The outgoing Barcelona President yesterday told the world that he had accepted an invitation for the club to join a European Super League.
Within hours of his bizarre claim the Spanish FA had responded by scorning the idea and pointing out that it would be an “inferior” competition to their own domestic division because it wouldn’t be recognised by UEFA.
This is a continuation of the story from earlier in the month about how top European clubs were planning their own breakaway division.
Which itself is a continuation of the scheme EPL clubs launched because they wanted to seize control of their own league in return for a massive cash infusion to help the lower leagues.
These moves have all been resisted.
None was ever likely to succeed.
Football goes round and round on this issue, to little avail. Breakaway competitions don’t happen with the imprimatur of the domestic governing bodies. UEFA is the most powerful part and important part of FIFA and their approval is also required for real change to take place.
Any competition set up outside the aegis of UEFA would be doomed to irrelevance.
Some in the mainstream press got a laughable amount of coverage out of the European Super League story earlier in the month, with daft suggestions that Celtic and the Ibrox club would somehow benefit from it, presumably because there would be some scraps thrown our way in some manner or other; for sure neither club is getting a seat at the top table.
This article is going to take a realistic look at this subject, and one that I think we’re overdue. Celtic is a Scottish club, but we are limited by that fact. Every now and again, someone suggests ways that we can alter that reality and the media goes into a frenzy over it.
But how realistic are these ideas? How seriously should we take any of them?
Do these ideas have merit?
Do some of them have merit?
Or are we pissing in the wind?
This article will attempt to answer those questions.
Option One: The Invitation To England
The most obvious way for us to leave Scottish football behind would be the “move to England.”
This is the one that comes up time and time again, the one that people keep on pointing to.
It’s the one our largest shareholder, Dermot Desmond, seems to think is most likely and the one that gives Celtic fans the most fever dreams.
It’s easy to understand why. But how feasible is it?
To be blunt, not very.
The EPL isn’t a closed shop, but it might as well be. The recent effort by the top clubs to snatch control of it envisioned reducing the number of teams in the competition; there will be exactly zero support around their boardroom table for the inclusion of two more.
Celtic is a global institution; for some of these clubs it would be like turkeys voting for Xmas.
The only way we get invited is if we agree to start in a lower league. Who wants to do that? I know a lot of our fans think it would be a hoot, but I’ve never been particularly convinced of that, and I reckon we’d be a long way from the EPL wherever we began.
Once again, the very idea would require the support of the clubs in England not to mention those up here, and the clubs up here would demand an outrageous sum of money before they’d let us go.
The same people who forever bang on about how glad they’d be to see the back of us know full well they’d be screaming blue murder at our selfishness if we ever tried to leave.
I don’t see any way we ever get the votes, unless they come an outrageous cost.
Celtic couldn’t just do this without us; there would need to be a major support consultation and that would have to deliver a clear verdict in favour and if the price of admission were as high as I think it probably would be then I don’t even know if that part is possible.
I’ve never believed the invite to England was going to come.
Put simply, their top flight does not need us and a lot of the clubs around the table would not want us. Think of the fans of mid-table EPL teams who sneer at Celtic on social media … they do so only because we play in the SPL and don’t have access to the wealth and exposure their clubs do.
Think they’d support us moving to their league and proving how much bigger we are?
Not a chance in Hell.
Which is the same chance I give this idea.
Prospect: No more likely than it was when the idea was first mooted decades ago.
Option Two: A European Super League
The idea of a European Super League is proposed by those who believe the current structures cannot hold and that the “super clubs” will more and more come to dominate the game to the extent they smash the current setup and go it alone.
In that scenario, some reckon we’d get an inevitable invite.
But how likely is the idea itself, and that we’d be part of it?
First up, let’s try to imagine what the European Super League proposal would actually look like; are we talking one division or a series of them, effectively replacing domestic football entirely? If we’re talking about a breakaway top division there is zero chance that it will involve us, and if it’s a closed shop we’re probably locked out forever.
But we should be glad about that, because such a setup would have exactly zero legitimacy in the game and UEFA and FIFA would come down hard on those involved in it. It’s not clear that it would be able to utilise the global transfer market, registration of players would be a lottery, none would be allowed to play for their national teams … it’s dead on arrival.
On top of that, the European Super League idea was always a crazy one from the point of view of the fans; forget those glorious away days we all have such fond memories of and will one day be able to enjoy again. Fancy taking a flight and two days off work every time you want to travel to an away match? How long would the novelty last?
A European League setup with more than one division would have us somewhere. Maybe not the top flight or the one below it, but we’d squeeze in. But a system like that would be even more disruptive to the current order and even less likely to succeed.
And again, it would involve us starting way down in the system and surrounded by uncertainty about how long the competitions would even last.
Barcelona’s ex President was fantasising, not discussing a serious subject. Those who often think in these terms are deluding only themselves. Football’s governors will never permit it because to even allow the debate would weaken their own power and the subsequent power of those national administrations under them. It’s a dead end.
Prospect: Zero. None. Nada. Nil. It will never, ever happen.
Option Three: The Expanded Champions League
The most likely, and the most legitimate, of all the proposals and the one that I would say isn’t just a possibility but a stonewall certainty.
It will give keep the power where it belongs, at the top of UEFA, it will cover FIFA by protecting the global football order and clubs can maintain their domestic challenges in a merit-based entry system instead of a closed shop.
Champions League expansion could be done in any of a dozen ways, but the most likely one is the trimming back of qualifiers, and the Groups expanding to six teams.
That’s four extra group stage games and more money all round … four more matches is the upper limit of what national divisions would be able to bear, and it would give us more access because an additional sixteen teams would be able to get into that stage of the competition.
And the thing is, this is a change that could easily be extended to the Europa League and UEFA’s barmy new tournament the Europa Conference.
The expansion of the European club competitions will happen; nothing is surer.
The bigger clubs and the top leagues are at the limit of what they will get away with and UEFA realises it full well.
The money from a six team Group stage would give all the clubs in it greater access to the wealth in the game.
Ten games against top European sides … we could sell that to top players as an alternative to playing in “better leagues” where they’ll only get a handful of games against the very best anyway. All of it would improve our standing.
Football can really grow by doing that.
The top clubs would get richer, but the rest of us would too and the gap between them and us would close little by little.
Not only will this happen, but we should be at the forefront of making it happen … it offers us the best route to a better future, by far.
Prospect: 100% sure to happen … and we must be involved in making sure it does.
Option Four: UK Wide Football Reform
A year ago I’d have said that this wasn’t impossible but that it was seriously unlikely, about as unlikely as any other option on the table.
But that was before the Global Health Emergency and suddenly it’s not such a crazy idea.
Suddenly it might be up for grabs.
The question you have to pose is this; what kind of state will football be in if this crisis drags on?
If Scottish football loses a dozen teams what do the rest of us do?
If English football suffers the effects to the extent some think is likely what then?
There is logic and sense in the idea of amalgamating the two national league bodies.
There is something to be said for giving the game that kind of shot in the arm, if it needs it.
The effects of the health crisis would need to be pretty severe to put this on the table, but it’s no longer a flight of fantasy, no longer something we can readily dismiss.
These are unprecedented times and that might call for an unprecedented solution. The Challenge Cup now involves teams from outside Scotland, and talk of a British Cup – possibly by combining both domestic League Cups – has been going on as long as I can remember.
It’s not the worst idea in the world and the more you examine it the more logical it becomes.
The question is what level the Scottish clubs would enter at and how you would determine where each goes.
As someone who supports independence, I would hate to see this come off … it would be used forevermore as a wedge issue in a future referendum …
But as long as this island remains a unitary political entity the arguments against this are weak and I’ve never thought that in certain circumstances – and a global pandemic qualifies – that they’d stand up to serious question or serious assault.
We may yet be able to put that idea to the test.
Prospect: We’ll see where we are in six months … but not crazy far less impossible.
Option Five: The Franchise Route
Of all the options, it’s the one I’d least be in favour of, the most unpalatable, the one that would be morally wrong and leave our history in the dust. It would be horrendous. I would rather build a wall around Celtic Park than allow it.
And yet, it’s been discussed by our board as a “do or die” option in the event Scottish football became an unsustainable environment and we had to consider the most drastic escape route open to us … and even then, the board balked at it.
The franchise route is simple enough; we buy a team in England, a small team, a lower league side which is on the brink of going out of business … and we subsume their identity. We change the jersey, change the logo, rename them Celtic and we custom build them a stadium down there … and before you know it, there’s a second version of us.
And if we get that version all the way to the EPL we close the doors of this one or transfer our main focus to the English version leaving the current one here in Scotland as a feeder club or skeleton team.
When this was war-gamed by the board they wanted to know what the EFL and the FA would do if we simply closed the shop here and effectively became an English club … and the lawyers concluded that it would be an epic battle to have us recognised as such with a stadium in Scotland but that it was one the legal eagles felt entirely confident they would win.
There are a rash of rules and regulations which would stand in our way; Celtic’s legal team does not believe any of them are insurmountable. The conclusion was that it was doable … but was it desirable? The answer to that question was tougher to answer.
Then 2012 came and the question was put to bed, probably for good.
Because Celtic fans are so vocal on the subject of NewCo Rangers that the idea we would deliberately ditch our current club, liquidate it and re-emerge as an English side has virtually no support. No history. No identity. No culture. No chance.
Having an English “franchise” is something the club has looked at but the moral aspect of it still gets in the way … we’d have to kill another team to make that happen and I don’t think any of us has the stomach for that.
It would just be wrong.