Parochial triumphalism can’t keep papering over Celtic’s European failures

Falkirk it is, then.Amid the retreat from the debris of Tuesday night in Austria, as Celtic players picked their way off a cut-up, sapping surface, some limping, all absorbing the magnitude of the collapse in Linz and the repercussions of a 5-1 defeat and wrecking Champions League exit, one imagines no one broke the silence of the dressingroom with the name of the club’s next opponents. But Falkirk it is.At the grand, old traditional time of Saturday 3pm, Celtic will kick off at Parkhead, with maybe 50,000 in the green stadium, against Falkirk, a club existing on pocket money compared to Celtic, a club that has not won a league game at this venue since 1994.Celtic are, of course, expected to win, meaning a third straight victory to begin the league season as the club aims for a 15th Scottish title in 16 seasons.READ MOREHow deeply felt a win against Falkirk would be is open to debate. Most in Scotland will regard it as a formality and therein lies one of the environmental issues for Celtic. They dominate a league lacking competitive depth, if not interesting detail, and even when their superiority is threatened – by Hearts last season, for example – Celtic still have the wherewithal to seize the flag of Scotland’s champions.In May it required a controversial Kelechi Iheanacho penalty at Motherwell nine minutes into injury time of the penultimate match, then an 87th-minute Daizen Maeda intervention against Hearts on the last afternoon to regain that flag. And how they celebrated. Parochial triumphalism rules.But it is not hindsight to say Celtic not scoring those goals might have been good for the notion of competition in Scotland and for Celtic themselves. Even Martin O’Neill might have agreed that after a season of four different coaching voices – two of which were his – Celtic as a sporting institution needed a reckoning. And having it in May at least allows a club timeBut Celtic won, Hearts started to shed their main characters, and although Rangers were spending, they have done that badly before.So O’Neill and Celtic continued and signings such as Kasper Hogh and Camilo Duran, and the timing of them, hinted at a reshaping of Celtic’s season and future. There were then 10 goals scored in the first three domestic games, then three more without reply against LASK in the first leg of this gold-plated Champions League qualifier. Celtic were on the brink.There had been a certain unsteadiness about the 3-0 against LASK, as O’Neill acknowledged at the time. But on Tuesday night, when captain Callum McGregor scored after 20 minutes to put Celtic four goals ahead, within the boardroom, the squad and dugout, there must have been a sense of gathering tempo.Samuel Adeniran of LASK celebrates scoring his team’s fifth goal during the Champions League playoff round second-leg match against Celtic in Linz, Austria. Photograph: Christian Bruna/Getty Images And then: boom.A four-goal advantage disappeared along with Celtic’s midfield and the lucrative prestige of Champions League involvement.Thus, rather than in May, Celtic’s reckoning arrives as August becomes September, a new season has begun, and the transfer window is about to close.“Not the day for fun and games,” said a subdued O’Neill on Friday, 72 hours on, 72 long hours by the look of things.Watching the Champions League draw on Thursday will hardly have been easy. As Celtic saw LASK pull out Liverpool at home and Real Madrid away, the pain from Tuesday will have returned with force. The money, the sheer excitement, all lost in a defeat in Linz of epic proportions. The Scotland edition of the Times said there is “a compelling case for this being the worst result in the entire 138-year history of the club”. And given the economics of modern European football, such an assessment may not be as extreme as it at first appears.Immediately, however, others offered alternatives and, distractingly for Celtic, several of them are recent – here was Celtic’s sixth consecutive Champions League qualifying failure. In 2018 it was against AEK Athens, in 2019 Cluj, in 2020 Ferencvaros, in 2021 Midtjylland, last summer Kairat Almaty and now LASK.As wailing fans pointed out – understandably – none of those clubs has Celtic’s history, scale or finance.In the wake of defeat, McGregor was asked if there was “a danger” it was so devastating it could “derail” things? His reply was: “Yeah, absolutely.”Such blunt honesty is not always a feature of post-match interviews, but then derailment is not a concept for Celtic, they have fresh knowledge of it. Via McGregor’s words, instantly we were back to a previous Tuesday, the one at the end of last August.Celtic’s elimination at Kairat fuelled then-manager Brendan Rodgers’s growing dismay. Photograph: Andrew Milligan/PA Then Celtic’s elimination at Kairat fuelled Brendan Rodgers’s developing dismay.Rodgers had long recognised a pattern: in August 2024, not 2025, as the club prepared to sell Matt O’Riley to Brighton, Rodgers lamented the sluggish pace of recruitment and said there was no need “to manufacture our own stress”. Last August, Rodgers repeated the phrase, and soon his language became more colourful – “Honda Civic”. His point about strategy was the same. He soon departed.In came O’Neill, then Wilfried Nancy, then O’Neill again. He has taken “responsibility” for Tuesday and is likely to think he should have made different substitutions. But when he steps back to take the longer view, O’Neill will see the cycle Rodgers saw.Both men will also see Scotland’s debilitating factional cycle. Celtic’s exit on Tuesday was met with widespread glee, as was Rangers’ from the Uefa Conference League 48 hours later. Plenty smiled as Motherwell and Hibs failed, too. Hearts scraped through on penalties, a belated reward for their stimulating presence last season.Some may laugh this off as banter but there is a consequential effect on Scotland’s Uefa coefficient. It is diminishing. Next summer Scotland’s champions, probably Celtic again, will have more than one Champions League qualifier to negotiate. Losing on European grounds really does mean losing ground in Europe.Celtic will not want to be in this situation again in August 2027, but that will entail a greater spend and longer-term strategy. There is no shame in financial prudence, when one assesses the mess of Rangers from 2012’s administration; but that cannot be Celtic’s primary comparison. Supporters measure the club by its European height.And now ... Falkirk.The level of hooped turbulence has obscured the fact that O’Neill’s first return last October came at home to Falkirk. Johnny Kenny scored the first goals of what no one was calling a new O’Neill era.O’Neill identified the priority as “a restoration of confidence”. He delivered. Less than 12 months on, he cannot have anticipated that in front of him would again be Celtic disruption, lost confidence and Falkirk at home.