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Celtic’s New Bhoy Raises An Interesting Question: How Far Back Are We Scouting Now?

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Marco Tillio sounds as if he’s got some game.

I read some stuff and watched some videos yesterday and people in Australia can’t praise him highly enough, and he looks like he has something as a player. But people praise their friends and others in the game all the time and those video clips can be greatly misleading.

This we all know. We can’t totally trust it.

But what we can trust is that he said Celtic has been keeping tabs on him for years, that he’s not an “Ange signing” at all but someone we’ve had on the radar for a while and would certainly have been recommended to Postecoglou as he has been recommended to Rodgers … and that we can believe in because if we’re doing a deep dive like that it’s only good.

And it makes me wonder; how far back are we now tracking players?

We know that we weren’t just looking at Liel Abada based on a season, we know we didn’t just take a mad punt on a Benfica reserve; we must watch a lot of Under 20 football, but do we watch Under 18 football and down through those ranks too?

One player – Odsonne Edouard – makes me think that we do.

He had not made a first team appearance in Paris … but he had starred at every international level under 21 and had even won a golden boot for a youth international tournament. His performances for the PSG youth team were stellar … how long had we tracked him for?

Imagine we’re going that deep.

Imagine we’re going deeper than that.

Imagine the analytics operation that would take and the talent to pull it together.

No wonder we’re so good at finding and spotting talent, and bringing them on. No wonder we’re capable of discovering these guys before other clubs have a sniff of them.

I know this; what we’re doing isn’t pure dumb luck.

Our approach has been finessed to a razor point and that’s why we got big money for Jota and could have had it for a half dozen other players in the team.

That’s amazing, and I cannot wait to see this kid play. Or to watch what Holm can do. I cannot wait to see who we’re going for next or how they perform.

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James Forrest has been the editor of The CelticBlog for 13 years. Prior to that, he was the editor of several digital magazines on subjects as diverse as Scottish music, true crime, politics and football. He ran the Scottish football site On Fields of Green and, during the independence referendum, the Scottish politics site Comment Isn't Free. He's the author of one novel, one book of short stories and one novella. He lives in Glasgow.

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