Celtic's Statement, Bodo/Glimt's Road Job: Champions League Play-Offs at Halftime
Seven league-phase places are on the line after a week of first legs, with the return matches set for August 25-26.
The last gate before the Champions League league phase is half open. The play-off round's first legs wrapped on Wednesday, and UEFA's results show two clubs with a foot in the door and five ties still genuinely alive.
Celtic produced the statement of the week, a 3-0 win over LASK at Celtic Park. That scoreline undersold nothing: the Austrian champions arrived in Glasgow on an eight-game winning streak, fresh off their first league title since 1965, according to Heavy Sports. Celtic now take a three-goal cushion to the Raiffeisen Arena in Linz on August 25.
Bodo/Glimt did their damage away from home, winning 3-1 at NEC in the league path — a result that lets the Norwegians finish the job in the Arctic, where visiting sides rarely enjoy themselves.
Everything else is a coin flip
The rest of the round stayed stubbornly level. In Tuesday's champions-path ties, Levski Sofia and AEK Athens played out a 0-0 draw and Dinamo Zagreb were pegged back 2-2 by Viking, while Fenerbahce 1-1 Lyon left the other league-path tie wide open. Wednesday added Hapoel Beer-Sheva 2-1 Sabah and Slovan Bratislava 1-1 Celje — six ties, in short, where the second leg is effectively a one-off final for a place in the 36-team league phase.
The stakes are softened, but only slightly, by the format: every side beaten in this round drops into the Europa League league phase rather than out of Europe altogether. That consolation still comes with a real cost — the gap in prize money and prestige between the two competitions is the difference between a transformative season and a decent one for clubs of this size.
Second legs run August 25-26, with the winners joining the league-phase draw and the beaten sides recalibrating for Thursday nights.