Alistair Johnston on Celtic’s underdog status in Champions League

The right-back has made 16 appearances for the Scottish Champions in Europe’s elite club competition since he arrived from Montreal in January 2023.

Johnston played an influential role in Celtic’s progression to the Champions League knockout playoff round last season, playing every game in the league phase, though the Canadian acknowledges the difficulty of facing top-tier opponents.

Speaking to One Soccer on YouTube, Johnston said: “When you’re at a club like Celtic, it’s about going out there, no matter how the game is going, chest out, head up, confident.”

“Because I know in the Champions League, when you play against a team like Bayern Munich, you feel like you’re on top of it, then you look across, and they don’t look fazed, how difficult that can be when you’re technically the underdog in the match. So it’s about us doing that domestically as well and realising that, look, you can win games just on your body language.”

Last year, Johnston committed his future to Celtic by agreeing to a long-term deal that will keep him at the club until the summer of 2029.

The 26 year-old revealed that he turned to a sports psychologist for support during a dip in his performance levels: “I could tell performances were lagging a little bit and I just felt like I was a little overwhelmed,” he said.

“And that’s when I actually started speaking to a sports psychologist and they really helped me with understanding, okay, yeah, being out in public in Glasgow is really difficult. It’s taxing and understanding that.”

“And don’t feel like you need to constantly put on a face, but understand that, okay, that is when you leave your front door, it’s gonna be like that. So, you need to have alternate ways to just completely decompress. And that’s when I decided I was gonna move from a flat in the West End and move out and get a house with a private garden and everything, so that we could have the dog running about and just have a bit more privacy.”

“And that’s something that I learned is that it was those smaller sacrifices, kind of things like that, that made a big difference for me. Having your own personal space and just finding ways to get away from it. And again, I’m only famous in a 20-mile radius of Glasgow.”

Conor Spence

New Celtic signing Ross Doohan spoke to The Celtic Star and two other fan media outlets earlier this week, with Conor Spence asking the questions for us. Watch the video below…

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