Brendan Rodgers admits he told 24-year-old Celtic player to get his ‘training right’ last summer

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Brendan Rodgers has shared what he told Mikey Johnston after the Celtic winger asked to leave the club last summer.

The Celtic boss allowed Johnston to go out on loan in January to West Brom and, to be fair to the winger, he has lit up the English Championship.

But it seems that Johnston wanted to leave sooner than that but Rodgers has told how he set the 24-year-old a challenge before he allowed him to go and seek first-team football elsewhere.

Rodgers said [The Herald], “Brilliant. I’ve said before about Mikey’s talent. He has been here a long time. Listen, the shirt is a different weight of shirt when you leave here. But Mikey has always shown the talent.

“He has had a number of years where he has picked up lots of injuries and he needed to get a run of games.

“I spoke to him in the summer when he was looking to go on loan, and I said stay and get your training right because you’ve not had a period of training consistently never mind playing games.

“He was able to do that, then he featured in some games for us, and once he trained and featured it was then about getting him game time.

“He has gone and done fantastic and shown the talent everyone knows he has.

“Hopefully he continues with that and then we can look at it again in the summer.”

There is little doubt that the challenge Rodgers set Johnston has paid off. It’s just unfortunate that it’s not paying off for Celtic.

But then that’s just how football works sometimes. Players can either be a success at a club like Celtic or they can’t.

You can have all the ability in the world but if players can’t handle the expectancy from the fans of winning each week then it’s simply not going to work out.

And that seems to be the case for Johnston. Since his debut in 2018, the Irish winger has failed to nail down a first-team place as his own yet when he goes out on loan, he seems to smash it.

Just look at his time at Vitoria Guimaraes as a perfect example of that. Johnston was an everpresent in the Portuguese side as he helped them qualify for Europe last season.

Hopefully, Johnston continues to impress and earns a move that will see him carve out a career elsewhere because, at Celtic, it seems as if it’s just not going to happen for him.