With Liam Shaw, Osaze Urhoghide and Liel Abada all recently signing for the Bhoys’ under the watchful eye of Ange Postecoglou, there seems to be a reinvigorated belief around the East End of Glasgow that the much-needed rebuild is going swimmingly well.
Despite the capture of the three exciting young talents, attentions are starting to turn to sorting the defensive imbalance that Celtic currently have. With both full-back positions being contentious to say the least, it hasn’t helped that star defender Kristoffer Ajer looks likely to depart Paradise.
Ajer has made it clear of his intentions to leave Celtic Park – creating a saga consisting of broken promises, poorly structured bids and public criticism along the way. Celtic’s board are reluctant to let him leave; however, the money influx that the Norwegian will bring in is a substantial amount. The difficult part of the task is finding an adequate replacement for one of Celtic’s better players – something which the board believe they have found in Carl Starfelt.
READ MORE: An Insight Into Incoming Centre-Back Carl Starfelt
Admittedly, there won’t have been many Celtic fans who will have heard of the Swede before he was linked to Celtic by Fabrizio Romano last week. However, the expertise of Swedish football that is Lee Roden believes Celtic really are onto a winner with Starfelt.
Roden, who has vast experience in the footballing industry – having worked with ESPN, BBC, FourFourTwo and even our own Glasgow Herald and STV – has lived in Sweden for the past seven years as a freelance sport writer, and taken a real shine to the football that Scandinavia’s biggest country has to offer.
Speaking exclusively to The Celtic Star’s Will Lancaster, Roden believed that despite not venturing on to greater things than Rubin Kazan at this state of his career, all the tools were there for Starfelt to have a second bite at the cherry and announce himself on the Scottish stage.
“It has real potential to work out well”, said Roden.
“He’s from the best academy in Sweden at IF Brommapojkarna, which is the academy that has produced Dejan Kulusevski amongst others; so despite not hitting the heights that he could have reached as of yet, he may be something of a late bloomer.”
Celtic are no strangers to Swedish players who are late bloomers. Henrik Larsson didn’t exactly hit the ground running at Feyenoord, before he was brought over to Glasgow at the age of 26 – as is the case with Starfelt. It was under Wim Jansen where Henrik arguably became Celtic’s greatest player of all time and was adorned with the nickname ‘The King of Kings’.
Wholeheartedly, I don’t expect this to happen; yet Roden believes that there are similarities in Starfelt’s case. With his move from Gothenburg to Kazan not working out, Roden believes Celtic is a place where Scandinavian footballers can come to ply their trade in a country with similar cultures to their own – something which will hugely benefit Starfelt.
“I don’t think his time in Russia has proved to be what he’d hoped, and Scotland is generally a good place for Swedes to settle as the standard of football is of a similar level to the Allsvenskan (the Swedish top-flight). Also, Sweden itself is of a similar culture to Scotland as opposed to Russia.”
“He definitely has something to prove, and he is moving to a side where there are decent conditions to do so. Let’s see!”
As a well rehearsed journalist in covering the Allsvenskan, I’d trust Roden over the so-called experts who magically had an opinion on Starfelt as soon as the rumours came out!
As a Scotsman who has an insanely key eye on the Swedish game, it is likely that Roden will be keeping tabs on Starfelt, and tweeting about him regularly. If you are interested as such, you can follow him on Twitter here.
