Brendan Rodgers’ Celtic will be playing for its first trophy of the season this December.
Celtic breezed past Aberdeen 6-0 on Saturday in the first semifinal matchup of the Scottish League Cup. Cameron Carter-Vickers scored the opening goal for the current Premiership leaders before three additional players got on the scoresheet.
Celtic will meet either Rangers or Motherwell in the tournament final on December 15 at Hampden Park.
Carter-Vickers headed home Arne Engels’ corner kick for a 1-0 lead in the 29th minute. It marked his first goal of the season in all competitions.
Kyogo Furuhashi doubled Celtic’s lead in the 32nd minute after finishing off Daizen Maeda’s pass into the back of the net.
Maeda made it 3-0 to Celtic in the 40th minute before adding to his tally in the second half.
Maeda’s second goal of the match nine minutes into the second half made it 4-0 before Nicolas Kuhn became the fourth different Celtic player to score in the match 10 minutes later. Maeda would cap his hat trick off with five minutes to play, ending a dominant performance from Celtic.
Carter-Vickers logged 64 minutes in defense, starting alongside USMNT teammate Auston Trusty. Trusty played 90 minutes as he continued to start in Celtic’s backline.
Celtic resumes UEFA Champions League play midweek at home against RB Leipzig.
Celtic’s payroll is over 4x that of Aberdeen and Aberdeen is actually a big spender for the league at around 6 million according to Capology. They’d be last in MLS, while Celtic would be around 3rd. Sporty Salaries lists the wage bills as almost 40 million dollars to 1.7 million or 23.5 times the payroll. In other words this match went as to be expected.
Give MLS its due, there’s a lot more year-to-year flux and even small-market teams like Columbus can field dominant sides if they’ve got a great coach and a front office that knows how to shop for the groceries. Moneyball can indeed work – as long as the gap you’re trying to bridge isn’t impossibly wide and in MLS it isn’t. Scotland, on the other hand, is so uncompetitive it’s literally Rangers and Celtic 1-2 every year, usually both finishing 20+ points ahead of whoever limps to third…well, at least in the years when Rangers wasn’t working their way back up to the Scottish Prem after getting demoted all the way down to the third division for financial fair-play-rule violations. I personally like our salary-cap system and our U22 initiative and homegrown player rules that place an emphasis on young-player development. I like the fact that we have a college draft that provides another pathway to the pros. I like that teams can’t stack more talent than they can ever play 3-deep on their roster because, well, they can, and that the rising tide is forced to lift all boats.
I personally think the proof is in the pudding. Atlanta United just beat a Miami team fielding Lionel Messi, Jordi Alba, Luis Suarez, and some of the better young players from South America in a packed Mercedes Benz stadium filled with almost 70K fans…and ATL snuck into the playoffs as a wild card seed. I still think Miami probably wins it all…but the fact that it’s anything but a lock makes it a spectacle actually worth watching.
MLS has its problems, but it’s absolutely grown like a weed, and the standard of play gets better every year.
I’d argue if it weren’t for Columbus and Portland though we’d have nothing but big spenders lifting the cup over the last 12 years going back to SKC in 2012. NYCFC, Seattle, and Atlanta aren’t big spenders this year but certainly were in their championship years. At least until the Inter Miami era the difference between top and bottom spenders was 3-5 million. The difference used to really be how much more are you spending on DPs. I guess on the bright side lowest spender Montreal played Int. Miami to a 5-5 aggregate this season despite an over 20 million difference in payroll. I just hope The Crew overcome there 1.5 million dollar deficit to Red Bulls today!
Nope that extra 1.5 million was too much. Crew looked exhausted in both games. Couldn’t finish chances they normally do and who loses a shootout up 4-2.