Deila criticises money-driven Champions League proposals

Celtic manager Ronny Deila has joined a growing number of people criticising plans to potentially dump Scottish teams out of the Champions League.

Plans have been revealed which would create a tournament between the ‘top’ clubs in England, Germany, Spain, Italy and France, despite 11 clubs from these leagues having qualified for the last 16 of this year’s competition.

These have been heavily questioned by a number of people, including SPFL chief executive Neil Doncaster.

Deila has also expressed his thoughts on this, as quoted by the Scotsman:

If you are going to call it the Champions League we have to have the champions in there or its not the Champions League any more. It would be the five top leagues having a championship when I thought it was called the Champions League.

However, getting to the qualification rounds means beating Aberdeen to the Scottish Premiership title, and the manager is sick of hearing about the title race at this moment.

You talk about Aberdeen all the time. Here at Celtic we don’t need to talk about other teams. It’s about us winning games. Whatever they do, we have to win.

So it’s not good enough losing games – every week we just want to put in a performance and take three points. As I’ve said many times, we can start talking about whether there’s a title race or not in April. There are too many games left.

The competition is not only important to championing Scottish football, but it is also huge part of Celtic’s season and the financial reward of reaching the Champions League allows them to hold on to their best players.

Fans are always demanding good performances in European competition, but the Hoops failed to qualify for the Champions League group stages, and already being out of the Europa League this season at the same stage.