Celtic’s January 22 signing explains why he had to get out on loan

Yosuke Ideguchi has spoken out about his Celtic frustrations and why he returned to Japan on loan in February.

The midfielder arrived at the same time as Reo Hatate and Daizen Maeda but while that duo have sampled the heights Ideguchi has been left looking on from the outside then from afar.

Being the victim of a brutal attack at Alloa on his debut set the midfielder back just as Hatate and Matt O’Riley began making big impressions on Ange Postecoglou’s side.

Ideguchi made a couple of substitute appearances as the season ended but as a defensive midfielder in a side that often has around 70% possession he had limited opportunities to impress.

The midfielder had faced similar frustrations previously in Europe when he was at Leeds United and loaned out to second tier clubs in Spain and Germany, a determination to make up for that drove the transfer to Celtic but with playing time non-existent e opted to return to the J-League and a loan spell with Avispa Fukuoka.

Japanese website Sportiva revealed:

During training one week before the opening of the 2022-2023 season, Ideguchi was overwhelmed and collided with equipment, sustaining a large laceration of nearly 20 cm around his left knee, and was forced to withdraw from the battlefield. As a result, he had to rebuild his condition, which had been increasing, and his “late start” was ominous.

Ideguchi explained:

I was unlucky with my injury, but I have to say that I am not good enough because I am a football player, including that. However, considering that I wasn’t used in the last game, I honestly don’t know if I would be used even if I had started the season without injury.

In that sense, I don’t know if it was because of an accident or if i was out of the managers plan from the beginning, but the fact that I wasn’t used at all in the end means that I didn’t have the power it needed.

In other words, even as the season progressed, I took it seriously, and I thought that I was responsible for the situation I was in, not anyone else’s fault. I felt that I was just training.

However, due to the large number of matches over there, there are almost no practice matches organized for players who have not played in matches like in Japanese J clubs have.

In that case, it is undeniable that players who are not involved in the game have no place to cultivate a sense of the game, and feel that they are training for the sake of training. To be honest, I didn’t think that playing soccer without knowing where I was going or what I was appealing to was doing me a favour.

For that reason, from a relatively early stage after the start of the new season, I told the club that I would like to leave the team if it was out of the manager’s plan, and that I wanted to join a team that had even the slightest chance of getting involved in the game.

I had a representative move. Of course, there is no guarantee that I will be able to play in other matches, but I was determined to play with a team that would allow me to stand on the starting line.

Although he has a contract that runs until June 2026 it is difficult to see any circumstances in which Ideguchi would return to play for Celtic.