For Celtic, the conversation ahead of Wednesday's Champions League play-off round is not just about qualification. It is about ambition, scale and whether the club still measures itself against the biggest prize in the game.
Martin O'Neill has made the point plainly: the standard was set in 1967, and Celtic should still be aspiring to win the Champions League. That is a bold line to draw before a tie against LASK, but it is also a useful one. It forces the club's immediate task into a wider frame, where the reward is not only progress but the chance to keep building toward a level Celtic last reached when they won the European Cup.
The financial stakes are clear enough. Qualifying for the league phase would be worth about £16m in automatic prize money, before any additional income from the competition. That matters for any club, but especially for Celtic, who banked more than £40m from their last Champions League participation in 2024/25. In other words, this is not simply a football tie. It is a gate into a very different scale of European business.
Ambition against reality
O'Neill did not pretend the road is simple. He said Scottish sides no longer can compete with the financial might of elite clubs in England, Spain, Germany, France or Italy, and he also acknowledged that Celtic may never get there. But his argument was not about certainty. It was about aspiration. If the club's bar was set by the Lisbon Lions, then the target cannot be reduced just because the market has changed.
That is the tension Celtic now live with. They are a club with a historic European peak, but also one that was beaten by Bayern Munich in the first knockout round of their 2024/25 campaign and knocked out at the qualifying stage by Kairat Almaty last year. Those results do not erase the ambition, but they do remind everyone why it is such a difficult ambition to sustain.
And yet the case for keeping that standard is obvious. Celtic are not being asked to pretend the path is easy. They are being asked to refuse the idea that the ceiling has to be low. O'Neill's language was less about prediction than definition: this is the level the club should still be trying to reach, even if the modern game makes that harder every year.
There is also the practical matter of timing. Celtic enter a play-off round where one result can shape the whole season's European story. That is why the discussion around Celtic Score feels larger than a single tie. It is about whether the club can move from defending tradition to using it as a platform.
Arne Engels' departure was another point O'Neill described as a disappointment, which only adds to the sense that Celtic are in a moment of transition as well as ambition. The challenge is not just to qualify, but to do so while keeping sight of what the club says it wants to be.
So the question before Wednesday is not whether Celtic can immediately match the great clubs of Europe. It is whether they still believe they should be trying to. O'Neill's answer was unmistakable: they should, and they must make an all-out effort to do it.
