celtic.
Part of the appeal with Celtic was playing for a team constantly in the ascendancy, where his offensive attributes would be best utilised.
“That’s what excites him; Celtic are almost the Man City of Scotland. Obviously, maybe in Europe, they’ll sit back a little bit but that’s going to be very rare,” says a source close to the player. “He’s up-and-down all game. Celtic are going to dominate mostly. He’ll have to be high and getting into those positions, so he’s a perfect fit for my mind.”
O’Connor, arriving from City’s crosstown rivals Manchester United, completes a trio of Irish youth internationals signed this summer, joining Johnny Afolabi and Luca Connell. There’s also Barry Coffey, who was already at the club.
Although touted as a right back, a position he’s proved capable of deputising in for (previous) club and country, O’Connor is perhaps seen more long-term within Celtic as a centre-back, his reputed preferred position.
The 19-year-old was allegedly on the cusp of making a first-team appearance at United as Ole Gunnar Solskjaer afforded opportunities to the academy’s brightest prospects as last season drew to an underwhelming close. O’Connor was also called up to the full Republic of Ireland squad for last November’s games against Northern Ireland and Denmark.
Transfer window theme
O’Connor and Frimpong both signed four-year deals, and their arrivals compound a fascinating transfer window theme for Celtic; the shrewd acquisitions of highly-rated young players who have either outgrown development football and are frustrated by the lack of structured first-team pathways mapped out for them, or are already first-team regulars hungry for a step-up in challenge.
Afolabi, Connell and Taylor also fit this profile.
This recruitment strategy suggests long-term succession planning, so that when Celtic’s current crop of marquee players do eventually leave for pastures new, there are ready-made replacements that can seamlessly slot in. This would pre-empt the recruitment and injury disasters that hamstrung Celtic’s past two Champions League qualifying campaigns.
Multiple sources insist Celtic have offered these players those routes to first-team football, which were a crucial factor in them opting for the Glasgow club over other suitors.
It’s also worth noting that while they are envisioned as future stars, they’re also expected to make something of an impact on this season.
It isn’t the future that’s bright. It’s the present.
(Photo: Jeff Holmes/PA Images via Getty Images)
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That one on Celtic’s signings is fairly shit. For a guy who covers Scottish football he seems to have no insight on Taylor at all. The stats around sliding tackles and expected assists are fairly meaningless given the low numbers anyway. What good is a slide tackle? Is it better or worse than another tackle? Stats about crosses allowed or blocked would be much more relevant for a full back.
Other pieces are a little more insightful but it’s not the type of writing you think might be the future of journalism.
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Thought the same when reading it. Little real insight
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The Taylor one is pretty poor but the bits on Frimpong and O’Connell are interesting insights though I’d be dubious about the veracity of the claims. Frimpong will have Elhamed, Bauer and Ajer all ahead of him in the pecking order at right back so can’t see him making much of an impact this season.
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Always nice to see Delaney mugged off good and proper.
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FAO footix