I laughed out loud today when I read that Kris Boyd thinks Scotland needs a title race this year for the good of the game.
This is an old theory that gets regurgitated often and loudly, but not particularly well.
Few in the game believe it, although a cadre within the media push it like a hard drug.
It’s a joke, but Boyd is one of the arch jokers and so it’s not surprising to hear him come out with this.
This idea is old it should be out of date. It’s so discredited it shouldn’t be brought up anymore. Even the concept itself is dishonest; what Boyd and others mean isn’t that the game needs a title race, it’s that Scottish football needs a new champion.
It’s not even particularly disguised. Ask the right questions of those trotting out this line and you get to the truth of it; it is “unhealthy for the game” for one club to be dominant. It’s cobblers, of course, and in a Scottish context it all depends on the club.
Do you know many leagues in Europe – including France, Germany and Italy, three of the big ones – have seen similar runs?
From 2001 until 2008 in France, Lyon won every title. Paris St Germain have won seven of the last nine, and there’s no end in sight. Juventus are on their eighth title in a row, and look like they, too, are going to make it nine. So, too, are Bayern Munich in Germany.
But here in Scotland Celtic’s dominance is a problem? Only for some people, although granted we’ve not just won the last nine titles but the last eleven trophies … a whole different order of magnitude in terms of one team ruling the footballing landscape.
Yet even here, the narrative is a joke.
What Boyd and others want is a duopoly rather than a monopoly and that matters not one bit to fans of others clubs. It doesn’t matter to them in the least bit whether two Glasgow clubs win everything or just one does; they are sick fed up of being the poor relations in the game.
They would prefer to see only one major club in Glasgow; that gives them a better chance of second places and cup finals and trophies somewhere along the line.
The last thing Scottish football wants, or needs, is a return to the old style two club axis.
Boyd would know this if he had a thought in his thick skill.
If he was capable of having such a thought.
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