Owen Moffat Leaving Celtic Shows That The First Team Path Is Harder To Walk Than Ever.

The decision, today, to let Owen Moffat leave our club to join Blackpool on a three-year deal surprised me. But it probably shouldn’t have, because all this kid has really done here is acknowledge a basic reality.

He was a long way from first team football.

Those who have watched Moffat over the last few years know full well that this is a kid who the club had once had high hopes for, and he looked as if he might beat the odds and prove worthy of those hopes. He is a very talented player; he will not go down there and disappear into obscurity. You will hear his name again, and he’ll do well in the game.

But his departure from Celtic shows again that the distance between our youth side and the first team squad is absolutely enormous. Those kids who have been promoted from one to the other have to possess something exceptional and extraordinary to be able to make the transition and the simple truth is that too few of them do.

As we’ve talked about before, it isn’t enough to be talented either.

You have to be driven. You have to be possessed of phenomenal self-belief. And you need to be willing to grab, with both hands, the opportunities which come your way.

Too few of our kids are able to make that leap, and I feel bad for many of them whilst recognising that they are almost certainly doing the right thing in choosing to leave.

Moffat must have, over the summer, seen that his chances were going to be increasingly limited … the path to first team football was being steadily narrowed for him.

With the arrival of Sead Haksabanovic those options shrunk to nothing.

He and the club have made the sad, but inevitable, decision to go our separate ways. I hope that he is not discouraged. I hope that other young players aren’t discouraged.

We are a special team right now, and you need to have something a bit special to get in to it.

There will be other Tierney’s and McGregor’s; that is a certainty.

The road to the first team is difficult, and although the challenge was too much to overcome for this kid others are going to get there.

In the meantime, good luck to Owen Moffat for his future.