Karamoko Dembele Gets Set To Leave Celtic. Is He Just Another Wasted Youth?

There is a gap between reality and expectation, and we have seen this time and time again as football fans.

Nowhere is it clearer than with the number of youth players who have passed through our club in the last few years, and have gone on to be disappointments rather than the hits we were all hoping that they would be.

There are scores of them, but some of them stand out above the rest because the expectations and hopes for them were so high. Some disappointed us by not sticking around.

Ben Doak is the latest of them.

Others just fail to hit the heights we thought they were certain to scale.

One of them played today, in the Chesterfield v Solihull playoff match.

It was Calvin Miller. Solihull beat his team 3-1. They are a National League team.

It’s several levels below where everyone expected this boy to play.

To understand how big a shock it is, you have to remember the hype that surrounded this kid once upon a time. He is only 24 and so you cannot rule out a major career renaissance … still, his progress stalled somewhere.

He is far from the only example we have, but his is a particularly glaring one.

No-one needs to be reminded, furthermore, of the greatest of the flops, Islam Feruz, who had his own hype machine which promoted his cause for years.

He left Celtic without playing a single first team game for the club. He went to Chelsea where he thought he’d made it, and he immediately bought himself a sexy new ride and developed superstar syndrome.

He never scored a competitive first team goal, anywhere, for anyone.

He had plenty of chances to get it right too, with several loan moves sending him to various clubs, none of whom turned him into the player that he should have been. What talent he had was wasted, utterly.

He now sells hats for a living.

Which is appalling considering where he’d once been.

Karamoko Dembele is about to come to the end of his contract.

It will probably be the end of his time at our club. What in the Hell went wrong for this kid? Could he be convinced to stay for another shot at it, or has the club decided his shift is over?

He had as much talent as Feruz. That’s been said over and over, by people at every level of the club. Unlike Feruz, he played first team matches and has scored a competitive goal.

But he’s 19, which is older than Feruz was when he left. There is an argument to be made for giving this guy a new deal, but is he interested in signing it, and what would the offer entail?

We aren’t going to guarantee him games, and at his age and stage of development there’s an argument for saying that he ought to be playing them. The boy has something, but does he have enough about him to justify first team football?

Probably not at Celtic, and that’s a shame … but it’s also the hard reality of football.

Some have got the stuff to make it – and skill is only a small part of that – and some don’t. Karamoko Dembele has a lot to prove.

I don’t think he’ll get to prove it at Parkhead.