Celtic Chief Executive Peter Lawwell has admitted that the club should be qualifying for the UEFA Champions League group stages on a more regular basis.
The club have qualified for the money-rich groups four times out of the last nine attempts during this current run of league titles.
Not bad by some club’s standards but for Celtic, especially in recent seasons, it’s been something of a failure.
It can often be portrayed that it’s immensely difficult to reach the group stages, but there’s a different reality that has to be considered.
Celtic have been amongst the top seeds in the Champions Route of the summer qualifying gauntlet for some time now, yet have slipped up against teams with a much smaller stature and budgets.
Teams that have knocked us out of qualifying in the last decade include Maribor, Malmo, AEK Athens, Ferencvaros and Cluj. Not exactly a top-tier of talent.
Lawwell still thinks the club are an elite European outfit, but has admitted that things need to improve on the Champions League front.
He said at today’s club AGM, as quoted by The Scottish Sun: “We see ourselves as a top-class, professional European football club in everything that we do.
“We know that results in Europe have to be better, we have to qualify more regularly for the Champions League. We are regular participants but we know that we have to get in that Champions League more regularly.
“We are regarded as a top-class European football club in everything that we do, and we want to maintain that and improve on that. To do that we need our supporters with us.”
Ultimately actions speak louder than words and our regression in Europe is pretty apparent.
Often going into qualifiers unprepared from a squad perspective, we should have been far better prepared for our attempted runs to the group stages.
That doesn’t all come down on Lawwell’s shoulders, our managers over the years have to take their share of the blame too.
However, the club isn’t exactly projecting ‘top-class European’ vibes right now. We’re barely projecting top-class Scottish Premiership vibes.
We need long-term vision and thinking in the football department, with a cohesive strategy from youth football through to the first-team, if we’re ever going to reach our potential on the continent.
Celtic have to prove to us they have those plans in place.
In other news, Christopher Jullien is enjoying his return to Celtic Twitter.
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