CELTIC will earn just €480,000 from UEFA from the Champions League Qualifiers after going out in the third round of qualification last Tuesday in Athens.
Had Celtic progressed to the Group stages by beating AEK Athens and then the Hungarian side Vici in the Play-offs, we would have secured around £30million in UEFA payments with substantial gate money on top.
Celtic of course had huge attendances at the qualifying matches – with the AEK Athens game being roughly £3 per ticket more expensive than the ticket price to see Celtic play Rosenborg in the previous round.
Anyone looking at Celtic’s goals against in the Champions League would understand that we had to STRENGTH our defence. What did Celtic do? We WEAKENED it!
Two central defenders, John McGinn and the right back that Brendan was after could all have been bought for not much more money than we made on the Virgil van Dijk sell-on windfall. Hell, had we done that we could have taken the £12million that Fulham were prepared to pay as well.
Had things panned out that way, chances are we’d be talking about AEK Athens earning €480,000 after going out of the Champions League to Celtic last week.
This is the price of failure. And that’s some amount of money to go up in smoke.
Sean McDon is however more comfortable with Celtic playing in the Europa League that the elitist so called Champions League. Read his column HERE.
