A new football study has globally ranked Celtic’s work in the transfer market at recruiting young talent for the first team in ten transfer windows between 2014 and July 2019.
The study by the respected football research company CIES Football Observatory has just released the information this morning and it takes into account over 800 teams from 48 leagues across the world over ten transfer windows from 2014-2019. [CEIS]
The managers over this period were Ronny Deila and Brendan Rodgers with Neil Lennon wedged at either end of both.
The players recruited by Celtic over that period were a mixture of youth and experience but for the purposes of the results of this study, we’ll take a wee look at who Celtic brought in which are relevant to the results.
Celtic’s transfers 2014-2019
Celtic are well known for their football model of recruiting young raw talent and developing them on to sell for huge fees. For context, players’ ages are in brackets at the time of signing and listed are only those who made an active contribution to the Celtic first team.
2014
Stefan Johansen (23)
Leigh Griffiths (23)
Jo Inge Berget (23)
Jason Denayer – loan (19)
John Guidetti – loan (21)
2015
Gary MacKay Steven (22)
Stuart Armstrong (21)
Dedryk Boyata (24)
Nadir Ciftci (23)
Ryan Christie (20)
Jozo Simunovic (21)
2016
Eric Sviatchenko (24)
Patrick Roberts – loan (19)
Kristoffer Ajer (18)
Moussa Dembele (19)
Kolo Toure (35)
Scott Sinclair (27)
2017
Johnny Hayes (29)
Olivier Ntcham (21)
Odsonne Edouard – loan (19)
2018
Lewis Morgan (20)
Scott Bain (25)
Jack Hendry (21)
Filip Benkovic – loan (20)
2019
Timo Weah – loan (18)
Jeremy Toljan – loan (24)
Christopher Jullien (25)
Boli Bolingoli (23)
Hatem Abd Elhamed (27)
So a you can see from that trip down memory lane, Celtic did actually do a lot of work in recruiting some of the best talent out there over this period.
Celtic’s global recruitment rank and where Rangers stand
According to the study, Celtic rank 59th out of all 800 clubs around the world for their work in recruiting young talent for their first team.
With an average age of 23.53 years, Celtic rank better than teams like Rangers (67th), Monaco (90th), Ajax (101st), Spurs (105th) and Sporting Lisbon (118th).
The best performing team was RB Salsburg (1st) with Qatari side Al-Gharafa SC ranking last.
Interestingly, Hibs ranked higher than Celtic over this period at 41st in the list which is better than Real Madrid who ranked 48th.
Celtic’s player trading model has served them well over the years and when you look at the players on that list and how much we sold them on for, you can see just how good the strategy works when it is used correctly.