Watching James Forrest is watching the end of an era. Celtic needs to get a grip.

It is great today to see my namesake doing the rounds and talking about his glittering Celtic career. It is great that he still has a year left. It is great that he’s still keeping himself fit, because you can see when he plays that he still has something to offer.

It used to be that you were pretty much washed up when you hit your early 30s, and you were just marking time until the end of your career. But now, with the way players maintain their fitness and keep going, a guy like James—who stays in good shape, keeps his mind sharp—can go on for a lot longer.

Earlier today I watched Celtic’s official video of him after he’d scored his hundredth goal. It’s incredible to think that we are witnessing a player of this quality, of this magnitude, at the club—and he’s still, to some extent or another, a bit of an unsung hero. A guy with a lot of critics, even now.

Let me say something: I was one of them.

Back in 2015/16, something weird happened to me. I was working between two websites at the time—this site and my original site, On Fields of Green. And it was on the On Fields of Green email system that I got a message from an agent in Russia who thought, incredibly, that James Forrest the footballer and James Forrest the blogger might be the same person. It was a kind of end-run around the club at a time when James was almost out of contract.

I wrote that story up for the site, published it, and even got some media attention over it. The club itself refused to comment, but they must have been aware of it.

Things like that happen every now and again. Agents are sniffing out players in very underhanded ways. It seems this guy was taking a flyer on behalf of some tiny agency, and they simply made a mistake.

But this only happened because James had allowed his contract to run down—or the club did—and he didn’t seem to want to sign a new deal. I don’t know whether there were things happening inside the club that he wasn’t happy about, I don’t know whether he wasn’t getting the assurances he wanted about his future. Whatever it was, it looked as if he was running his contract down and was going to go on a free at the end of it. I didn’t care either way. He wasn’t playing particularly well.

He didn’t seem happy. He wasn’t in the team as much as he had been at the start. He was not only underused, but I think he felt undervalued. And that surprises me, because the manager at the time, of course, was Ronny—and Ronny was the guy who effectively discovered both Kieran Tierney and Callum McGregor. He gave them their first real big boosts as first-team players.

But the thing with James was that he was looking for some kind of sign that the club wanted him to stay and had a role for him—but also that the club itself was going places. I always got the impression that some people didn’t really believe that under Mr Deila, and I write that as someone who has the greatest respect and affection for Ronny as a Celtic boss and think that we owe him a lot.

At that point I was extremely frustrated watching James Forrest play because he wasn’t hitting the heights we expected. He didn’t look like a guy who was ever going to get to 100 goals. Something had just gone out of his game, and watching him made you want to bang your head against the wall.

I was stunned when he signed a new deal almost as soon as Brendan arrived. Not only did Rodgers see something in him that made him appreciate Forrest in a way that maybe Ronny had not, but James’s enthusiasm for the club was rekindled by the hiring of a manager like Rodgers, one who unleashed his full potential. For a while, he was as good as all the hype had suggested he might be.

The best thing that ever happened to his career was Brendan Rodgers. And what satisfaction and joy we all got from him after that. The best years of his career have been spent under this manager, and it’s no surprise that Rodgers has found a role for him in this team all over again.

But I’m going to be honest—watching James makes me sad sometimes, because of what he is and what he represents.

Next season we’ll have four homegrown players in the 25-man squad: Ralston, Tierney, McGregor, and Forrest. But only James is a one-club player.

Callum I consider a one-club player, but he won’t ever get that accolade because he spent time out on loan at Notts County. Ralston has spent his whole career here so far, but he’s never made the impact those three have—or at least not yet. And I write that as someone who thinks he’s an excellent player.

But James is our current one-club shining example to every young player who ever dreamed about pulling on the shirt. And the question that automatically comes to mind when I watch him is: when will we see his like again? When will we see the likes of a Tierney, or a Ralston, or a McGregor again?

I mean, that question arises when I watch all of them—but it rises more when I watch James than any other player, because he is a one-club pro. And the much darker question that comes to mind is: are we watching the last one-club player Celtic will produce in our lifetime? Are we watching the passing of an era, and not just the latter stages of his stunning Celtic career?

It’s one of the worst things about watching the decline of our academy over the last few years. Waiting for something that might never come under the current system and the current structure—the emergence of a brand new talent, the emergence of a player who can replace Forrest or even better his accomplishments.

Although that will be incredibly difficult to do.

At some point, our academy has to improve. At some point, those who run it have to realise that we’re not going to get anywhere playing in the Lowland League, and they have to shake it up.

And I know that it’s not just down to them. I know that. I know this is partly the fault of the governing bodies, who have not given us any kind of competition to play in. This is their fault as much as anyone’s.

But the fact that we—the best funded, best organised, best run club in the Lowland League by about two million miles—have yet to even get near to winning it shows you that there are major problems in our own house.

Not only are players not developing as we would have liked and turning into first-team players, but these guys aren’t even good enough to compete at that abysmally low level. And that is genuinely disturbing and shocking.

The feeling grows that all we’re doing is pissing away a lot of money at Lennoxtown—and that’s surely unacceptable and especially for a board that prides itself on financial prudence and good governance. It is absurd that we’ve allowed this level of stagnation in such a critical area.

None of us should be watching James Forrest and wondering if he is the last of his kind. The last player we’ll see in our lifetimes who comes out of the academy, makes so many appearances for the first team, wins so many trophies, scores so many goals—and is essentially a one-club footballer.

Our club has always produced those kinds of players. Our club has always been able to rely on a small core of homegrown talent whose ambition was to wear the Celtic shirt.

And I know there are obstacles in the way of any player now being a one-club man, because the lure of big money down south will always be there to tempt even the most diehard Celtic fan. You only have to look at Kieran Tierney to see that—between the money and the idea of playing in a better league, even the greatest might not want to stay that long.

But here’s the thing—we’re not producing any players worthy of making that an issue. We’re not producing players good enough to make us want to move heaven and earth to keep them. And that’s where the real problem is.

Don’t tell me that the issue is that we can’t hang on to our best young talent or that we’re just failing to play these guys in the team. Our best young talent isn’t going to the Arsenals and the Chelseas. Our best young talent isn’t good enough to play for our first team on a regular basis. And when we start graduating players who are, then I’ll worry about those who leave.

What concerns me most is that none are coming through. And anyone who thinks we’ve let tremendous talent walk out the door unheralded—they have to start by telling me who those players are, and where they’ve ended up.

As I have said repeatedly, no club will spend money it doesn’t have to spend—and certainly not this one. If the answer to some of Celtic’s first-team dilemmas was already at Lennoxtown, those guys wouldn’t be allowed to wither on the vine.

They’d be in the team. They aren’t there.

And that is where the problem lies—and where it has lain for a while. Until we start acknowledging that problem, we are never going to solve it.

Our club used to produce James Forrests all the time.

We don’t do that anymore, and that’s what makes me sad, watching this exceptional servant of the club near the end of his career—because I do not know who we replace him with when he’s gone.