Celtic have played seven matches since the last international break in October. It's fair to say it has been a period of ups and downs.
The biggest win of the seven-game stretch came on Sunday with a 6-0 rout of Aberdeen, which was needed after a demoralising thrashing at the hands of Atletico Madrid by the same scoreline.
Earlier there were wins over Hearts, St Mirren and Ross County while Brendan Rodgers' side shared points with Hibernian at Easter Road and Atletico in Glasgow.
Overall, fans can be pleased with the direction of travel under Rodgers. The Champions League hammering in Madrid was a reality check in terms of our status in Europe but domestically Celtic are driving ahead, sitting eight points clear of second-placed Rangers having played a game more. That's despite the Ibrox side's massive spending in comparison to their income during the summer transfer window.
Where do Celtic rank globally as a team? The results have all contributed to Celtic moving up a healthy 10 places to 82nd in Opta's global power list compared to a 92nd place position during the last international break in October.
If you're not familiar with Opta's rating system, it's described as follows: "Opta's Power Rankings is a global team ranking system that assigns an ability score to nearly 13,500 domestic football teams on a scale between zero and 100, where zero is the worst-ranked team in the world and 100 is the best team in the world. The Power Rankings are updated daily and currently rank teams from 183 different countries and 413 unique domestic leagues, providing a truly global rating system in men's football.
"Our Power Rankings utilise a hierarchical Elo-based rating system to measure the strength of each team. The Elo rating system is a skill score which has been adapted to many sports since its creation for chess player ratings, including the official FIFA world rankings for both men and women. The Elo algorithm used here analyses match results from over 2,500,000 games since 1990 to assign a rating to each team that is comparable across leagues, countries, and continents."
Celtic are now directly ahead of teams such as Club Brugge, English Championship leaders Leicester City and Ligue 1 European contenders Reims. The five teams in front of the Scottish champions are AZ, Genk, Las Palmas, Al Nassr and Flamengo.
Rodgers' side are the only Scottish side currently in the top 100 with rivals Rangers the next closest Scottish Premiership side at 101st. Aberdeen are the next ranked team in Scotland, way down in 799th near Gamba Osaka of Japan and Gangwon Blue Swifts in South Korea.
European opponents Atletico are as high as eighth, ahead of PSG, RB Leipzig and all but three teams in the English Premier League. Lazio sit in 30th and Feyenoord are 33rd, highlighting how difficult our group has been.
When club football resumes Celtic have a massive 11 matches before the mid-season winter break. It will be a defining period. The Champions League group stage will come to a close and there are trips to McDiarmid Park, Rugby Park and St Mirren to contend with alongside the small matter of an end-of-year derby against Rangers at Celtic Park. Let's see where we stand after all that.
In other news, Liam Scales reveals Irish pride in representing Celtic; how close he came to Aberdeen move.