Celtic captain Scott Brown says his side faced potential Champions League winners in Paris Saint-Germain after losing 7-1 in the French capital.

The Scottish champions took an early lead but were outclassed by the star-studded hosts and Brown said he always knew Celtic would face a real challenge.

"It was a hard day and it was always going to be a hard day, to be perfectly honest," he said. "I think we're playing against a top quality team and we've tried to attack.

"We've scored early doors and it maybe rumbled them a little bit.

"If you don't lose the first, second and third goal that early on and we're a little bit more composed on the ball I think we maybe push it a wee bit longer."

Brown said there was no doubting the ability of the team he had been up against and said he didn't see many teams in Europe who were at the same level, tipping PSG as contenders to win the tournament.

"They're top quality players," he said. "They're very, very clinical once they get up the park.

"They'll go a long way to winning this, to be perfectly honest. I don't see many other teams that have got that pace and the squad they have as well.

"To be fair, [the defending] could be better throughout the whole team but yet again they're clinical. They drag you out of areas that you don't really want to go to and they're confident one on one. It's just the pace and power they have once they go on the attack and they go with four or five players pushing forward all the time.

"It does make it hard but take nothing away from them. They've played very, very well."

Despite losing 12 goals over two games against the top seeds in the group, Brown didn't feel that an overly-defensive approach was the right way to face the side and said that looking to pose a threat to the best teams would help Celtic improve in the long run.

"We're not going to sit in and defend for 90 minutes," he said. "It's not the gaffer's philosophy and not the way we want to play. We want to improve as players and coming up against the best is the only way you're going to do that.

"You've got to try and look after the ball and be a little bit more composed than we were in the first half."