Jackson Irvine

I was like, what does that mean?

And they're like, so that means you'll obviously move here, you know, as soon as possible.

And the first words out of my mouth were, but what about school?

That was literally the first words out of my mouth.

I was like, what about school?

And they were like, well, obviously, you know, you have to leave school and you'll move here and this will be like, like explaining to me like what it meant.

I had no, not a clue, no agent, no nothing, no, it was literally just me and my auntie sitting in that room and yeah, and that was it.

No, no.

There was no negotiations at any point.

I think my first like months, you know, when I went over, I was on – I used to get £100 a week cash expenses.

So basically you used to have to go to the offices at the end of the week and they'll get you – you'd give you a little envelope without £100 in it and then –

And then basically they put you in like in digs.

So I got put with a family there with two other players who were living there and the family got paid to, you know, board me and feed me and everything like that.

And then we were just given a hundred quid a week to live on basically.

Yeah, that was my first taste of the professional life.

Yeah, there was a lot of it was, was tough.

You know, you, you do your best to like integrate into the culture as quick as possible.

You know, I had, again, I think probably the, one of the toughest things was from the sporting aspect was just not understanding how, how things worked just, you know, cause again, you play local, I play, I was training two nights a week with a local team in Melbourne and all of a sudden you're full-time professional and

And, you know, like that I'm sure a lot of other players can relate to the same thing of just not understanding how things operate and not knowing the dynamics between players, staff, club, fans, you know, even like there's just dynamics that you don't even know that at work.

And you're at Celtic, you're at like one of the biggest clubs in Europe in a city, you know, in a city where they literally live and breathe Celtic.