Celtic qualified for the knockout stages of European competition for the second season in a row, finishing 2 points above RB Leipzig. Easy (*not easy*).
Do the numbers help to illustrate the gulf between this standard of opposition and that Celtic come across in Scotland?
Of course!
Creativity
By combining two metrics illustrative of creativity, we can see the challenge Celtic had to overcome in the Europa League Group B.
Firstly, Chances Created is a simply summation of passes leading to shots plus assists.
Secondly, Total Impect is an overall summed score. The score reflects the extent to which the team were able to bypass opponents through passing and dribbling. The higher the Impect score, the more opponents you were able to remove from the game in this way.
The numbers below are averages where Celtic have played the opponent more than once (or more than 87 times in the case of BK Rosenborg!).
What you can see is the enormous gulf between FC Salzburg and RB Leipzig and the rest of Celtic’s opposition. It is not easy to adjust to such an uptick in quality.
You can also see that teams are roughly grouped according to their league position. The bottom four in the SPFL are in the bottom left quadrant – the least creative.
St. Johnstone, Livingston, Heart of Midlothian (and The Rangers – don’t tell the press!) are in the middle. Aberdeen, Kilmarnock and Hibernian are nearer the top of this group.
If you accept that these metrics are a decent overall indicator of team quality, then it is frustrating to note that AEK Athens are no better that the best Scottish opposition.
The real outlier is Partick Thistle who are in the danger zone in the Scottish Championship. They played Celtic in the League Cup when Celtic were in poor form but gave it a real go!
Attacking Threat
Continuing the theme but focussing on actual delivery, we can combine another pair of attacking metrics in similar fashion.
Possessions In The Box is the number of times the opponent had the ball under control or got a shot off within the Celtic box.
xG (Expected Goals) is an indicator of the quality of shots taken given the shot position and type of move (corner, fast break etc). It indicates the number of goals you can expected to have scored given the quality of the shooting opportunities you took.
As before, the numbers are the average over the number of matches played versus Celtic.
A very similar story to the Creativity plot, as you might expect.
At the risk of labouring the point, the main thrust of this article was to highlight the huge gulf in quality represented by Celtic’s Europa League opponents versus both Scottish domestic opposition and the teams Celtic faced in Champions League qualifying.
Champions League qualifying is fraught as the teams faced are as good as if not better than most Scottish opposition. Over two legs anything can happen – Celtic have failed to win six of eighteen SPFL matches this season.
Celtic’s qualification from Group B was a great achievement.