Brendan Rodgers: Celtic can reach ‘really competitive level’ in Champions League

Brendan Rodgers feels more ready than ever to lead his Celtic side into a Champions League campaign.

The 51-year-old will begin his fourth group stage campaign with Celtic when they host Slovan Bratislava on Wednesday night.

Rodgers has secured only two wins in 18 group games over two spells in charge, against Anderlecht first time round and Feyenoord in the final game of last season.

Although Celtic drew twice with Manchester City in 2016-17, when they went through the domestic season unbeaten, they suffered heavy defeats by Barcelona and Paris St Germain over two seasons before losing to AEK Athens in the qualifiers.

Having taken time to adjust to the departure of Ange Postecoglou and several key players last season, Celtic have picked up where they left off from a strong finish to last term and look more proficient with their pressing.

Celtic have begun their William Hill Premiership season with five wins, 14 goals and five clean sheets from five matches and with record signing Arne Engels on target on Saturday.

“There’s absolutely no doubt, this feels like the most ready I’ve been as a Celtic manager coming into a Champions League campaign,” Rodgers said.

“Naturally because of the qualification phase (in his first spell) and the doubt around all of that and trying to get players in later on the back of that, and last season coming in, trying to find out about players and managing them through that and seeing them in the competition…

“But having had a year under my belt back here and seeing all the players and being able to improve a lot of the areas that I want, there’s still areas that we want to improve in, but certainly the readiness is a great word.

“I think that feeling of arriving at this first game will be the best place that I’ve been in since I’ve been here.”

The former Liverpool and Leicester manager added: “It’s a real challenging level and for teams like ourselves we have to be at our absolute maximum to benefit, especially with how the game has developed in the financial side.

“But what I always believe in here as a club is that if we can get our squad to a really competitive level, what we can do here at home can make it a really special place to be and still we can be really competitive at this level.

“There have been a lot of occasions where, and no fault of the players, because the players in all my times here gave me absolutely everything, but we just weren’t at that level. That’s the reality of it. The players were good players but maybe our depth wasn’t quite there.

“But I look at us now as a club, progressing, looking forward, you see the club has supported us fantastic in the summer. And we want to be able to do that again in some other areas because we want to keep growing.

“We don’t want just the benchmark to be domestic. We want to improve and do well in Europe.

“It’s an amazing level to be involved in. I love the challenge, I relish the challenge. The players love playing at it. That’s why you work all year, to win your league, to win your title, to get to nights like this which will be amazing for them.”

With Celtic in pot three of the seeds and Slovan in four, the Scottish champions are favourites but Rodgers does not see that status as a challenge.

“We respect every single opponent that we play and obviously there will be a narrative around this game which I totally get,” he said.

“But I look at Bratislava and I only have to go through my own experiences here. They’ve had four ties, eight games to actually get to this stage. So the amount of work and fight and spirit they needed to have to reach this level, you can never underestimate that.

“For some it might not be fashionable, there might be other teams with bigger histories and bigger clubs but for us we know that it’s a team that we have to really respect.”