Celtic have now failed to qualify for the Champions League 12 times. No club in Europe has failed more.

Celtic led 4-0 on aggregate against LASK in Champions League qualifying, and lost the tie 5-4.

A 3-0 win in the first leg in Glasgow had put the tie in a strong position. Callum McGregor then scored inside the opening minutes of the second leg in Austria to make it 4-0 overall.

What followed was a collapse. LASK levelled first, after Celtic's Benjamin Nygren played a careless pass back toward his own goal and LASK's Moses Usor nipped in to score from the mistake.

LASK then added a long-range strike from Robert Ljubicic and a curling effort from Dennis Adeniran.

A late goal from Florian Flecker forced extra time on aggregate, and LASK completed the turnaround there and won the second leg 5-1.

Celtic's players called it exactly what it was.

"We got what we deserved," captain Callum McGregor said afterward. "We actually looked scared to go and win the game, and when you are 3-0 up it's psychological. There is no way that we should lose that game."

Manager Martin O'Neill went further, ranking it among the most painful nights of his career at the club, behind only Celtic's 2003 UEFA Cup final defeat.

Both reactions treat this as a shocking, isolated collapse. But this isn't the first time Celtic have fallen apart at this exact stage of the competition.

This is a club that reached the competition's main phase as recently as three seasons ago.

LASK, by contrast, hadn't even qualified for European football the previous season. On paper, it looked like a tie Celtic should have won comfortably.

Celtic have been here before, over and over

According to figures compiled by the Celtic-focused site ReadCeltic, Celtic have now failed to reach the Champions League's main phase, whether under the old group-stage format or the current league-phase system, 12 separate times.

We haven't independently recalculated that figure ourselves, and it's worth being clear about that.

A second Celtic-focused outlet arrived at a closely matching count, which suggests it holds up as a rough order of scale even if the exact number depends on which qualifying eras and rounds are included.

By that count, no other club in Europe has failed as often. Dinamo Zagreb are next, on 9. Red Bull Salzburg have 8. Fenerbahçe and Rosenborg have 7 each. Sparta Prague complete the group at 6.

This isn't tied to one manager, or even one era. Celtic have been eliminated at this stage under five different permanent managers across the past decade or so.

Ronny Deila lost to Maribor and Malmö. Brendan Rodgers lost to AEK Athens in his first spell and Kairat Almaty in his second. Neil Lennon lost to Cluj and Ferencváros. Ange Postecoglou lost to Midtjylland. Now Martin O'Neill has lost to LASK.

Five managers, eight different opponents, one recurring outcome. Whatever keeps going wrong in these ties, it hasn't been solved by changing who picks the team.

What it actually costs, and what's less certain

McGregor said the LASK defeat alone will cost Celtic "at least £20million," a figure reported widely at the time and tied to the drop from Champions League to Europa League football this season.

The precise breakdown behind that number hasn't been set out publicly, including how much comes from UEFA distributions specifically versus other revenue.

It's safest to treat it as the club's own estimate rather than a figure we can independently verify component by component.

The longer-term cost is harder to pin down. UEFA distributions, matchday income and commercial effects all vary from season to season, which makes any single cumulative figure for the club's past qualifying failures difficult to verify with confidence.

Celtic's finances have also been part of this conversation for other reasons. Reported figures have put the club's cash reserves at various points anywhere from around £65m to over £100m, depending on the financial year and what's being measured.

Celtic themselves have argued that cash on the balance sheet isn't the same as money freely available for transfer spending, pointing to UEFA's sustainability rules.

That's a more complicated picture than a single "sitting on £100m" line suggests, and worth keeping in mind before assuming the club could simply have spent its way out of this problem.

The bigger question

McGregor has promised a reaction. "You'll now see what Celtic are made of," he said. "This is what it's like to play at Celtic. You have to bounce back."

Celtic's domestic dominance has often allowed the club to recover quickly from these European disappointments, at least in terms of results at home. That may be part of why the pattern has continued as long as it has.

Domestic dominance and European failure have coexisted at this club for a decade, without one clearly forcing a change to the other.

That leaves one real question. Will this failure be treated any differently to the previous eleven, or will the response, once again, deal only with this result and not the pattern behind it?