Celtic are back in the Champions League group stage again this season, and that means the club will also be featured in the official fantasy football offering.
The UEFA Champions League‘s version works like any other fantasy football. Players pick a squad and earn or lose points depending on how their selections get on.
The points are all tallied together and players are ranked in various public and private leagues. It’s a good bit of a fun to go alongside some fiercely competitive action.
Despite the draw for the Champions League group stage not taking place until August 31, UEFA are allowing users to pick their squads from the already qualified teams.
As detailed on their fantasy football website, players have €100m to spend on a squad of 15 — two goalkeepers, five defenders, five midfielders and three forwards.
The squad can only have a maximum of three players from a single club, meaning that you can’t flood your setup with Celtic players. Nice try though.
Kyogo Furuhashi and Liel Abada have the highest value (both €7.5m) of all of the Celtic players in valuations that are stacked heavily in favour of attackers.
Intriguingly, the unknown quantity of Marco Tilio is next up (€7m) with Matt O’Riley, Daizen Maeda and David Turnbull after that (all €6.5m).
Unsurprisingly given our recent European record, our stars haven’t been hugely popular so far with users. Joe Hart has the highest selected percentage with 2% of all players including him in their squad.
The likes of Greg Taylor and Cameron Carter-Vickers are at 1%.
Rather worryingly, the ‘goals last season’ column is completely blank for all of our players.
We did manage to net four times across our six matches last season. However, two of those were scored by the recently departed Jota, one by Giorgos Giakoumakis who has also left, and the other was an own goal by Shakhtar’s Artem Bondarenko.
So we need new scorers in Europe next season. Early days but Kyogo is going in my fantasy team.
In other news, Brendan Rodgers admits that the recent spate of Celtic first-team injuries has been frustrating
Receive a digest of our best Celtic content each week direct to your mailbox
