The trio of Swedish treble-winning defenders Lagerbielke will follow at Celtic

The signing of Gustaf Lagerbielke from Elfsborg for £2.9million was confirmed on Celtic’s social media last night and the 23-year-old Swede joins a healthy list of Swedish talents that have walked through Parkhead’s gates.

Some were great like the King of Kings Henrik Larsson, whilst others we would rather not mention. More specifically, he joins the long list of Swedish defenders who have played at Celtic Park, with one of these, Mikael Lustig, making a cameo and helping the club’s Twitter account announce the signing.

With Lagerbielke signing and potentially making his debut as soon as this Sunday, A Celtic State of Mind decided to take a look at the Swedish defenders that came before him to see what sort of standards he will be trying to live up to.

Carl Starfelt

Arguably the easiest of our Swedish defenders to recall considering he only departed the club a matter of days ago. After enduring a shaky start to life at Parkhead following his arrival from Rubin Kazan, one of the first signing of Ange Postecoglou’s Celtic side formed a formidable partnership with Cameron Carter-Vickers and Celtic wouldn’t lose a single league game that the pair played together.

Adding goals to his game in his second season at the club, Starfelt departed Celtic as a treble-winner before heading off to join Rafa Benitez at Celta Vigo. Treble-winning Swedish Celtic defenders is a bit of a running theme, as we will see further down this article.

Mikael Lustig

A fan-favourite and a reliable option in Celtic’s defence for almost a decade, the loyalty and dedication Mikael Lustig showed towards the club was completely unexpected when he first signed from Rosenborg back in 2011 as a 25-year-old.

Coming into the club as a skinny, lanky Scandinavian with long hair, many didn’t take Lustig seriously but he quickly became buddies with Celtic’s resident hard-man at the time Scott Brown. His tenure at Celtic park was laden with trophies, 16 of them to be exact. Featuring regularly for Celtic and winning title after title, Lustig also became adored by Celtic fans due to his fight on the park as well as his love for police hats.

He left the club in 2019 as a club legend and with cult hero status, and he trumps Starfelt’s treble counter as Lustig boasts three of them, grabbing the assist for Odsonne Edouard’s treble treble clinching goal against Hearts at Hampden Park, a fitting way to close out his Celtic career.

Daniel Majstorovic

Daniel Majstorovic signed in the summer of 2010 from AEK Athens as a 33-year-old Swedish internationalist. Given his age profile, expectations for him to set the world alight weren’t the highest.

‘Big Dan’ donned the captain’s armband on numerous occasions whilst Scott Brown and Shaun Maloney both dealt with injury-stricken campaigns. Despite a shaky start, Majstorovic started to show glimpses of becoming the commanding and composed centre-back he was signed as.

Not having the same levels of success as other Swedish defenders, the only one not to win a treble, however a Scottish Premiership and a League Cup is nothing to be scoffed at.

Johan Mjallby

Johan Mjallby was signed by Celtic in 1998 by Jozef Venglos in a campaign which also saw Mark Viduka and Lubomir Moravcik sign for the club.

An imposing colossus of a defender who struck fear into the hearts of opposition attackers, Mjallby was initially signed as midfielder. He stuck through the trophyless years under Venglos and John Barnes until Martin O’Neill came in and decided his services were best used as a centre-back.

The heart of O’Neill’s treble-winning defence and the side which reached the UEFA Cup final, Mjallby’s association with Celtic wouldn’t end when he left for Levante in 2005.

Returning to Parkhead as assistant to former teammate Neil Lennon, Mjallby helped the club win a further three league titles and two Scottish Cups.

JAMES MCKENZIE