In the aftermath of the Paris St Germain game, the Scottish media has been happily comparing the French club’s victory over us to the way in which we dominate here in Scotland. In doing so, they’ve finally tumbled onto an issue the blogs have been writing about for a long, long time now – financial fair play. And as per usual they’ve missed the point, either deliberately or because they are too stupid to actually get it. I suspect it’s the first one.
To read some of this you’d think there was almost total ignorance on this subject. It’s almost as if the people writing the articles have half understood the term and just made up the rest. As I know even the Scottish press cannot be this dumb I suspect they are simply playing games.
Brendan Rodgers’ comment about PSG have been deliberately spun into a discussion about financial gaps, which of course lets the press paint him as a hypocrite and us as the PSG of Scotland. One hack compared PSG having Julien Draxler on the bench for the game against us with our having Jonny Hayes on the bench for a game last week.
Excuse me? Draxler is a German international worth a mid seven figure sum. A handful of teams on the planet can afford a player like that. Hayes cost us £1 million, which is well in line with the values of many other players in the SPL.
The comparison is ridiculous. The attempted linkage is deliberately offensive. There is simply no comparison that stands up to the remotest scrutiny.
Worse is the way they seek to equate the spending of PSG with that of Celtic; that is truly a distortion of the circumstances the clubs in Scotland find themselves in by comparison to where we were that night and what Brendan said in the aftermath.
Brendan was not talking about financial disparity; when we were beaten by Barcelona last season the issue of financial disparity was barely brought up at Celtic Park. We know there’s a financial disparity between us and clubs elsewhere; that’s not the issue and it was not what Brendan was trying to say. He was talking about financial doping.
PSG’s spending is a complete distortion of the market and a gross violation of FFP regulations; they are spending money they don’t have.
PSG and other such clubs are sterling examples of why FFP regulations need to be tight, and why they need to be enforced. They are artificially bloated by funny money from outside the game. These clubs already earn enormous sums from TV. Their billionaire backers give them an advantage above and beyond what they would otherwise be able to spend … and that is exactly why FFP was introduced in the first place.
And I’m not surprised that the media is going out of its way not to highlight what Brendan was actually saying, and why they’ve tried to turn it into a discussion on financial disparity instead.
If they can reframe the debate around that it devalues Celtic.
If they keep it away from what the actual intent behind FFP is they can keep it away from Sevco.
Because the papers are boasting that Sevco “outspent us” during this summer window; even if it was true, we’re not the issue. They outspent everyone else, and their directors are being asked to make up the numbers. That’s the issue. The club is not spending what it earns. Nowhere near it. They will not catch Celtic unless someone’s willing to pump in tens of millions, season on season, to afford transfers and pay the wages above and beyond earnings … not going to happen.
But our media would be perfectly happy if it did.
They couldn’t give a damn about financial disparity; it only concerns them as long as it applies to Celtic and the rest.
If it was Celtic and Sevco compared to the rest they wouldn’t care.
But Celtic is pulling ahead of them as well as everyone else, and that’s where their problem lies. They want the old order back, the one that died in 2012, in blithe ignorance of the fact that it was Rangers’ overspending which killed them and the need by other clubs to try and keep up that placed them in similar deadly peril. FFP would have kept them alive, but Celtic would have won a lot more titles; they actually preferred dicing with death to that.
Celtic bloggers, like myself, have been banging the financial fair play drum for years now.
It’s a core part of our campaign to get an inquiry into goings on at the SFA; any such inquiry would surely have to conclude that “spend what you earn” rules would have stopped all this in its tracks, but no … that’s part of why certain clubs are resisting the idea.
The media has gotten late to the party. We’ve been here all along, and our support for FFP is unconditional. Their own support for it wavers the second you point out that it could doom Sevco to a generation or more of utter irrelevance. Our desire to see it is rooted in helping create a fairer game across the continent … theirs is conditional on it restoring some kind of parity between us and the Ibrox club, which actually distorts the intent behind it.
Some of these muppets have been dredging up the idea of “handicapping” Celtic again; I beg those people, please, put your proposal in writing. Submit it for serious discussion at the SFA. See how long it takes for our lawyers to blow it out and for UEFA to threaten any association that passes such a thing with expulsion from European football.
We are supposed to feel bad for being successful, for building something sustainable, for doing it right.
Other clubs can’t get their own houses in order, but want to poke their noses into ours.
Celtic’s comments on PSG have a moral weight that flows from the way we’ve acted as a club, it’s the same moral weight contained in our demands for an independent inquiry into the way football in this country has been run for years.
I repeat, and I will never get tired of saying it; we did it right. We played by the rules. None of where we are right now is an accident. We got here on merit and when we call out clubs for breaking the rules we can do that because we never have.
The media ignores that too, of course.
Some of them have made a lifetime out of living with alternative facts.