John Kennedy’s football career was effectively ended by a catastrophic knee injury on his Scotland debut in March 2004. Back then, Kennedy had the world at his feet. In the week before his injury, he had played a starring role in Celtic’s 0-0 draw against a Ronaldinho-inspired Barcelona in the Camp Nou and then started in a 2-1 win against Rangers at Ibrox. After multiple surgeries, Kennedy made his comeback three years later, but ultimately never returned to first-team football and retired in 2009.

Kennedy used those years of injury and rehab to lay the foundations for an elite coaching career. At Celtic, he has worked under managers such as Ange Postecoglou – who attempted to take him to Spurs in 2023 – and is now Brendan Rodgers’ assistant manager, playing a highly influential role in the club’s domestic and European success, including this season’s run to the play-off round of the Champions League, where they lost narrowly to Bayern Munich in February.

Here, he explains how his years on the sidelines opened up new avenues – and why his experiences have given him a superpower in dealing with injured players

By John Kennedy

Adversity makes you think differently. Through my years of injury and rehabilitation, I started to think about the possibility of not being able to play football again. I was only 21 at the time, but I had to start considering the bigger picture.

Before the injury, I'd gone through a period of years where it was very much about me. How am I going to make it into the Celtic first team? How am I going to establish myself in the Scotland team? How do I better myself? As much as it’s a team sport, everything revolves around progressing to the next point in your own career.

Through the injury and rehab, the blinkers started to come off. I started to understand how the whole club operated – through watching training and going to the games, I began to appreciate all the parts that must come together to make something work.

Instead of just watching a game back and analysing my own performance, I would watch what the whole team were doing. I would listen to Gordon Strachan, the Celtic manager at the time, give the team instructions and then watch it unfold from my seat in stand – or not unfold, and then watch Gordon correct things at half-time.

At half-time, I'd actually slip inside the dressing room just to be able to hear what was going on, then I’d go back to my seat in the stand for the second half. I picked up so much about preparation, game-planning, execution, then the review process.

It all changed for me in that period. As much as I didn't have a long career when I came back from injury, it prepared me for where I am now. So, when I stopped playing, I felt equipped to quickly move into something else, which was the other side of football – firstly analysis and recruitment, then coaching.

Now, I’m really passionate about process. The game's great – but it's about the preparation and organisation, how a week comes together to prepare the team for the match on a Saturday, so that there's no surprises. When we prepare for a game, we're mapping it out so that the players know what to expect. These things will happen. These are the solutions. Ultimately, the players are the decision-makers, but it's our job as coaches to best prepare them – then you hope that the game unfolds almost like watching a play.

We start with the common goal. What do we want our team to look like? How do we want it to perform? The outcome is the performance and the result. But you can't always control the result, so we try to control the performance first. We’re lucky at Celtic that the outcome – more often than not – is a good result but there's a long process to get to that point involving coaches, sports scientists, medical staff, chief executives, facilities.

Ultimately, the spectacle is out there on the pitch at Celtic Park. The whistle goes and that's what everybody's tuning in for – that’s the showpiece, the emotion. But there's a hell of a lot of hours that go into preparing for that.

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My own experience with injury now helps me relate to injured players. Everyone’s different and I think it's about getting to know the person. With Brendan Rodgers and all the staff at Celtic, there's a lot of interaction. Brendan's very much a people person. He wants to manage and make decisions, but he wants to get to know people. Every day he's got players coming in and out of his office. He'll sit them down and it isn't always a conversation about the game or the performance. It could be – how are you feeling, how are you settling, how's your family? That's his way of connecting with players and getting the best out of them.

Of course, we are pushing players and developing them, but it’s also our job to make them feel comfortable. And so that culture and environment feeds into how you handle them when they are injured.

There's always that initial period at the start of the injury process which is the darkest – you go from playing in big games to all of a sudden being out for the next six, nine months, a year. That's the hardest part because you are at the very start of the journey. Even though you have the glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel, it feels a long way away.

Communication with injured players is just as – or even more – important than speaking to guys who are playing every week. Silence can kill. You begin to talk to yourself – filling the void with made-up nonsense. It goes back to creating some form of clarity and understanding for them.

I've got the experience of coming through one of the worst injuries, so that's always a good starting point for me in terms of being able to say: I know where you're at, I know what you're thinking. A lot of times you can see them coming around and thinking: Yeah, I am feeling like that. Once you’ve made that connection, then you can start to shape the narrative: I get it. But ultimately this is not going to last. In a week's time you'll be back moving again, then you’ll be off your crutches. And when you start taking steps again, you're getting closer to where you want to be.

During my injured periods, it felt good when people spoke to me, even if it was: How are you doing? How's it feeling? Small comments, small conversations. They make a big difference.

When I was a reserve team coach and a youth coach before that, we had a couple of guys who were out – one was an ACL, the other was hip surgery. We got them together and set up a body-fat challenge between the three of us. That wasn't for anything other than: How do we stimulate these guys who are going to be out of football for the next six months? Having some form of competitive edge helps to push you on – and, before you know it, you're halfway down the path to achieving your goal again of getting back on the pitch. And when the light at the end of the tunnel starts to get closer, that's the easy part.