Rudi Vata’s damning indictment of the Celtic youth system proves categorically that it is not fit for purpose

This morning in the Daily Record, Rudi Vata opened up on the difficulties his son Rocco faced at Celtic when it came to a pathway to the first team.

Rocco Vata left Celtic in 2024.

Vata departed for Watford in August of that year with another promising youth prospect, Daniel Kelly.

We’ve also discussed the difficulties Daniel Kelly faced before he moved south of the border on the Trinity Tims podcast.

Vata and Kelly’s stories are not isolated.

The Celtic youth system is clearly not fit for purpose.

And while we’re currently seeing plenty of action involving Dane Murray and Colby Donovan, the reality is they broke through to the first team due to a lack of resources available to Brendan Rodgers before he vacated his role at Celtic Park.

They got their chance to prove what they can do, and they took it.

Dane Murray has learned the hard way.

With some poor errors against Hearts and the Ibrox side, Murray still has a way to go before he’s the finished product.

Rocco Vata did not get the same opportunity Murray and Donovan got.

According to his father, many players in the youth system at Celtic simply give up.

They leave because they find their pathway to the first team blocked.

Rocco Vata had hoped to follow in his father’s steps.

He hoped to become a first team regular at Celtic, and the few flashes we saw of him we’re promising.

He had been scoring regularly for the youth team, but it still wasn’t enough for him to make his breakthrough to the first team.

Having discussed the paltry contract offer that Daniel Kelly received from the club before his move to MIllwall on the Trinity Tims, it comes as no surprise that Rocco Vata received something similar.

Rudi Vata, who had been negotiating on behalf of his son insists that it was a lack of long term think at Celtic that forced Vata Jnr. to choose Watford instead of his boyhood club.

That certainly comes as no shock.

This season has proven that much in spades.

Long-term vision is as rare as hen’s teeth at Celtic Park.

Here is some of what Rudi Vata had to say about his dealings with Celtic and his son’s career trajectory:

I was speaking to my boy the other day. I was telling him, ‘listen, if you are a kid of 19 or 20 years old and you want to play football to make money you will never make it,'” he told the Herald.

Too many kids leave Scotland for England thinking of the money and the players who think only of money will never fulfil their dream.

I could actually have got a better deal for Rocco. I was with a sporting director negotiating his contract and if I had pushed I could have got more.

I said to him, ‘what you are offering him is more than enough. He is going to work hard to earn it because right now I’m not sure he even deserves this money for the amount of games he has played. I put a clause in for him to score goals and assists and work hard so that he can earn his money from performance.

Yes the money for my boy was more than what Celtic offered, but in my opinion, Celtic did not have a proper project, they did not have a proper plan or pathway.

It’s now become a familiar problem for Scottish clubs with no obvious way to stop the flow of young talent to England.

No proper project, no proper plan, no pathway.

Celtic could stop the flow of young talent to England tomorrow if the club really wanted to.

We’ve apparently built a state of the art “world class” training centre in Barrowfield, a stone’s throw away from Celtic Park, so why not start filling it with “world class” coaches?

To create “world class” youth prospects?

We do, after all, aspire to be “world class” in everything we do, don’t we?

The problem is, the kind of “world class” Michael Nicholson refers to is very different to the kind of “world class” the Celtic fans think the club should be aspiring towards.

That certainly doesn’t involve “jobs for the boys” when it comes to former Celtic players.

Players who may have been great servants during their time at the club, but clearly aren’t showing they can take the youth team forward in any meaningful way.

Celtic now look likely to lose Dara Jikiemi to Liverpool.

Jikiemi will be eligible to sign a full-time contract with Celtic at the end of this season, but there is no way he will if Liverpool come calling.

Liverpool will make him an offer Celtic will not even attempt to match.

And therein lies the problem.

We do not make any serious attempts to retain our top youth talent.

The club claims they cannot compete with what clubs south of the border offer.

But, as Rudi Vata alluded to earlier, if the club gave promising youth players a pathway to the first team, this wouldn’t be happening.

Vata was right when he said its not about money.

If you offer a young player a secure pathway and career at the club he grew up with, the likelihood is he will choose that.

Celtic do not do that.

The club just says it can’t compete with English clubs.

It never will compete with that kind of attitude, and we’ll just continue to lose all of our serious talent to clubs in England.

Funnily enough, Rudi Vata seems to know what it will take to keep our top talent.

What he says here makes an awful lot of sense:

If I was working for Celtic now, I would not sign any more than four or five foreign players for the club, he said.

I would focus on Scottish talent because who would understand better than the Scottish players what it means to wear a Celtic, Rangers or Aberdeen jersey?

It’s a sad situation to be in. I see young players from academies now being loaned out to the lower leagues in Scotland until they lose motivation, give in and disappear.

They don’t get the opportunities because clubs sign so many foreigners. If you are some kind of Larsson or Moravcik or Laudrup, fine.

But in the Scottish game now you see many average players and they are blocking the path of the young players. So they move to England instead.

Imagine that?

Focusing on Scottish talent.

Celtic have all of the facilities to do just that.

Isn’t it about time they started investing in the kind of coaching that will help retain all of our upcoming talent?

Rather than losing it all to the English system?

Where, in most cases, players just disappear in the game down there and end up plying their trade in the lower Leagues.

They could start by hiring someone with the same mindset as Rudi Vata.

After all, he’s been through it all with his son.

He knows exactly why youth players don’t make it at Celtic.

That needs to change.

Choose Read Celtic as a “Preferred Source” on Google News for quick access to the news you value.