When LASK reported their last financial results, a turnover of £42m was less than a third of the £143million banked by Celtic.
The highest fee the champions of Austria have ever paid for a player remains the £2.5million paid for Hadjuk Split for forward Marin Ljubicic; significantly lower than the £10.5million Scotland’s champions recently shelled out for Bodo/Glimt for Kasper Hogh.
The Reifessen Arena, where a raucous din followed the 5-1 rout of Celtic, has a capacity of just 19,080 and offers no comparison to the 60,000 who fill Parkhead every second week.
When it comes to their annual failure in Champions League play-offs, a Celtic pattern is forming. Since losing to Malmo under Ronny Deila in 2015, Scotland’s champions have made a persistent rickets of beating the kind of clubs who manage to do so much more with a good deal less.
The last six play-offs have been lost to AEK Athens, Cluj, Ferencvaros, Mydtjylland, Kairat Almaty and LASK, none of them giants of the game. While they edged past Be’er Sheva and Astana in 2017 and 2018, exits to Malmo and Maribor make it eight failures from their last ten attempts. It’s a galling litany of failure.
A club can only really call itself a Champions League outfit if it mixes with the big boys from time to time. And outwith the years when Scotland’s coefficient was high enough to offer automatic qualification as Premiership champions, Celtic have never been much good at that.
The latest collapse in Austria was surely the most ridiculous and humiliating of the lot. Leading 4-0 on aggregate with an hour of the second leg to play, the only surprise was that they ever found themselves in that position in the first place. As captain Callum McGregor acknowledged, the 3-0 scoreline in Glasgow flattered them.
Despite spending a sum in the region of £26million on Hogh, Camilo Duran, Haissem Hassan and Mika Baur, this is a Celtic team which coughs up too many chances to the opposition. They sold Arne Engels for £22million to West Ham and dragged their heels over bringing in the mobile, physical midfield number six they need to offer a layer of protection to a creaking back four.
Had they beaten LASK, they planned to move to secure Torino’s Lithuanian midfielder Gvidas Geneitis and Chelsea’s loan left-back Landon Emanelo, as well as a goalkeeper and right-back cover for the injured Alistair Johnston.
While transfers are a complex business, with various moving parts, it made more sense to get those players in before the two games which define the club’s season. Not after.
All 41 of the other clubs in the SPFL have signed more players than Celtic so far this summer. While another four or five are likely in the coming week, the conservative and cautious custodians who run the show continue to take an annual punt on the club’s European ambitions. It’s a gamble they don’t need to take.
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Plenty of fans feel that the blame for Linz lies squarely with the management and players rather than the board of directors, and they are as right as those holding the board to account. Austria was a failure from the top of the club to the bottom. No one emerged with any credit at all.
Leading 4-0 with an hour to play, it’s scarcely believable that a perfect storm of individual errors, poor game management and tactics, ineffective substitutions and players dead on their feet - despite playing no league game last weekend - imploded the way they did. The second-half collapse was best viewed through the cracks of the fingers.
When Benjamin Nygren’s poorly judged pass back cancelled out Callum McGregor’s early strike a scoreline of 1-1 was manageable until Auston Trusty’s weak defending on the right touchline led to the concession of a meat-and-drink second goal early in the second period. Samuel Adeniran curled in a brilliant third for LASK after 58 minutes, and Celtic’s travelling support felt they had seen this movie before. Many times.
O’Neill’s legend at Celtic was built on nights of endeavour in Europe, and he tried to stem the blood gushing from Celtic’s main arteries by slapping on a few plasters.
Sebastian Tounekti, instead of new £5million Egyptian winger Hassan, didn’t work at all. Reo Hatate - a player who wants to leave the club in the next week - wasn’t much better. Luke McCowan was dispossessed on the edge of his area for the fifth - and decisive - LASK goal while central defenders Liam Scales and Dane Murray were pressed into action as emergency full-backs. Desperation seeped from every pore.
While the quality of the replacements exposed a lack of quality and depth below the first eleven, only once in their history - in 1964 - had Celtic surrendered a first-leg three-goal lead in Europe. There was no logic, no excuse for how they did it again with a panicked and chaotic collapse. Stats showed that LASK took 40 shots at goal, and it felt like more.
The fourth goal, which dragged the game to extra-time in the 90th minute, was almost as inevitable as it was deserved. In no fit state for another 30 minutes, only the woodwork prevented the Austrians from putting Celtic out of their misery in normal time. An xG of 4.35 to 0.42 told the story of one team’s excellence and another’s humiliation.
The side which fails to protect a four-goal lead against the champions of Austria has no real business mixing it with Arsenal or Real Madrid. Group stage football now beckons in the Europa League and, these days, that’s pretty much Celtic’s level.
It’s hard to see when - or if - a team from the SPFL will play in UEFA’s top competition again or what impact the loss of £40million will have on Parkhead transfer activity between now and the end of the transfer window. For fans of other Scottish clubs that’s one more reason to spend the days ahead laughing up their sleeves.
In an incendiary address to a stormy and abandoned AGM, Ross Desmond - son and representative of controlling shareholder Dermot - warned of a changing financial landscape which posed a huge challenge to clubs struggling to compete in smaller European leagues.
While the changing landscape would certainly make it difficult for Martin O’Neill to sign English Premier League players like Chris Sutton, John Hartson, Alan Thompson or Neil Lennon in the current climate, it’s no excuse for failing to compete with Maribor, Cluj, Kairat Almaty or LASK Linz. None at all.
The club’s latest money-making marketing wheeze is a kit designed to honour the upcoming 60th anniversary of the legendary Lisbon Lions. The players who turned in the worst second-half capitulation in the club’s long history of European football should be embarrassed to wear it.
