Alex Smith has made this week’s idiotic suggestion; that Celtic and Sevco should buy lower league clubs and use them for the purposes of blooding our youngsters. What a wonderful idea, except for having more holes in it than a box of t-bags.
Let’s start with this one; Sevco doesn’t have the money to run itself. How in God’s name is it going to run another team? God forbid this club has more than one vote at the SFA Congress. Who knows what ridiculous rules this lot would try to have passed?
Celtic already has a number of affiliate clubs in different countries.
We have good arrangements with sides all around this one, to whom we send out players on loan. This is a setup that has worked for us. On top of that, we’re looking into a US colt side – a concept I just love and which someone should for an update on at the AGM.
Smith’s idea would have merit in just one way; if we actually bought Sevco.
That raises some fun possibilities, right? We couldn’t have as much fun for a quid as Craig Whyte enjoyed but all the same, it’s not the worst idea I’ve ever heard. We certainly have the money. Our income dwarfs theirs at the moment, and their share price is low enough that we could probably afford it from our Champions League bounty. The one fly in the soup is that stadium of theirs, that white elephant which could swallow many a year’s prize money.
On the serious side there’s another little issue and it’s one of which Smith is well aware, but with almost mind-bending insouciance he simply waves it away as if it was nothing; it’s against the bloody rules. It’s not even legit for a club director to own shares in another side. The SFA constitution strictly forbids it, although it never stopped a director at Airdrie from having Sevco shares or Campbell Ogilvie from riding roughshod over the regulations.
This casual dismissal of rules which exist for perfectly good, perfectly legitimate, reasons – which should be obvious even to the stupidest person in the sport – is typical of some in our game, and it’s typical of the media to report this crap as if it’s a legitimate strategy instead of somebody’s pipe dream.
It’s just ridiculous, as is the so-called “NFL draft system”.
Hey, this is football … this is not the sodding American version with weird rules, scheduled stops for adverts and all the rest of it.
When the World Cup was held over there in 1994 a lot of insane ideas came out of the competition, like having shaded areas on the pitch where if you scored from them you’d get more points for a goal and other such nonsense. And although the MLS is a bloody good tournament to watch I want none of their dumb regulations, salary caps and other the rest of it. Suggestions like that don’t help the sport get better.
But this is why our game never gets better; there are too many people tinkering around the edges. Where’s the focus on the bloody fundamentals? If the SFA really wants to make the game better there are number of proposals they can look at; we’ve mentioned many of them before.
Get the governance issues right first, or there’s no point in the rest.
Smith and others can come up with all the left-field suggestions that they like, and the media can keep on running them even the most ridiculous. But sooner or later the people who make the decisions – and that’s the clubs – have to get serious and start driving the change they want to see, and that they think we need.
Everything else is noise.