Alan Morrison analyses Celtic’s double-winning season under Brendan Rodgers, uncovering the tactical trends and data that show where improvements are being made year-on-year.
It was a double trophy-winning season for Celtic, and we can hope that the loss of the Scottish Cup will be an open sore for Brendan Rodgers into next season as he seeks another treble.
The league remains the minimum requirement, as this is the gateway to Champions League football, which is the only predictable income stream that can be transformative for the club.
Today, I will highlight the main differences between Celtic’s last two title-winning campaigns under Rodgers.
Note that the persistent, mainly low, standard of domestic opposition (not my subjective assessment; refer to an independent ranking service such as ELO) and the growing resource advantage Celtic holds over the opposition, combined with a consistent playing style, means that season-over-season disparities in underlying performance data are subtle.
What are the highlight themes?
Celtic's pressing - 2024/25 vs 2023/24
With time on the training ground (albeit difficult with two matches a week), come improvements in off-ball organisation. Rodgers talks about the press probably more than any other facet of play, other than the speed of movement of the ball.
The best improvements are in working smarter, not harder. So it is with Celtic’s pressing efforts.
Given around 75 per cent possession, Celtic press less often than virtually all teams in the league and have reduced the average pressures per game by eight this season. However, regains from pressing have increased by two. That's an eight per cent improvement in regains from a six per cent decrease in pressing effort. Most manufacturing processing owners would love that!
Pressing is not just about regaining the ball; indeed, primarily it is about slowing the opponent's advancements towards your goal.
Celtic conceded 0.68 goals per 90 compared to 0.79 last season, but more importantly for performance evaluation purposes, xG against is down from 0.74 to 0.65, and the value of xG per opposition shot is down from 0.09 to 0.08. This may seem a tiny difference, but remember this is an average across every shot over the season.
The same trends are observed with counterpressing efforts, where you attempt to win the ball back within five seconds of losing it. Counterpressing volume is down from 33.89 to 33.37, but the regains of the ball from those efforts are up 3.97 to 4.24.
Further evidence of press effectiveness is that opposition passes completed per Celtic defensive action decreased from 6.46 to 6.08 per match.
In tandem, Celtic continues to deploy a very high defensive line. That increased marginally by 0.03 centimetres last season. The point being that pressing effectiveness can be enhanced with less distance to cover. The more you squeeze the opposition into their half, the less the pressing distances and the less time players have to react to pressures.
All these point to what I hoped we could expect. That is, when a top coach has a group of players over a longer timeframe, you see improvements in defensive organisation and therefore performance.
In both pressing and counterpressing data, we see signs that perhaps decision-making around when to press is becoming more effective. That is, less effort but more effective.
We also need to be careful that the above data points do not draw a hard, straight line from correlation to causation, but the signals in the data and the outcomes in the performance do align pleasingly in this regard.
Celtic's attacking - 2024/25 vs 2023/24
We can see similar signals in the attacking data. That is, small but perceptible shifts upwards in underlying performance.
Celtic's xG is up, as is xG per shot (Celtic took 936 shots in the Premiership last season), from 0.10 to 0.11 per effort. The trend is similar to the pressing exertions in that although the quality of the average shot has improved, Celtic is taking slightly fewer shots.
There are also more shots from high-pressure scenarios, but fewer from set pieces and fewer clear shots.
Finally, although there is a lower success rate with crosses into the box, that 22 per cent success rate is the 99th percentile for the league, higher than last season.
Shot on ball value, using Statsbomb’s proprietary on ball value model, is, at the team level, up massively from -0.10 to 0.19.
This can be down to individual performance. Adam Idah, Nicolas Kuhn, Kyogo Furuhashi, Daizen Maeda, Reo Hatate and Paolo Bernardo all saw significantly better shot OBV values in 2024-25.
An inference we can perhaps, cautiously, draw is that if individual players are all seeing better on ball values, then perhaps the collective team dynamics, structures, and patterns leading to shot situations are more coherent.
Celtic's control - 2024/25 vs 2023/24
Simply having the ball is the other cornerstone of Rodgers’s tactical philosophy. The old maxim that the opponent cannot score if they do not have the ball has probably been challenged in the era of Jose Mourinho, and letting the other team have the ball whilst waiting for mistakes. You could argue that Aberdeen successfully deployed a similar strategy in the Scottish Cup Final.
Nevertheless, on average, it is a strategy that works for Celtic.
That can be indicative of increased ponderousness, to be fair.
They are managing to increase the ball-in-play time. That is up to 55.40 minutes per game, the highest in the league. We saw a 'masterclass' from St Mirren goalkeeper Zach Hemming, who was in control of the football for 20 minutes of the recent league game at Celtic Park. It was indicative of the lengths teams will go to disrupt the champions' rhythm on the ball.
Pace towards goal has also slowed slightly, but I would be more concerned with this were average xG per shot down or Celtic were taking far fewer efforts at goal.
The corollary to Celtic’s improved pressing decision-making and execution, more coherent attacking patterns, and overall levels of control is opposition strategies to counter.
Celtic play in a highly predictable way and reason that with superior player ability and overall squad resources, it will eventually wear the opponent down. Equally, the opponent knows what they are facing and can increasingly game ways to stop it.
It is why, as we saw against St Mirren and in the Cup Final, the pace of passing and movement off the ball is key to Celtic’s success.
I will follow up with areas to improve and also individual player end-of-season reviews in the coming weeks.
Share