Celtic Diary Monday May 23: Going Our Own Way ?

The final places on the list of the twenty six automatic qualifiers for the Champions League were filled over the weekend as league seasons finished all over Europe.

Milan won Serie A, and Manchester City won the pantomime that is the English Premiership.

That means the line up looks like this, as the teams are placed into pots according to co-efficients and tv audiences, with one from each pot forming a group…

The only thing left to sort out is where Liverpool and Ajax end up. Liverpool need to beat Real Madrid to get into Pot 1, if they don’t Ajax are in.

Those in red are the seeded teams expected to qualify via the play offs, those in black already made it.

The draw is on august 25, and whilst Celtic could end up with Eintracht Frankfurt, Sevilla and Sporting Lisbon, it’s more likely to be Bayern, Barcelona, and Inter.

Or Real Madrid, Juventus and Leverkusen.

We know what’s more likely….

Doesn’t matter, we’ve earned the right to be there, so we might as well give it a shot.

Moravcik 67 , as ever, gives the definitive rundown on how it all works…

Pot 3 might look slightly different. If Benfica don’t qualify then a team will move up from Pot 4 – Rangers, if they qualify. Pot 4 might look very different, as that’s where most of the qualifiers will be. There aren’t enough of them to move us up, so Celtic will be Pot 4.

As you can see, the potential for our usual group of death is pretty high. I’m already envisaging some kind of Real Madrid, Liverpool, Inter Milan abomination. It would be nice to see the best players in the world at CP, but it’d also be nice not to get pumped 6 times.  

Money. Celtic will get €15.64M just for turning up. We also get a payment based on our 10 year coefficient. Based on the teams projected to qualify in the pictures in the 1st tweet, it’d be around €8M. But it depends on who qualifies. 

We’d get an extra ~€1.1M for each of Benfica and Olympiakos who fail to qualify. So it could go up to over €10M at best. But it could also drop ~€1.1M for each of Monaco, Dynamo Kyiv and PSV who qualify, although only 2 of them can 

Frankfurt winning the EL meant they overtook us in the 10 year ranking, costing €1.1M. But it prevented Rangers from qualifying automatically, which would have cost us ~€3.5M in the Market Pool. So fair enough. Of course if Rangers qualify we get hit with the double whammy 

If Copenhagen qualify then we’ll be above them in the 10 year rankings only on the basis of the bonus points we get for our win in Lisbon in 1967. That’s worth ~€1.1M to us. The Lions are still contributing to the club, more than 50 years on. 

As mentioned above, we also get money for the Scottish market pool. The amount has fallen recently. It’s probably worth ~€7M to Scotland. It’s all ours if Rangers don’t qualify. If they do qualify then we share it. It’s complex. Easier to say we’ll get 55%, they’ll get 45%. 

Finally, we get money for our performance – €2.8M per win, €930K per draw. It’s clearly much harder to win a game in the CL. But 1 CL win is worth more than 4 EL wins. To put it into perspective, we made about ~€2M from performance payments in this season’s EL groups.  

This is all before our usual revenue from tickets and sponsorship, etc. So, there’s a fair chunk of money coming our way. Hard to quantify it at present, but you’re probaly talking €25-32M before you even consider performance payments and ticket sales. 

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Other scottish clubs. Rangers start in CL QR3, and will face one of Monaco, Midtjylland Sturm Graz, Royale Union SG, Fenerbahce or AEK Larnaca. In the playoff they could also meet Dynamo Kyiv or PSV, along with the above, depending on who makes it through. 

Hearts start in the EL Playoff. The draw for that is pretty weird these days. They could initially be drawn against Dynamo Kyiv, Midtjylland, Fenerbahce, AEK Larnaca (whichever of those are knocked out of CL QR2), or Partizan Belgrade or Slovacko. 

If not, they could then be drawn against a team knocked out of QR2 of the champions route of CL qualifying. So who the hell knows who they’ll get. It could be anyone from Dinamo Zagreb to Hibernians of Malta. Which would be kinda funny. Okay, maybe not. 

If they’re knocked out the PO, Hearts will drop into the conference groups. They have a chance of being Pot 3, but also might slip back into Pot 4 depending on who else qualifies alongside them. It’s a great chance for them, and they can earn some cash doing it.