Celtic Underground Recruitment Reports – Summer 2025

Ross Hall profiles potential targets for summer 2025

If you haven’t read the introduction to this then I’d suggest giving it a look before you dive into this and it can be found here:

(1) 16th of June, 1st of July and the 1st of September: Transfer Window Party

Let me start with something that is often said that bugs me. It’s when people say recruitment in football is easy. They are talking crap, it’s damn hard to do it well because a good recruitment setup will want to be as informed as they can be and that takes time. It is easy to make easy, but only if you just want to turn it into a lottery based on what an agent friend tells you they can do for you without actually doing any real digging of your own, or live by the idea that one size fits all.

A good scout or analyst needs to know their club inside out and look at things from multiple angles, doing their best to know exactly what their manager and club wants, knowing the biases and preferences in players that you and the decision makers in your club have and trying to balance that with the idea that talent can come in all different shapes and sizes.

More specific to this, when you are using video like I have for much of this, trying to see all the things that the camera man isn’t all that interested in, like off the ball movements. It’s hours, days, nights of compare and contrast, looking at data, reading reports and trying to see if the data is in line with the reality, or looking at the reality and then validating it with the data. Then when you are looking at the same player in different games you have to account for the levels of difficulty that each fixture can have, what the game means to the players and clubs and what is being asked of that player in that game (this can be extremely difficult when using video, data or both because it’s a team sport that has multiple moving parts).

It’s at times all consuming, it’s a football tidal wave on the brain, and at times you can feel like you are bashing your head off the one oar you have left whilst stood on a boat in the middle of the sea trying to find a mythical creature that someone has told you they need you to find, only for you to realise that might not exist in the world you live in.

Some clubs in big leagues and far nicer environments spend vast sums of money on trying to get it right, and yet no one has come close to finding the exact recipe for that super success rate. In the English pyramid last year clubs paid agents over 500 million pounds, and on a rough estimate all those clubs combined will have spent less than 10% of that figure on scouting and analytics, maybe that explains a big part of the issue.

As for this presentation. I’ve based it around the idea that Rodgers has hinted at, and that is one of a bit of a reset. He’s said this a few times over the last 12 to 18 months “teams have a life cycle”. So, while I have players in mind who are 26+ I decided to focus on players who are younger and who have enough quality to make in impression, with enough potential for a coach like Rodgers who is driven by helping players reach new levels. Players who also fit into a trading model that could see them be valuable to us if they stayed for 5, 6 or 7 years or valuable to us if they were successful and were to move on within their first contract as a Celtic player.

I had said previously I’d probably add an older player or two but most you’ll already know enough about. Would I turn down a Christian Eriksen in the right circumstances, no chance. His desire to play the game after everything he went through says a lot, his football education through the likes of Ajax, Inter and Denmark along with his experiences at the top levels in Europe and on the international stage are worth their weight in gold. If I’m Paolo Bernardo, Kyle Ure or Liam Kennedy I’m absolutely chomping at the bit to get a chance to train alongside a player like that, but it is a 2-way thing. The club has to see that willingness from an older player to come in and do more than collect a pension top up, they will want a player who can be valuable on the pitch and to be someone who will help bring others up levels.

I’m a big believer that if you can get one or two experienced heads in who have a willingness to educate and share what they have learned with others then you can get great value from that. Guys like Joe Hart and Kasper Schmeichel are proof of that, and maybe there is an argument for an extra outfield player who has that top tier experience to join the club next season just to help the likes of Callum McGregor and James Forrest in terms of setting the standards based upon a good career in the game. Some candidates might be the likes of:

Christian Eriksen, Joel Veltman, Raul Jimenez and Andrej Kramaric are all players who have situations that will be up for review in the summer as free transfers or on small fees. All of whom would be interesting. Maybe Kevin De Bruyne has always fancied the idea of living in Scotland, bit of fishing, maybe always fancied going down the Barras, or has held a lifelong ambition to spot Nessie.

In terms of the players who are in the slide show and how they got there, well I put them there (cheeky). A lot of the thought was about finding players who have enough experience to gives them a sound base (games, come out of good academies or leagues), and a ceiling that is a few levels above where they currently are. The main focus around places to start looking was data led to an extent, with a focus on leagues where there is a level of intensity and physical demands that we have here in Scotland. Top leagues in countries like Czech Republic (which is just shy of the EPL in some of the metrics), Portugal, Switzerland and Austria who all rank above the SPFL when looking at the physical demands on players in terms of ground coverage and highspeed runs. Then you have a few in and around the SPFL like the Eliteserien in Norway, or much to many peoples surprise the J1 league in Japan, and then you have the Danish Superliga, Belgian Pro League and the Swedish Allsvenskan just below.

It's also important to note that some of these players availability is by no means guaranteed, and their value is never set in stone which is why I haven’t placed values on any of them. All it takes is one EPL team to sniff in their direction, and a player who was being valued at 5 million is all of a sudden worth 25 million.

Slides 1-9

Slides 9-17

Slides 18-22

You can view the images as a sideshow at this link - https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1zmzO3zBZvj8QN-E3LbF8v6RJioT9gifZrJ2kcY2K-j4/mobilepresent?slide=id.g34bfd402b55_0_1273

The Others And The Posted Missing

The last slide is the others, and these are a variety of players who I like, some are very raw, some just missed out on the more detailed section, and one or two are probably wishful thinking. There were also a few South Americans who are still based in South America that I didn’t add because I’m aware that the club has a bit of a fear when looking into that market, that needs to change but until it does there is no point in me wasting time looking in that direction for the sake of this type of content. We do in my opinion need to learn lessons from moves for the likes of Scheidt and Bernabei and ask what we could have done better with ID and helping them settle to allows us to approach those moves with confidence, not be afraid of acknowledging what we need to do better and thus shutting off a continent loaded with fantastic players.

There are also some players that I haven’t listed at all that we have been linked with that I really like. Guys like Mathias Kvistgaarden (longtime fan) and Raul Moro who impressed me when I looked at him just before he got injured. Those 2 along with many more could have been listed. I also didn’t really go into detail on leftbacks because I’m led to believe that area is sorted, if that changes then I’ll maybe look at it as a standalone article down the line.

I think all in I’ve had a detailed look at data for around 500+ players, narrowing that down using what I would class as key metrics and then looked at what I could find about their current situation, some were already set to move in the summer, others fell into that category of having significant English or top team interest that would mean they wouldn’t be viable options for us early in the window. Maybe later on if that interest fell away, but I’m a big advocate for Rodgers getting his targets in early to allow him to get some good work done with them in the summer and that is also factored into my list of options.

In the end I’m not happy with my list, I never am, but I am happy in my belief that every player I’ve listed fits, or could quickly fit into this current Celtic structure as I understand it. I believe they are players that Brendan Rodgers would see levels in, and that he would enjoy helping them reach those levels. As above the one thing I cannot tell you about is the personal level beyond what you’d find by doing a Google news search and translating some hearsay on club forums that I don’t have the time to even try and confirm.

To finish this up I need to thank Ben Griffis @BeGriffis (X and Bluesky) for the data sheets his tools allow me to create, it makes life so much easier, and DataMB_ (X and Bluesky) for having a tool that is great and affordable in a market that is dominated by HUDL who are not just pricing people like me out of their product, but many clubs who just do not have thousands of pounds to pay for a Wyscout product that hasn’t really been developed in years, and then rinsing clubs for all the add-ons that they’ve pulled into their monopoly.

So, that is that for now. I’ll likely do some opinion pieces on players we are linked with over the coming weeks and months but after many, many hours over many, many days I’m happy this piece is done.

I hope you enjoy looking through it. I look forward to reading feedback, opinions or anything else in the Substack chat and now I’m away to have a good break from looking at this screen.