The Scottish Problem
September 23rd 2008 06:37
Now, imagine for a second if the phrase wasn’t ‘Big Four’ but rather ‘Big Two’. Scary thought.
Well, that’s Scottish Football. Rangers and Celtic, Glasgow’s rival teams, have dominated Scotland’s top division since it’s inception in 1890. In fact only two other clubs have won it in the last 40 years. Fans up and down the country know at the start of each season, and I mean literally know, that the eventual winner will be either Rangers or Celtic; and English fans think they have it bad.
English fans, and even the ones outside the so-called Big Four, can and do find solace in knowing that every week they are watching the very best footballers in the world. In Scotland they are not, no matter what they claim. Despite the incoherent bleating about Celtic’s good European record or the massive Rangers fan base, let’s get one thing perfectly clear. Scottish football and its top division are justifiably derided in England because it was, is, and always will be a joke.
The Glasgow teams can afford to be mediocre because their opposition is poor and they know that they really only have to finish above one single team to ensure Premier League victory. That doesn’t exactly put demands on the top two to go out and sign the world’s finest. Of course, they will argue that they do but the fact that the current transfer record in Scotland is the ridiculously inflated £12 million that Rangers paid for Tore Andre Flo back in 2000, would suggest otherwise.
Even the best teams in Scotland have taken to mixing average home grown talent with mediocre imports that are held up for praise despite pitting their talents against no marks. Take lanky Greek striker, Georgios Samaras, who floundered around the English Premier League looking like Bambi, on ice, on roller-skates. He was and still is an astonishingly ordinary player. In Scotland, at Celtic, he is thriving.
Similarly let’s look at rubbish Australian striker, Scott McDonald, who continues to be a force in the SPL, despite looking like he’s been eating way too much haggis. At any other club he would be forced to slim down and get his act together, but at Celtic there seems little point as his little talent is enough to get by against defenders that have no place earning money from the game.
That is the calibre of player that plies his trade in Scotland though and there is no scenario under which that will change. They just can’t attract the superstars that might actually make their league watchable, despite having the promise of the Holy Grail that we hear so much about… Champions League football.
The fact that Scotland gets two places for the Champions League is ridiculous and makes a mockery of the fact that the competition should be about finding the continents finest. If you can’t win the league in Scotland then rest assured you’re not the best team in Europe.
My suggestion, for what it’s worth, is to shut it down completely. Disband the entire league and allow them to be incorporated into the English one, much like Cardiff and Swansea are. That is the only way the teams up there are going to improve and get to a level that will really give their fans something to turn up for.
Then if Glasgow’s best really are as good as they say they are, who knows, maybe we’ll be talking about the (so-called) ‘Big Six’. Hmmm, I might just go and trademark that, right now.
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Comment by Pooks667
Random Rantings
Comment by Rico
I for one am happy with the state of play, and as long as Partick Thistle can continue to field a professional team each week, no matter what league they are in, I will still get that bit of excitement when a goal flashes up in the video printer or they get an alright cup run.
Media and glory hunters are now driving football and in the end that will be detrimental to the majority of teams. i..e a future European league is not a pipe dream its a fact. As Mr Pareto once said, 20% of teams drive 80% of wealth. 2 tier society where the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer. So whats the choice for Rangers and Celtic? Well its Simple
Stay in Scotland and respect your roots.
or
Go Chasing the money and the false fame.
Football is no longer a sport, its a business, so its obvious what choice will be made.
Comment by Wooderbeen
The Daily Sydney
The State Of The Game
Pooks, we're too rich to be bitter anymore! Ha ha ha!
Comment by Stonewall
Before we turn to the inaccuracies lets look first at the elements of his piece that are just, quite simply, made up...."find solace in knowing that every week they are watching the very best footballers in the world. In Scotland they are not, no matter what they claim." - Show me one, just one Scottish media outlet, one Scottish fan site that suggests that the football watching public north of the border believe that they are watching "the very best footballers in the world". You won’t find one because no one thinks that. So, to baseless point Number 2.
"Despite the incoherent bleating about Celtic’s good European record or the massive Rangers fan base, let’s get one thing perfectly clear. Scottish football and its top division are justifiably derided in England because it was, is, and always will be a joke." - Brilliant. Just a quick pointer here, if you're going to say "lets get one thing perfectly clear", its generally considered conventional to back that up with a statement of proven fact, a statistic, or perhaps some detail to refute an incorrect assumption. What you’ve done is no different from me saying "Lets get one thing perfectly clear; the author of "the Scottish problem" article is a clueless tube." It’s not really making anything clear, it’s just an opinion.
If you wanted to ‘get something clear’ then you really needed to say why……Eg. despite both teams making a UEFA Cup Final in the last 8 years, despite Celtic making the final sixteen of the CL the last two years running, Scottish teams are still a joke because…….and you see its that ‘because’ thing that you’re missing. Not only does it make you look like you shouldn’t really be let loose near a keyboard that doesn’t have pictures on it, it also renders your entire point ridiculous.
Now, your next brain explosion was the fantastic, “The Glasgow teams can afford to be mediocre because their opposition is poor and they know that they really only have to finish above one single team to ensure Premier League victory”, before rattling on with some old nonsense about Tore Andre Flo and 12 million.
Do you honestly think that the highest fee paid for a player in Scotland is “only” 12 million because Celtic and Rangers lack ambition or because they can “afford to be mediocre”. Here are some facts, enjoy them as you’re clearly not a man who spends too much time worrying about facts. A Championship winning team will earn (at 2007 estimates) 46 million quid for the following year in Premier League TV money alone. This means that, this year, a team like Stoke, playing in a stadium with half the capacity of Celtic Park, with a worldwide support that’s perhaps less than 5% of that enjoyed by Celtic will earn around 50 million from TV money. Celtic will earn around 2 million, that’s right I haven’t dropped a zero by accident, 2 million in domestic TV money this year.
The only reason that Celtic and Rangers can even afford to spend 4 million here or 5 million there on a player is because their gates, their European income and their large support can finance those deals.
Look, no one is suggesting that the English league is not streets ahead of the SPL, of course it is; it has the largest global TV audience, a domestic population of 50 million (ten times that of Scotland) and consequently the money and glamour to appeal to players like Robinho and Berbatov.
That being acknowledged I just don’t know what your point is? The English Premier League is better than the Scottish Premier League……what a breakthrough, Sportswriter of the Year Award coming your way.
Or is it that English teams have more money than Scottish teams?......again, your intellect astounds.
Or is it perhaps, the lack of competition in the SPL? There are 12 teams in the SPL and only two have a hope of winning it. In other words 16.67% of the teams in the SPL have a chance at the title. There are 20 teams in the EPL, and only 4 teams with a realistic chance of winning it, or, put another way 20% of the teams are capable of winning. We can see therefore that the English Premier league is, statistically, 3.33 percent more competitive than the Scottish one. Startling.
I look forward to your next missive Wooderbeen but do us all a favour and sit down before hand, put on some relaxing music, clear your mind……….and have a right good think. It’ll make things more fun for all of us.
Comment by Wooderbeen
The Daily Sydney
The State Of The Game
And are you saying Celtic and Rangers can't afford to be mediocre? They obviously can afford to be mediocre because they are mediocre. Despite what many Scottish football fans might think, your top two teams wouldn't finish top six in the EPL, yet still enjoy automatic qualification for the Champions League.
Yes, if I'm honest, that does grate rather when better teams aren't included. It's not only Scotland though to be fair, but in my experience they're the fans who crow the loudest.
Maybe, just maybe, you're in the minority of Scottish football fans who freely admits that the standard is bordering on ludicrous and for that I applaud you. But don't harbour under the mistaken assumption that you're the voice of the many.
That said, thank you for your well considered, well thought out and well written contribution.
Can I ask you the same question as I asked Rico? I'm not sure who you support, but what would you say to just shutting down the whole thing and assimilating the Scottish teams into the English (British) league?
Comment by Anonymous
All the author is telling me is that the English League is all fur coat and no knickers who kids herself on that selling her glory means that we'd all rather be climbing into bed with her and her sugar daddy for a cosy orgy.
Celtic dominated Europe from Scotland long before the English game was awash with TV money and if you take the TV sponsorship away from the EPL then the so called big four would struggle to compete. Celtic stand tall on their own two feet and there's not too many EPL teams that could do that or would even know how to do that.
At least that wee Glasgow club is competing at the highest level on it's own footballing merits.
The English game is not as strong as the TV sponsored EPL portrays and no amount of money spent on buying in foreign talent will develop the talent of the youngsters coming through the ranks as the only way to get better is by playing the game at a better standard.
Stuart Pearce needs to go to the Championship to spot the best U21 players coming through.
When Scotland lost it's subscription TV money clubs like Hibs, Motherwell, Aberdeen, Dundee Utd all had to go back to blooding their youngsters and the upshot was Scotland's national team climbing the rankings because we were forced to play our own at a highly competitive level and the author is deluding himself if he thinks the game in Scotland is not highly competitive.
I'd have picked Larsson as the example of the standard of player who came through the Scottish game in these TV subscription dominated times, who left Celtic to single handedly win Barcelona the Champions League title.
The Larsson that destroyed Arsenal that night was not the Larsson that made his debut at Easter Road V Hibs
The 'mediocre' Celtic and the 'mediocre' Scottish League made him into the great player he became.
England will one morning wake up and wish it had done more to encourage the subscription TV companies less.
That is the true state of your game.
The Scottish game is getting stronger again without the TV monies and while it will always be punching above it's weight to compete with the wealthier leagues there's a certain satisfaction in landing the odd killer punch against the odds
As Jock Stein once said; "football without the fans is nothing"
Who said, "English football without the subscription TV money is nothing"?
Comment by Stonewall
You're missing the point by so far that I'm wondering if you're either doing so deliberately or just really not grapsing the fundamentals.
I didn't, at any point, say that the standard in Scotland is ludicrous. I agreed that it was inferior to the English league but then thats hardly the same thing is it?
The Scottish league is absolutely lower in standard but then it would be, we are after all talking about a country that has roughly the same population as North London and its largest city has a population slightly less than that of Sheffield.
No one would expect countries of a similar population, say Denmark or Slovakia (both round about 5 million) to have a league that competes with the EPL so why do you choose to pick Scotland as a point of comparison?
In fact if we look at these countries , maybe you should congratulate Scotland for punching above their weight ? Scottish clubs clearly perform better in Europe than clubs from any other small nation. I would have thought that this would be something to congratulate them on rather than deride them ?
As for your point about Champions league qualification, Wooderbeen, there are 12 year olds that grasp this concept fairly well so I'm not going to labour it, suffice I say that the Champions League like most cross-boundary competitions is supposed to be respresentative of the full spectrum of nations within the conference, not just the top ranked.
Take the World Cup, by your logic we wouldnt bother letting teams like Saudi Arabia and Senegal play, we'd just get the top 32 ranked nations in the world and select them. It just doesnt work like that and its incredibly nieve of you to think otherwise.
As to the "ludicrous" nature of Scottish football, I have a question for you. Do you know what Celtic's record has been against English opposition in the 10 years of European football. I'll tell you. Only Manchester United has beaten them , and even then only at Old Trafford. They were beaten in Glasgow as were Blackburn, as were Liverpool. So my question is, if Scottish football is so bad, how can that happen. They cant all have had off days?
As for your question of Scottish teams playing in England. FIFA have made it very clear that they will not allow it, as have UEFA. It will never happen so why discuss it?
Comment by Chicken
Wooderbeen - You've also been a bit of a nincompoop, and although I do agree with the general synopsis that Scottish footy is crap, can't agree with the rest of the article.
Your point that the no. of automatic qualifying places to the European Cup should relate to the standard of footy being played by a nation means the gap between the 'rich' leagues will continue to grow, as the leagues that already have wealth will have an increased no. of qualifying places to a diminishing no. in the shitter less wealthy leagues.
The current setup is incredibly biased towards England, Spain, Italy & Germany, and as a Man Utd fan although the setup means that Man Utds wealth should remain at the top end, it will become harder & harder for less traditional clubs to break into the elite group unless a billionaire that couldn't care less about the club (ring any bells) comes in when it's fasionable to do so and pumps some non-footy generated cash into the club.
The only way to make footy a more balanced playing field is to have only the league winners qualifying for the European Cup - basically 1 winner from every league. That way you don't end up with 3 of the top finishing clubs coming from one nation and so getting the majority of the cash as was the case last season. As a self-confessed liberal man I thought you'd be preaching this rather than encouraging a less balanced approach to wealth distribution.
Stonewall - The fact the Celtic & Rangers have not helped promote competition in Scotland but have taken the vast majority of the wealth, has helped to keep interest in Scottish footy, and therefore wealth to a minimum. And so to a certain extent you've only yourselves to blame.
Wooderbeen - daft idea about joining Scottish teams with the English league. With many lower league clubs already struggling financially why would a Southern team such as Bristol want to travel to say Forfar for a game or vice versa.
So put that in your pipe & smoke it you blue git! This final line does not relate to any aspect of the article, but was simply satisfying to write.