By Jamie Kilday
What does it mean to be successful in Europe? Winning a trophy is only reserved for 3 clubs a season and arguably winning the Europa League or the Conference League isn’t a success if your aim is to be a Champions League club, especially now clubs from the Champions League no longer drop into the Europa League. For Celtic fans, most would see qualifying for the Champions League as being the baseline of success, a secondary target would be to be competitive. The latter makes the former easier and due to the club’s domestic dominance, in theory, Celtic should be in a nice feedback loop of, qualifying for the Champions League every year, reinvesting those funds and then making a better show of it each year. That however, is not the reality and something that really sticks in the craw of the average Celtic fan – but how realistic a target is it?
In terms of Champions League qualification failings, Celtic fans will rightly point to the 2014/15 Champions League qualifying campaign as when the wheels started to fall off. In the 13 seasons prior, Celtic had qualified for the Champions League 7 times, in the 13 seasons since, Celtic have qualified 6 times so from that perspective it seems like the club are where they have always been. There had been shaky qualifying runs in the past, but generally the club had a reputation of doing the business at home and on occasion succumbing to the opposition when on their travels. Defeat to Artmedia Bratislava in 2005/06 was a low point, but the following season the club went on to beat Manchester United, Copenhagen and Benfica. That perception changed against Maribor.
The writing was possibly on the wall two weeks earlier when hosting Legia Warsaw, a 2-0 home defeat being overturned due to Legia fielding an ineligible player meant Celtic were through to the qualifying round. A fortuitous and some might say undeserved reprieve given the performances. A draw away from home pointed to something maybe written in the stars for the campaign, but that was shattered when another lacklustre performance saw the club binned out 0-1. To the eyes of all Celtic fans, their club should be beating Maribor over two legs. Subsequent humblings to Malmö, AEK Athens, Cluj, Ferencvaros, Midtjylland and Kairat Almaty all stung the same. At the time of each of those ties Celtic were ranked higher in the UEFA coefficient so a win would have been expected. Hindsight now suggests we may have been facing clubs in the ascendancy, so where their coefficient was low it might not have been truly reflective of the quality of the club. Kairat Almaty aside, every one of the clubs went on to improve their coefficient over a prolonged period and except for AEK Athens and Maribor, all the listed clubs have a better coefficient now than they did when Celtic faced them.
Only six clubs have qualified for every Champions League since 2014/15. Bayern Munich, Manchester City, PSG, Real Madrid, Barcelona and Atlético Madrid. But given the number of guaranteed Champions League places in each of those leagues that’s not unexpected. Only 25 clubs have featured more regularly in the Champions League than Celtic with the majority of those clubs being from Spain, England, Germany, Italy, France. In fact, only eight clubs outside of the big five leagues have featured in the champions league more frequently than Celtic. Donetsk and Benfica have featured eleven times, Porto ten, Club Brugge and Ajax eight, Sporting CP, Galatasaray and Olympiakos seven.
Only 14 nations have had more representation in the Champions League than Scotland over the same period. The big five nations of Spain, England, Germany, Italy, France occupy 57% of the available Champions League places in the last 13 seasons, which is not surprising with four of them having four guaranteed places pretty much every season. Scotland is generally in the mix with the next 10 nations each year in trying to secure a top ten ranking to ensure at least one club is guaranteed a place, but it must be noted that the number of individual nations represented at the Champions League has been declining. In 2013/14 there were 32 clubs from 18 different nations, this season it’s 36 clubs from only 16. The Champion’s League is becoming more of a closed shop. This means that on the face of it, you could make the case that Celtic being in the Champions League 6 seasons out of the last 13 is in and around what you would expect from a Scottish club. You could also see it as another reason why complacency in Champions League qualification is unacceptable.
Taking the focus away from the Champions League is where you can see how other nations have been creeping up on Celtic. One of the reasons Celtic have qualified for the Champions league 6 times is due to Rangers exploits in the Europa League, those coefficient points had raised Scotland to a position where they received an automatic Champions League place and even lifted Rangers to 25th in the UEFA Coefficient Rankings. Similarly, Czechia, has had fewer Champions League sides than Scotland but has been doing better in the lower European competitions moving them into 10th in the rankings and giving them an automatic Champions League place.
Does that stop fans wanting more…no. Are they wrong for wanting more…no. Are their expectations too high, arguably, the answer is still no. Had Celtic managed to overturn even just two or three of the 7 failed campaigns then they would have qualified for the Champions League as frequently as Liverpool, Chelsea or even Inter Milan. These are the level of club’s Celtic fans think they should be mixing with, not, with all due respect, Maribor and Kairat Almaty. Defeat to Kairat is the straw that has broken the camel’s back when it comes to Celtic fans. This is a team who had only once ever qualified for a European competition – the 21/22 Conference League which was a winless campaign in a group with Basel, Qarabağ and Omonia. The following season they crashed out of Conference League qualification to Hungarian side Kisvarda, a club who the following season were relegated to the 2nd tier of Hungarian football. This isn’t the sort of side a club with the stature, support and finances of Celtic should be losing to.
So, what is success? It is, after all, relative. Yes, Celtic have qualified for the Champions League more than most clubs in Europe. Yes, Celtic have had a consistent UEFA coefficient when other clubs around them have fallen. But it isn’t enough, the cards have been stacked in Celtic’s favour for the last 13 years, and they have not managed to capitalise. What’s more, much of Celtic’s success in qualifying for the Champions League has been founded on Rangers having a much better European run which very much undermines any success the club has. Rangers in 2017/18 season were ranked 265th and they have since made it to a Europa League final, Bodo/Glimt were ranked 264th in 2020/21 when they knocked Celtic out of Europe and were Europa League Semi Finalists last year. Kairat Almaty were ranked 266th when Celtic faced them this year. Celtic could continue to ride this patch out and maintain their place as being in and around 45th-60th in the coefficient or this could be the tide turning with more and more smaller clubs rising up the coefficient. They could end up like former Champions League stalwarts Panathinaikos and Anderlecht and find themselves falling behind the rest of the pack.
