A lot has been made of Celtic’s record in the Champions League this season and, to be fair, over the course of the last few seasons.
The results have been nowhere near good enough and whilst many point to the fact that the gulf in finances dictates that Celtic will always be in the shadow of the elite clubs, they do have players who are capable of holding their own in the competition.
This afternoon TBR Celtic told how Daizen Maeda is one of the fastest players in the competition according to UEFA stats.
And now, it’s the turn of Callum McGregor. The ‘top class‘ 30-year-old is one of those players who doesn’t look out of place in the Champions League.
In fact, I would go as far as to say that he often strolls through these games. But whilst it looks that way, according to UEFA, McGregor is one of the hardest-working players in Europe.
So far, over three games, McGregor is number 11 on UEFA’s list of players who have covered the most distance in the Champions League.
Sitting at 36.1km, McGregor has run further than Bruno Fernandes (35.9km), Declan Rice (34.4km), Rodri (33.8km) and Martin Odegaard (33.5km).
Only the likes of Joao Neves (37.8km), Joshua Kimmich (37.1km) and Mohamed Elyounoussi (36.9km) have covered more distance.
Considering all of these players above and below McGregor have youth on their side, this just shows how fit and determined the Celtic captain is to drive his team forward in the Champions League.
With Celtic still having three fixtures left in the competition, it would not surprise me in the slightest to see McGregor well within the top ten at the end of this current campaign.
This just proves how good McGregor is at setting the standards at Celtic because if your captain is continually driving forward, it will inspire his teammates to follow suit and hopefully help Celtic get out of the group stages.
In other news, Faster than Kylian Mbappe, £1.3m ‘electric’ Celtic player is one of the quickest in Europe