Celtic would struggle in the Championship, let alone the Premier League

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On loan winger Patrick Roberts and Bhoys manager Brendan Rodgers have indicated that the club could compete in the Premier League.

Celtic’s Callum McGregor, Patrick Roberts and Kieran Tierney celebrate winning the Scottish Premiership

With Celtic winning the Scottish Premiership yet again, the message coming out of Parkhead was that the club would be able to compete in the English Premier League, and would be a force to be reckoned with.

Manager Brendan Rodgers has claimed that they would finish in the top six, stated by the Daily Mail, while on loan star Patrick Roberts believes that Celtic could definitely compete in the English top flight, as reports BBC Sport.

In reality, Celtic would struggle in the Championship. The standard of the Scottish Premiership and the English leagues are night and day when you compare the two, so much so that such claims come across as borderline naivety.

To put into perspective, two of Celtic’s best players this millennium in Aiden McGeady and Gary Hooper are both at Championship clubs in Preston North End and Sheffield Wednesday respectively. While McGeady’s doing fairly well, Hooper’s nearly always on the bench at Hillsborough.

Celtic players look dejected

There are a handful of players Celtic have that would be more than fine – Scott Sinclair, Kolo Toure, Craig Gordon and Moussa Dembele in particular would be up there with the league’s best – but a fair chunk of Celtic’s team would need to be replaced in order to seriously challenge.

Even Celtic icons like Leigh Griffiths risk falling into that category, and it speaks volumes that when Wolverhampton Wanderers were initially relegated to the Championship in 2012, they felt they didn’t need Griffiths at any level so loaned him back to Hibernian.

Leigh Griffiths scores the second goal for Celtic

People may point at the Champions League games, but when Celtic are playing massively inferior opposition prior to their European fixtures, they can afford to take it easy and save themselves for the huge matches. That simply doesn’t happen in England.

Maybe with the additional finance the Premier League offers, Celtic could attract big players to be a force from the start, but right now, with this current squad, they would probably fall short of finishing top six in the Championship, let alone the Premier League.