Three games into the title defence, Celtic have outscored their opponents 10-1. Dundee were seen off 1-0, Kilmarnock were taken apart 5-1 with Kasper Høgh helping himself to a hat-trick, and Dundee United were put to the sword 4-0 at Tannadice with Benjamin Nygren pulling the strings. Sky Sports reported that Høgh’s treble in Ayrshire came with Martin O’Neill absent from the dugout, which says plenty about the squad depth O’Neill has assembled since taking permanent charge in June.
Wednesday raises the stakes considerably. LASK arrive at Parkhead for the first leg of the Champions League play-off round, kick-off 8pm, with the return leg in Linz on 25 August. O’Neill flagged the gap between a routine league away day and a two-legged tie against Austria’s champions after the Dundee United win, saying his side would “have to straighten that out” before facing a team he called “very, very strong.” Miss out on that tie and it isn’t just European nights lost, it’s the group-stage revenue that funds the next signing.
The bookmakers, at least one of them, have already stopped waiting to find out. Paddy Power confirmed in the first week of August that it had settled outright bets on Celtic to win the Scottish Premiership again, three matches into a 38-game season, reasoning that the gap to Rangers and the rest wasn’t going to close from here. Punters weighing up the season’s betting sign-up offers and free bets before that market tightens further don’t need to look far for the reasoning: one Parkhead regular put it simply after the Dundee United rout: “You watch Høgh score four goals in two matches and Nygren pulling every string like that, and you stop looking for value in the outright market. You just enjoy the games while it’s this good.”
That form didn’t happen by accident. O’Neill has spent close to £29m rebuilding the final third this summer, starting with Camilo Duran from Qarabağ for £5.5m and Høgh himself from Bodø/Glimt for around £11m, before adding Real Oviedo’s Haissem Hassan and Paderborn’s Mika Baur, both on four-year deals, as his third and fourth signings of the window. It has been funded partly by exits rather than pure outlay: Luis Palma left permanently for Lech Poznań in June, Jan Nawrocki followed to Champions League-bound Lens for around £2.5m in July, and Arne Engels has now agreed a £22m move to West Ham. A squad that was more out than in for most of the summer suddenly has four new attacking options bedded in within three matches, which is exactly the kind of turnaround that shortens a title price quicker than a single result does.
It also explains why September already looks like a checkpoint rather than just another Old Firm fixture. Rangers, under new manager Derek McInnes, host Celtic in the Premier Sports Cup quarter-final on the weekend of 12-13 September, confirmed by BBC Sport after both sides won their previous round ties. It will be McInnes’s first Old Firm test since taking over at Ibrox, and Alistair Johnston’s few weeks out with injury means the full-back options are thinner than O’Neill would like heading into it.
None of it matters much if LASK go through instead. Beat them over two legs and the Champions League group stage bankrolls the kind of squad depth that made Wednesday’s scoreline against Kilmarnock possible in the first place. Lose it, and every conversation about retaining the title, seeing off McInnes in September, or building on last season’s double gets considerably harder.
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