Headlines were generated by Club Brugge manager Ivan Leko ahead of their Champions League clash with PSV this week.

“We’re no longer just participants in Europe,” he said when asked about their ambitions in the competition. “We’re fully involved. We want to win the Champions League.”

However seriously you think the comment was intended, it was certainly an attention-grabbing statement. No Belgian club has ever been crowned champions of Europe. Brugge are, in fact, the nation’s only European Cup finalist, having lost 1-0 to a Kenny Dalglish-inspired Liverpool in 1978.

In the absence of a stated objective from the club’s hierarchy, Celtic fans are often left soul-searching over what their team should aim to achieve in Europe. Perhaps taking a leaf from Brugge’s book would be a good place to start.

High risk, high reward: The Club Brugge model

In a league much more competitive than the Scottish Premiership, Brugge have won five of the last seven titles.

They have competed in six of the last seven editions of the Champions League, winning 24 matches. In the 2024-25 campaign, they defeated Atalanta 5-2 in the first knockout round of the competition, achieving something Celtic haven’t in the entire post-European Cup era.

At the time of writing, they sit top of the Belgian Pro League and ninth in the Champions League table, above Bayern Munich and Inter Milan. They beat the latter 4-3 at San Siro last month, also comfortably dispatching Ligue 1 runners-up Lens at home before their away triumph at PSV this week.

They qualified for the knockout phase of last season’s competition, comfortably beating Marseille and Monaco on the way and also claiming a 3-3 draw with Barcelona. In fact, they haven’t been knocked out of the UCL before Christmas since 2021.

So how have a club from Belgium’s sixth-most populous city managed to make European achievement so normalised? You won’t be surprised to hear that it comes from a well-driven, top-down model.

At no point have Brugge been a one-man show. Incredibly, over the last five years, they have had seven permanent managers, including future Rangers boss Phillipe Clement, ex-Hoops gaffer Ronny Deila and even Scott Parker for a brief period.

Ange Postecoglou famously used the term “aggressive trading model” at Celtic’s 2022 AGM, and the Belgian champions epitomise this. In the last two-and-a-half years, Ardon Jashari (£31M, AC Milan), Igor Thiago (£27M, Brentford) and Aleksandar Stankovic (£20M, Inter Milan) have all been sold at huge profits after just 12 months at the Jan Beydel Stadium.

This is not the case for any single one of Celtic’s 27 most expensive-ever sales. Incredibly, Kenny Miller (£4M, Derby County) is the Hoops’ record sale of a player who had spent just 12 months at the club.

Brugge simply move faster than Celtic. They operate a more ruthless model with a deliberately high level of risk. Their reward is a transfer profit exceeding the Hoops by more than £110 million over the last decade.

Of Brugge’s 20 most expensive-ever signings, 14 have been players aged 22 or younger, including three teenagers. Of Celtic’s 20 most-expensive-ever signings, five have been aged 22 or younger, and none have been teenagers.

These are two football clubs with fundamentally different priorities in the transfer market. Celtic expect many of their biggest investments to be “the finished product” (think Kasper Hogh). Brugge are realistic enough to acknowledge their place in the food chain, reaping the rewards of heavily investing in players with less experience, but crucially more potential.

Celtic fans often bemoan “project signings”, but the Belgians are proof that it can be done differently if you are willing to increase the financial risk. The Parkhead hierarchy reject this principle, as Ross Desmond openly stated at last season’s AGM.

It isn’t just about scouting and recruitment, either. Brugge overhauled their academy in 2018, aggressively lobbying the Belgian FA to allow Club NXT, a rebranded version of their U21 side, to compete in the nation’s second tier.

Five players to appear in their Champions League win on Wednesday had previously turned out for Club NXT. Arne Engels played the first six months of his career there before earning his move to Augsburg in 2023.

Of course, Celtic are not in full control of the level at which their B team play, and whether they should be allowed higher in the pyramid is a matter of intense existential debate in Scottish football. One hopes that the SFA’s new Club Co-operation system will allow the Hoops to imitate, if not emulate, the new status quo in Belgium.

But plenty of the aforementioned factors very much are in Celtic’s control, and a self-congratulating board show little signs of beginning to take them seriously. Instead, they continue to pander to fans about a changed European landscape, glossing over their inability to adapt to it.