Celtic’s campaign was a total triumph. No wonder our rivals are sick.

And so it ends. The 2024/25 league campaign concludes with Celtic as champions.

It ends with Celtic as League Cup winners, and we go into next week’s Scottish Cup Final chasing a Treble.

Yes, another one.

This was a big one. This was an important one.

It is brilliant that Rodgers kept his promise to the fans, made at the end of last season. When I personally asked him on the final day if he had a message for those who said we were about to see the “real” Ibrox club after the summer, he said, “They’ll see the real Celtic.”

And we have. From almost the first moment the season began, we were on fire.

Seven wins in a row to start the campaign, the first six of them without conceding a goal. The draw against Aberdeen ended that run, only for us to go on another seven straight wins. Fourteen wins from the first fifteen games. That took us to the draw against Dundee United, and then two further wins before we lost at Ibrox.

But by then it was just about over anyway. Sixteen league wins and two draws in the first eighteen games meant we were already miles ahead. Another three wins, a draw, then three more wins followed—that’s another seven-game unbeaten run. Then came a little wobble where we looked a bit shaky, but all the work had already been done.

The lead had been built, the foundation laid. We were on our way to being champions.

Those 18 games without a loss—16 wins and two draws—were an outstanding start to the campaign. And it was that start which made it inconceivable that we’d be caught before the season ended. There were individual matches where we looked in a different category of brilliance from every other side in the league.

Prior to kick-off today, these are some of the crucial stats;

We’d scored six goals on two occasions.

We’d scored five on half a dozen.

Amazingly, in the late stage of the season—in a spell where we lost two and drew once—five of the matches in which we scored five goals occurred.

In another five games, we’d scored four times.

And dig this: on ten occasions, we’d scored three.

Our form has been staggering.

To put it in even more context, in four Scottish Cup games we scored five times in two of them.

In the League Cup, which of course we won, we scored three goals twice, five goals once, and six goals once.

That’s why we’re miles ahead of everyone else.

Seven of our players have scored more than ten goals over the course of the season in all competitions.

One of them, Daizen Maeda, has over thirty goals.

Two of them—Nicolas Kühn and Adam Idah—have over twenty.

Over 1.1 million fans have attended Celtic Park across our Premiership games this season, and more than 1.5 million in total across all competitions.

That translates into raw financial power like nothing else.

That’s why we’re the richest club in the country. That’s why we can afford to spend more than any other club here.

It’s also a phenomenal statement about the loyalty and dedication of the Celtic support.

It’s all there in the hard numbers. But of course, there’s more.

With Celtic, there’s always more. Rodgers wasn’t kidding. We have seen the real Celtic this season—because we had to. It was the only way we were going to accomplish one other very special task: overtaking the lie. Smashing their bogus claim of being the most successful club in the country to bits. And we’ve done that—emphatically.

The act itself was sealed at Hampden when we won the League Cup.

Winning the title increases our lead.

Winning the Scottish Cup will increase it further. This club is hungry to extend that lead even more.

Rodgers has delivered in spades.

What’s more—and perhaps most important—we’ve also made strides in Europe, where Rodgers has delivered in ways no one expected.

In a campaign full of positives, I think we all agree that our proudest moment was coming so close in Munich—to take Bayern to extra time.

They got the late goal that broke our hearts, but they didn’t take away our pride. A lot of people thought the draw in Atalanta was our most extraordinary European performance. But to have given so much in Munich and come so close to extra time? That was momentous. That gives us hope for next season’s European adventure.

This season has been a triumph. We’ve been brilliant throughout. There have been times we’ve raised our game to a whole new level. Not only do we look further ahead domestically than ever before, but those strides in Europe are massive. Because that’s where we want to be judged now. Those are the teams we want to benchmark ourselves against—not the SPFL.

This was the season where we smashed the lie completely.

The season where we completed the Barrowfield project.

The league campaign where a dreadful officiating decision—and the leaked audio of how it was reached—brought down another SFA official, VAR official Alan Muir. Shades of the old days when we were knocking off Jim Farry and people like Hugh Dallas.

Rodgers has gone on the offensive several times this season—against decisions he didn’t like, officials he didn’t like, and a media he hasn’t hesitated to slap down.

This has been one of the most enjoyable campaigns in my living memory. Even when things got shaky toward the end, we always had the cushion. We always had the luxury of knowing we had a solid lead and nothing was going to shake us on the way to the title. There was no point at which it ever looked like we wouldn’t be champions.

Everyone in the Celtic squad deserves credit for this campaign—and so do the coaching staff. It’s been a team effort.

The board don’t get off quite so easily. They dragged their feet in the summer, and ended up having to pay more for key players. They sold Kyogo in January without a replacement lined up. They ought to be mortified at how stupid that looked—both to Celtic fans and the wider football world.

They cannot fail to back this manager in the summer. They just can’t.

The outcry would be universal.

The boss himself would be entitled to be angry.

There may be a few curveballs in terms of players leaving, but as long as Rodgers is informed in advance, I’m confident he’ll have a plan for it.

The distance between now and the start of next season will feel atrociously long.

But the time will pass—it always does. The key is to be ready when it does.

Five in a row is the prize… but it’s not the only one.