As he celebrated 100 days in the job at Celtic Park yesterday, Brendan Rodgers joked that in football you either “walk on water or you’re the devil”, but there is no doubt at the minute what his status is.

He did not need to get the cigars out and the feet up - a glance at every back page gave him the satisfaction he needed.

Having taken Celtic into the group stages of the Champions League, Rodgers has achieved the immediate part of his remit when he was brought to the club.

The next job, however, will lie in trying to coach the best out of a group of players who are going to be tested to the hilt by the cream of Europe’s players.

Those games will roll around very quickly – this coming week there is some downtime for those not involved in international duty – before there is the first game against Rangers to look to before a visit to the Nou Camp beckons days later.

However, Rodgers believes that Celtic have earned the right to stop and take stock of what they have achieved in these opening months of his tenure.

“I think it’s very important that the players can celebrate a milestone,” he said. “Because it clearly is a milestone. You have to because if you’re always running the race, you never get the feeling of going over the finish line. It can be tough. The players have created something here in the last five or six weeks that is a milestone.

“It’s a celebration. But they will do that at the right time. It was our first goal of the season and we achieved it. It meant a lot to the club. It meant a lot to the players. It means a lot to the staff to have helped them get there.

“ It’s given them huge confidence that they’ve been able to take on board what we’ve been trying to give them. We still have a lot of improvements to make but the early signs are really positive.”

There will be letting up until today’s visit of Aberdeen has been taken care of, but even for those who do benefit from a little time of over the coming week, there is the tantalising thought of what is looming into sharp focus on the immediate horizon

The spine of the current Celtic team is untested at Champions League level; Kieran Tierney, Leigh Griffiths, Craig Gordon, Nir Bitton, Callum McGregor, Patrick Roberts and Moussa Dembele have never stepped foot in the competition but Rodgers believes they will be better players coming out of the tournament than they are going into it.

“I was talking to Danny McGrain about it the other day,” said Rodgers. “He is a club legend. He has played a lot of games here in Scotland.

“One of his first big learning experiences was when he played against a German team. The first game was away from home and the winger made a movement that he had never seen before and he got away from him. So that made him think as a footballer.

“When he came back and thought about how he could deal with it, it made him a better player. So when you play against different styles, different cultures, different types of players, they will present to you different problems that you’ve got to find a solution to. Whether you come off second best or not, you will always learn from it. That makes you better and that’s what it’s about.”

While Rodgers remains insistent that Celtic are not there purely to count the cash off the pitch and make up the numbers on it, he has acknowledged that realistically it is tough for the Parkhead side to make a dent in the armour of Bara and Manchester City.

He will look to maximise Celtic’s hand by making them hard to beat but the Celtic manager is also looking forward to testing himself from the dug-out.

“You see the investment in Manchester City and you have to be realistic,” said Rodgers. “Their investment in terms of what they are building makes them one of the superpowers of world football now. That’s the challenge for us: to try and find answers to all the undoubted problems they will give you and then make sure that you can give the opponent problems as well. I am looking forward to that.

“The Etihad is a wonderful stadium, the pitch is beautiful. When the game comes round in December, we’ll look forward to that, but of course, we look forward to that being the first home game as well.

“Borussia are a team that has been progressing very well in the last few seasons. German teams are always very, very good on the counter-attack.

“They’re very fast, they work hard and they have a number of good young players in there. It will be a tough game. Out of the pot that they were in, they were probably the top team. Not so many people have known that. They were a big team a number of years ago that fell away, but have come back again strongly. They are definitely a force in German football and I’m sure they will show that over the course of the games.”

There will be a reunion again with Luis Suarez, but while there is always a danger of coming out of these games with egg on your face, Rodgers was keen to accentuate the positives to come out of such a tough draw.

“Football’s football,” he said. “You either walk on water or you’re the devil so I never get too carried away or too disappointed. We achieved what we wanted to achieve. Qualification was extremely tough. It’s been a unique pre-season for us. After the intensity of the games and the level of healthy pressure that’s there for qualification, we can really enjoy it now.”