There was one crumb of comfort for Celtic over the weekend but it won’t become relevant for a while.
With PAOK winning the Greek title only three league winners will be seeded above the hoops in next season’s Champions League qualifiers meaning that they will play lower seeded teams in each qualifying round.Four group stage places are available through the Champions Route.
Celtic will be seeded for all 4 qualifying rounds in next seasons Champions League.
PAOK won the Greek title today, leaving only Salzburg, PSV/Ajax & Plzen/Sp.Prague as teams who could be ranked higher than us.
Still need to win the league, didn’t help us this season, etc, etc.
— Moravcik67 (@Moravcik67_) April 21, 2019
Who will be in charge of Celtic and who’ll be signed are the most pressing matters but it does allow the club to make some sort of plans for the campaign that starts on July 9/10 with the draw for the first qualifier taking place on June 18.
The seedings rarely run to plan as Celtic discovered at the start of the current season. A knock out from AEK Athens saw the hoops drop into the Europa League play-off round while the Greek champions saw off the Hungarian champions to book a group place and pick up £30m.
Last season Celtic saw off the champions of Northern Ireland, Norway and Kazakhstan with a similar standard likely again next season spread over four qualifying rounds.
There were plenty of lessons to learn from last season’s failure which was heavily linked to problems in the transfer market.
If those lessons have been taken on board then it ‘only’ requires the team to navigate through four qualifiers against lower ranked and lesser financed clubs to qualify for the big time next season and try to ‘do an Ajax’.
