Alistair Johnston has revealed how the intensity of life at Celtic took a toll on him in his first year in Glasgow and how he found his way back with help from a sports psychologist and a move to the quiet outskirts.
The 26-year-old was a January addition after the 2024 World Cup, in which rumours linking Celtic to the player emerged. The competition was held in the November, and Johnston had signed all the papers in December, before officially joining in the winter transfer window and making his debut at Ibrox.
The Canadian full-back admitted the constant attention that comes with playing for Celtic began to affect his performances. He told One Soccer:
“It’s something that I actually learned as I got to Celtic. It was something that you hear about, you know, it’s a fishbowl, all these different things.
“You never really truly feel it or can understand or grasp it until you’re actually living it. So, I think through about the first six months to a year, I just kind of was taking everything in. And after that, it started to weigh on me.
“I could tell performances were lagging a little bit and I just felt like I was a little overwhelmed. 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.”
He married his partner this summer, the only available date he could manage with the World Cup next year, but still managed to join up with his teammates for the Gold Cup.
His country and him finished at the top of their group, and are now in the latter stages of the tournament. The right-back received an elbow to the face against El-Salvador in their last group stage match, as tey saw out the nine-man opposition to seal the group.
Canada hasn’t won the tournament since 2000, and they’ll be hoping to change that this summer.
