Alistair Johnston confesses Celtic pressures took mental toll as he reveals 2 solutions to adapting to goldfish bowl

Daily Record

5 hours ago

The defender shed a light on the mental aspect of being a Celtic player
Alistair Johnston lifted three trophies in a breathless first six months at Celtic.
But the Canada right-back admits the whirlwind start to his Parkhead career took its toll off the pitch.
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The 26-year-old swapped CF Montreal for the Scottish champions in December 2022 and ended his debut campaign as a Treble-winner.
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Johnston was an instant hit in the Hoops, seamlessly replacing Josip Juranovic and making the position his own.
But while fans may have thought he took to life at Celts like a duck to water, Johnston confessed he felt mentally shattered coping with the demands of representing one of Europe's biggest clubs.
In a candid interview with One Soccer, the Celtic star revealed how life in the Glasgow goldfish bowl forced him to seek help from a therapist - and even move house to escape the public eye.
He said: "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.
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"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.
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"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.
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"I think that's pretty clear. When you come back to Canada, you can walk around. My wife's from America so we go down there for example in the summer. We've got a lovely spot out by the beach, we go out there with the dog and walk around.
"It's stuff like that, that can just remind you what you really enjoy in life and that's something I've never struggled with. I don't identify myself strictly as a footballer. That's not even the first word I'd use to describe myself.
"So it's really about understanding that and not getting too lost in that fact so when you do get home, you are able to leave it at the door a little bit.
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"That's something a lot of players struggle with when you get to these big football clubs where the demand's massive and you're in a city where it is non-stop. People live and breathe it.
"But it wasn't something that I could easily just flip a switch. It took some time, understanding and talking to some professionals to really grasp what I need to do to be successful."
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Johnston might be a huge favourite among the green-and-white faithful.
But no player is safe from scrutiny. And the defender says he's learned to block out the noise and focus on the job at hand.
He said: "I think when you get to one of those clubs, something you don't enjoy winning maybe as much as you should. It's almost more of a relief that you won.
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"When things are going bad, it can feel like it's the end of the world. I think now, I've really realised that, okay, you pass the ball backwards and the crowd's going to boo.
"But at the same time, as long as you're giving everything for a purpose, you can tell them, calm down, it's going to be okay. We're going to get through this.
"It's never as good as you think it is, it's never as bad as you think it is. I can be pretty level-headed when it comes to that kind of stuff.
"When you're in a fishbowl, it feels like everything is magnified. But you really just need to understand what voices are really important, and which ones should you be listening to and which ones should you shut out."
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