Martin O’Neill's Return: Celtic's Champions League Journey
Martin O’Neill stood on the touchline on Tuesday night, 22 years removed from his last taste of the Champions League. By this time next week, he could be heading back to the stage that once defined him.
Some of the players who dragged Celtic to a commanding play-off win over LASK weren’t even born when O’Neill last prowled a Champions League technical area – a tight, goalless draw with AC Milan at Celtic Park in 2004. The years have flown. The authority has not.
He is 74 now. Earlier this month he was in hospital for what the club described as a “small procedure”, forced to watch from afar as Celtic swept Kilmarnock aside in the Scottish Premiership. For many, that would have been a gentle nudge towards the quiet life.
O’Neill has never been wired that way.
The old master, still in control
Back at Celtic Park, he remains the central figure. The voice that matters. The mind shaping the club’s resurgence.
He delegates the drills and the daily grind to his assistants, Shaun Maloney and Mark Fotheringham, but the big calls are his. Team selection. Tactical shifts. The tone of the dressing room. The direction of the season.
“Martin is a manager,” Scott Brown said on Sportsound, the emphasis loaded. “The times have changed but it is amazing that he has moved with them.
“See the calmness when he talks on radio or TV – he just oozes confidence. You can imagine what he does to fans, to us, to players, he oozes that confidence and that calmness as well.”
That calmness seeped into his team on a night that could easily have been awkward.
LASK arrive in form – and are blown away
LASK, champions of Austria and in strong domestic form, did not come to Glasgow’s east end to make up the numbers. They pressed high, they broke with intent, and they carved out chances.
Then Celtic found another gear.
Benjamin Nygren lit the place up first, lashing a fierce strike into the top corner to puncture LASK’s early belief. It was a finish of real conviction, the kind that changes the mood of a tie in an instant.
The pressure built. Celtic sensed weakness and went after it.
Summer signing Camilo Duran delivered the moment of the night before half-time, thundering in a magnificent volley that underlined why the club moved for him. Technique, timing, ruthlessness – all in one swing.
After the break, the pattern held. LASK kept probing, but Celtic’s front line carried a different level of threat. Nygren slipped Duran in again, and the Colombian forward smashed home his second of the evening, a brutal, emphatic finish that turned a strong position into a commanding one.
Three stunning goals. One foot, and then some, in the group stage.
A legend who walked back into the fire
O’Neill barely changed expression. He has seen enough European nights to know when a job is only half-done, and he stressed exactly that afterwards. No grand declarations. No talk of turning back the clock. Just the insistence that the tie is still alive.
Yet this is another remarkable twist in a late-career chapter nobody truly expected.
When Brendan Rodgers resigned last October, Celtic turned to O’Neill as a short-term solution, a safe pair of hands to steady a listing season. He came out of retirement, took charge across two interim spells, and ended up delivering a league and cup double that felt, in context, improbable.
The board asked him to stay. He said yes. A summer of planning followed, and now Celtic stand on the brink of the Champions League with a 74-year-old architect at the helm.
“Sometimes it’s hard to see what Martin does for the team, but he seems to be able to mould a side,” former Scotland winger Pat Nevin said on Match of the Day. “The great managers do that. It’s understanding what players work with other types of players and getting the best out of them.
“The job he did last season was out of this world. Whatever happens, he will always be a legend of the club, but if they have a good run in Europe, that’s fantastic.”
The legend part is already secure. The question now is simpler, and far more tantalising: how far can this unlikely second act carry Celtic back into the European spotlight?
