Ange Postecoglou lays out his exciting UEFA Champions League goal at Celtic

By David Walton

March 22, 2022

Celtic manager Ange Postecoglou has outlined his exciting UEFA Champions League goal at Parkhead.

Celtic are flying high in the Premiership as they look to wrestle back the title from Rangers in Ange’s first season. With only 7 games remaining and a 3-point advantage at the top, the signs are certainly exciting.

However, it’s in Europe where the Celtic fans want the club to be making a splash. It’s been just under 5 years since the club last qualified for the UCL group stages. Since then, it’s been frustration after frustration in the qualifying stages, with this season seeing us dumped out by FC Midtjylland.

And Ange has stated in an interview with Optus Sport that competing at Europe’s top table is his goal for the Hoops. As quoted by Optus, Ange said: “(This club) won a European Cup, how many clubs can say that? It’s one of those clubs that are in rarefied sort of territory, and when you do that, then that sets a standard that, you need to try and uphold. For me, my goal is to get this football club to be playing Champions League and competing.

“There’s some massive clubs (there), but you also look at some other clubs that do well in the Champions League and you think, well, we can replicate that. This football club can, it has 60,000 supporters every game, it’s geared for success, it has a history and tradition of competing at the highest level. So there shouldn’t be a barrier to that.

“You’ve got to have domestic success because that gets you into it, but beyond that, you’ve got to be aspirational enough to say, well, that’s, that’s where we want be as a football club. (We) want to be competing in the Champions League, making an impact in the Champions League, and to be honest, that’s the biggest driver for me.

“I know that I need to have domestic success, but the biggest impact I can make at football club is to make an impact in Europe”

Ange Postecoglou ready for European success at Celtic

Celtic, you feel, still have some way to go if they’re to be a competitive European side. This season we showed some promising signs. by racking up 9 group stage points in the Europa League. But the UCL is of course a major step-up from that.

Celtic will likely gain direct access to the UCL group stages if they manage to win the Premiership title. So it could be the case that we’re back in the big time very early into Ange’s Parkhead reign.

However, you still feel the squad needs some major improvements if its to seriously compete in such a cut-throat environment. Not to mention there are some habits that we really need to stamp out when playing on the continent.

One of the big issues this season was that we conceded far too many goals in the Europa League group stages. We managed to ship a pretty ridiculous 15 goals in that stage of the competition alone.

Ange will out it down to the opposition’s quality, and he’s right to an extent. But it’s an unnatural amount of goals to lose to any side if you’re Celtic. Given, of course, how early it was in Ange’s reign, you can understand the reasons for it.

But if we’re to be competing in the UCL, we need to be a lot more solid than we were this term. Still, it’s great to see Ange outline his next major goal here.

In other news, Carl Starfelt says Celtic are improving on set-pieces after in-house discussion