Celtic do a lot of things right on the pitch and that is why they have had so much success in domestic football over the years, with a treble on the cards this season.
The Hoops are set to win the Scottish Premiership title for the fourth season running and made their way to the final of the SFA Cup with a 5-0 win over St. Johnstone at Hampden Park on Sunday.
Brendan Rodgers has built a relentless team that is hungry to win at every opportunity, which is evidenced by their form this season across all competitions.
It took German giants Bayern Munich to narrowly knock the Hoops out of the Champions League, whilst they have already won the League Cup, and are on course to win the Premiership and the SFA Cup.
Celtic do not get everything right, though, as no club can be expected to be perfect in all areas, and one aspect of the game that they may want to improve is their pathway from the academy to the first-team.
Callum McGregor, 31, is the only academy graduate to have started more than six league games for the club this season, whilst no academy graduate under the age of 26 has started a single league match, and the Hoops have fumbled exciting prospects from their youth set-up in the past.
How Celtic fumbled Karamoko Dembele
Karamoko Dembele joined the Bhoys at the age of 10 in 2013 and, unbelievably, played for the U20 side at the age of just 13, which led to comparisons to Barcelona legend Lionel Messi.
David Feeney, who coached the forward at youth level, compared him to the Argentine icon, saying: “I think he is very similar to Lionel Messi. If he has the right guidance, then the sky is the limit for him.”
Dembele went on to make his first-team debut in the Premiership at the end of the 2018/19 campaign, playing 45 minutes off the bench against Hearts, but he only played seven times in the following two seasons and then suffered a fractured ankle in the summer of 2021 that stunted his development under Ange Postecoglou.
After just ten appearances and 133 minutes of action on the pitch for the first-team, Celtic and Postecoglou opted to release the young forward in the summer of 2022.
Dembele joined Stade Brest on a free transfer ahead of the 2022/23 campaign and has spent the last two seasons on loan in England, with Blackpool and Queens Park Rangers, respectively.
Starts
29
13
xG
N/A
1.14
Goals
8
2
Big chances created
15
4
Key passes per game
2.0
1.1
Assists
13
4
As you can see in the table above, the 22-year-old attacker has provided quality in both League One and the Championship since the start of last season, scoring ten goals and providing 17 assists.
The left-footed whiz may not have lived up to the Messi comparison yet, but he has still forged a decent career for himself so far and is one that Celtic fumbled before he got the chance to prove himself with regular minutes on the pitch.
Dembele is not the only promising youngster who has been fumbled by the Scottish giants, though. The Hoops had Ben Doak emerge at a similar time and also failed to see the best of his talents at Parkhead.
Why Ben Doak was Karamoko Dembele 2.0
Just like Dembele, Doak came up through the youth ranks in Glasgow and caught the eye enough at academy level to earn a first-team breakthrough at a young age.
The left-footed starlet played 25 minutes over two matches off the bench in the Scottish Premiership at the age of 16 in the 2021/22 campaign under Postecoglou, which meant that he made his senior bow at the end of Dembele’s time at Parkhead.
Unfortunately, however, it was also the end of Doak’s time in Glasgow because he was out of contract at the end of that season and decided to move on to new pastures.
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The Scotland youth international decided to join Premier League giants Liverpool for a compensation fee of just £600k, which meant that the Bhoys lost him on the cheap because they could not get him to commit his long-term future to Glasgow.
Celtic may look back on his time at the club with regret and wonder if they could have done more, with extra game time on the pitch, to convince him to stay.
Doak played ten first-team games for the Reds in the 2022/23 and 2023/24 campaigns combined before joining Middlesbrough on loan last summer, thriving in the Championship this season.
Starts
21
Goals
3
Big chances created
7
Key passes per game
1.9
Assists
7
Dribbles completed per game
1.5
As you can see in the table above, the 19-year-old star has racked up ten goals and assists combined in 21 starts in the division, whilst Dembele has managed two goals and four assists for QPR in the same league at the age of 22.
These statistics suggest that Doak, who was described as a “generational” Scottish talent by analyst John Walker, could be an even greater prospect than Dembele, whilst playing in a similar position on the flank.
The Middlesbrough loanee has shown great promise in his performances in the Championship and, therefore, will be another Celtic academy graduate who the club may look back on with regret as they failed to extract the maximum out of his talent before his time at the club was up.
Doak only had 25 minutes on the pitch for the Hoops at senior level and his form for Boro in England suggests that the Scottish giants could have had an incredibly exciting wing talent on their hands if they had managed to keep hold of him back in 2022.
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