With the Champions League group stages approaching quickly for Celtic, the supporters will be waiting with bated breath to see which of Europe’s elite Brendan Rodgers will be pitting his wits against.
With the qualifying stages still going on, it will be a couple of weeks before the Celtic fans have a clearer idea of who will be in the draw for the biggest club tournament in Europe.
One of those teams will be John McGinn‘s Aston Villa. Unai Emery’s side will join Brendan Rodgers’ Bhoys and McGinn shares what he is ‘hoping’ for when the big draw comes.
McGinn wants to play at Celtic Park
We all know the story about how McGinn never got the chance to pull on the green and white Hoops but it seems he wants the next best thing as the Aston Villa midfielder says he would like to run out at Celtic Park when the Champions League theme tune blasts out.
McGinn told talkSPORT, “I would say Real Madrid or Barcelona, but obviously, Barcelona are not playing at the Nou Camp.
“The Bernabeu is, obviously, the one everyone wants to play at. I was watching Rangers hoping we would play at Celtic Park or Ibrox this season but it wasn’t to be.
“So it will be exciting for all of us. A lot of the players in that dressing room have played in the Champions League before but for for players like me, Ollie [Watkins], Ezri [Konsa] it’s really exciting and we can’t wait.”
This will be Villa’s first time reaching the lucrative group stages of the Champions League. Like Celtic, the Premier League club have also won the competition in its original form when they beat Bayern Munich 1-0 in Rotterdam in 1982.
However, they have never appeared in the group stages since the tournament was revamped in 1992 and now in a new format for this season, Villa are set to experience something they have never seen or felt before.
And if they get lucky and draw Celtic, many of their players will face a cauldron of noise that has left many of Europe’s top teams shaking in their boots.
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