CHAMPIONS LEAGUE
Celtic 0 PSG 3 DREAM bigger. The slogan was emblazoned along both sides of the PSG team bus as it sat parked outside Celtic Park last night.
It could easily have been written across Brendan Rodgers’s tracksuit top.
With a season of group-stage matches under his and the squad’s belt the Celtic boss believes it’s time to take the next step and won’t stop his players from thinking positively.
Group B is daunting. Tonight’s opener against the French giants encapsulates the sheer magnitude of the challenges ahead.
Celtic will face the most expensive frontline ever assembled in world football. That trio of Neymar, Kylian Mbappe and Edinson Cavani help take a squad market value of close to £700million.
Rodgers knows Celtic can’t compete with those levels of investment. He realises his club can’t win the competition. He’s honest enough to say they might never win it again with the gulf in finances to the glamour leagues.
But that doesn’t mean he expects his players to cower. To crawl into their shells. Quite the opposite.
Rodgers says the troops are excited as opposed to intimidated and wants them to make their presence felt.
He wants aggression, he wants positivity, he wants the PSG players to feel breath on their necks as well as the voices of 60,000 frantic home fans in their ears.
Most importantly he wants his team to dream and aim high. Starting tonight.
Rodgers said: “You respect the level PSG are at but the difference in our team now is attitude. That’s key. It’s everything in these games.
“They have to feel us breathing very close to them. That’s how we play domestically and how we play in other games in this competition.
“You can’t do it for 90 minutes so you have to dip in and out of the pressure. But it’s our job to progress with real aggression.
“If you stand off top players they will play around you, through you and over you. They have to feel that pressure they have to feel the crowd.
“If you look at the Manchester City game here last season as a reference there was similar expectation about it beforehand. So you hope you can go and impose your game.
“It’s going to be a great test for us and it doesn’t faze us. In the team meeting we were all in a good place and we learned lessons from Barcelona last season. After that we took them on and performed very well.
“This year there is a different mentality and we go into the game with a real attitude to give everything, be physical, be aggressive and show our quality.
“Every challenge is big. No matter if you are the Swansea or Liverpool manager but at this level of competition it’s a big ask.”
Rodgers was right with that assessment. In Champions League terms, as big as it gets.
Backed by Qatar Sports Investments, PSG have had the wealth of an entire country at their disposal to build. With spending that has brought indignation from even the chiefs of Spain’s La Liga, the dealings have opened more debate about the financial chasms clubs from smaller nations find impossible to bridge.
Rodgers tries to concentrate on the players involved as opposed to the funding that signed them. To that extent he knows PSG are under pressure to deliver. The eyes of the globe are watching them.
Rodgers said: “When you are writing a cheque for that amount of money on Neymar, then backing it up with Mbappe, you are making a serious statement you want to win this competition.
“They have some incredible players and are up there now in terms of how much they can pay them. They are there to win, they are paid the money to win. There’s a huge expectation but they welcome that.
“The game has moved on so much now. You compare budgets and it’s very difficult now.
“There is a star outside the ground because we have won it but finances now in football dictate whether the trophy is in Paris or in China or the Premier League.
“It’s just astronomical now and unfortunately for us here in Scotland that’s just not the case.
“I tend not to over think it. There are people there to govern the game. But money does dictate things, that’s the simplicity of it.
“That’s a frustration. A club like this with the history and tradition it has – this is a huge club.
“But until it changes and we get