The 2025 Ballon d’Or ceremony will take place on Monday evening, and Gianluigi Donnarumma is expected to win the prize for the best goalkeeper.
Last season, Paris Saint-Germain joined Celtic in becoming only the 11th side in history to win the Treble, alongside the European Cup.
PSG thrashed Inter to win their first-ever Champions League trophy, with Donnarumma, who has since left and joined Manchester City, playing a key role in the French club putting their name alongside the elite.
It has been quite a career for Donnarumma so far, who started and made his competitive debut at 16 for AC Milan, and now Celtic are being told to follow his example.
Celtic told to start Viljami Sinisalo and drop Kasper Schmeichel
On Sunday, Celtic beat Partick Thistle to book their League Cup semi-final ticket and another Hampden showdown with Rangers.
With the fixture list starting to pile up and the European fixtures around the corner, Brendan Rodgers rotated his goalkeepers by dropping first-choice Kasper Schmeichel to the bench and starting Viljami Sinisalo.
But Pat Bonner told BBC Sportsround (21/09/25) that he wants this to become a permanent thing, and he wants Sinisalo as Celtic’s number one instead of their 38-year-old veteran.
“Sinisalo is an interesting one,” said Bonner. “There has been a lot of debate, with people I have spoken to, and they want to talk goalkeeping to me, as you can imagine.
“Schmeichel, listen, he was a wonderful goalkeeper. Fantastic career, and he started his career up here, remember, and went on to do fantastic things. He has got to a stage in his life now where I would probably go with Sinisalo to maybe start games, and he would be the back-up.
“Whether he would be happy with that or not, I don’t know. I think about the future and how you are going to develop a young goalkeeper. I don’t want to see young goalkeepers sitting on the bench and not getting game time. I want to see them playing. That’s how you develop. That’s how you develop your decision-making.
“I think he has done enough last year to justify putting him in and starting him – from a future perspective, I just think Sinisalo fits the profile.”
Celtic told to look at Gianluigi Donnarumma
One of the points Bonner was trying to make is how many appearances Sinisalo, who joined from Aston Villa last summer, has made in his career so far.
Sinisalo has 98 senior appearances to his name, including a loan spell at Ayr United, but Celtic’s legendary keeper thinks now is the time to increase those numbers.
Bonner explained that the likes of Donnarumma were well on their way to hitting 200 appearances by the time they were in Sinisalo’s shoes, and the same now needs to happen in Glasgow.
“When you look at the top goalkeepers, Donnarumma, Courtois, all the top keepers, even Schmeichel himself,” added Bonner.
“At 23, those guys are playing over 200 games. Donnarumma is 26 or 27 now, and he has played over 500 games. I know he is a one-off.
“But if you look at the list of top, top goalkeepers. They have all played a huge amount of games by the time they were 23 and 24.”
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