The lowdown on Celta Vigo
Time for a closer look at the team that FC Barcelona will be visiting on Saturday at 4.15pm CET.
WHERE ARE THEY FROM?
With a population of just under 300,000 people, Vigo is the biggest city in the region of Galicia in northwest Spain, which has its own unique language and culture. Located on the Atlantic coast, just a few miles from the Portuguese border, it is home to the European Fisheries Control Agency, being a natural choice for that honour due to its close ties to that industry.
HISTORY
The several small clubs in Vigo decided in 1923 that in order to be more competitive on a national level they would be better off combining forces as a single club.
Thus Real Club Celta was formed, named in honour of the Celtic tradition in Galicia, where it vies for supremacy with local rivals Deportivo La Coruña.
The last decade or so has been the best in club history, but although Celta are regularly in contention for Champions League places, 2003 was the only year that they actually qualified.
THE STADIUM
Balaídos holds 29,000 spectators and has existed since 1924, making it one of the oldest professional stadiums in the country. It has undergone several redevelopments since then, particularly for when it hosted games at the 1982 World Cup, and in recent years has been undergoing further redevelopments.
HEAD TO HEAD
Although there have been cases of Barça running away with this fixture (6-1 in 2016, 5-0 in 2017 and 5-0 in the cup in 2018), the last fourteen league meetings have also seen Celta get five wins, just one fewer than Barça in the same period.
They’re very much Barça’s bogey team of late, and have even won twice at Camp Nou, 1-0 in 2014 when goalkeeper Sergio Álvarez was simply extraordinary, and 2-1 last May, when Santi Mina scored twice to cancel out Leo Messi’s opener.
Barça may have won fairly comfortably, 3-0, when they visited Balaídos last term, but the season before that they were held 2-2 and in 2019 they lost 2-0, although they had already won the league by that stage and Ernesto Valverde rested several players with the Champions League semi-final in mind.
FORM GUIDE
Now in their tenth consecutive season in La Liga, and after finishing a more than respectable eighth last year, 2021/22 has not go off to the best of starts for Celta.
They only had one point to show from their first five games, and although they then collected back-to-back wins against Levante and Granada, that didn’t signal in much of a change in fortunes.
Getafe is the only other team they have managed to beat and they currently lie 15th in the table.
THE PLAYERS
Most capped internationals
Renato Tapia (Peru, 66); Néstor Araujo (Mexico, 54), Okay Yokuşlu (Turkey, 35), Jeison Murillo (Colombia, 32); Iago Aspas (Spain, 18); Nolito (Spain, 16); Emre Mor (Turkey, 15), Joseph Aidoo (Ghana, 7); Franco Cervi (Argentina, 4), Brais Méndez (Spain, 3)
Barça connections
Manuel Agudo Durán, better known as Nolito, was at Barça B from 2208 to 2011 and made a couple of appearances for the senior team. After spells at Benfica and Granada, he joined Celta in 2013. After 100 games, he left on sky blue for another, Manchester City, and was also at Sevilla before returning to Celta last year.
Colombian Jeison Murillo spent the second half of the 2018/19 season on loan to Barça from Valencia. After that he went on loan to Sampdoria, and eventually signed full time for the Italians, although since the deal was struck he has been playing on loan to Celta.
Somebody else who knows the Camp Nou very well indeed is Denis Suárez (below) He was sold from Barça B to Villarreal in 2015, but the Catalans exercised the buyback clause a year later. After 46 games for the first team, he went on loan to Arsenal last season before being sold to Celta in the summer of 2019.
THE BOSS
Eduardo Coudet spent his entire playing career in his native Argentina, other than a short spell in the USA prior to his retirement.
He then went into management, mainly in Argentina, but also at Tijuana in Mexico and Internacional in Brazil, his most notable achievement coming when he guided Racing Club to a rare league title in 2019. He has been in charge of Celta since November of last year in what is his first experience of European football.