Articles

Celtic And The British League Questions Nobody Wants To Ask.

|
Image for Celtic And The British League Questions Nobody Wants To Ask.

Today there are more stories about this British Super League project.

We have one manager – David Moyes, of course- welcoming the idea and a club director allegedly scorching it.

Does the idea even have merit? Is it possible? And why are we talking about it now?

The idea of moving to English football divides our support. Some would be opposed to it just on general principle.

Others want to know what the price would be so they can judge whether or not the move would be worthwhile. More still don’t want to leave Scottish football in the lurch. Some worry about where we’d finish in the English set-up.

And there are some who just want to get there, and some of them don’t care how we do it.

They would take the franchise route if it was quick enough and accept an invite if that’s what was on offer.

They believe we would naturally rise to a level where we couldn’t be ignored and where our natural strength would propel us to the top of the game.

In a sense, I agree with them … but there are other considerations, and that’s what I want to do this piece on.

Is this going to happen, and what would happen if it did?

Is Reform In England Even Possible Right Now?

Here’s the first question; with the collapse of the European Super League, is the idea of a British league even possible at the moment? If Celtic were to be interested in this, would we be hitching our wagon to an idea that has no chance of success?

We do this from time to time.

We supported the idea of colt teams in the lower leagues although the idea originated at Ibrox and our support for it made it reek of Old Firm Inc. and probably doomed the whole idea.

We lack the strategic outlook to realise this stuff.

We’ve said nothing on this and I’d advise us not to, because the architects of this idea are toxic.

If this suggestion that come from the 14 teams who hadn’t proposed the European league there would be an opportunity here, but this has come from the so-called Big Six.

They’ve just suffered their second major defeat of the year, the first being their attempt to grab control of the EPL in exchange for a massive financial donation to the lower leagues.

It will be a long time before they are in a position to propose anything.

Nobody in the top flight trusts them.

Clubs in the leagues under them now see them as rapacious and greedy and unprincipled.

Under these guys, this is a total non-starter. They couldn’t get approval if they wanted to pass a motion stipulating that the grass has to be green.

So right from the off, this story has more holes in it than Swiss Cheese.

These people aren’t going to get such a proposal through the rest of the clubs. Not in any way that I can see. But if they did then the terms would have to be extreme. I worry about that.

Let’s have a think about what those terms might be.

English Clubs Would Demand – And Get – Concessions.

Every club in England would demand concessions to let us into the league.

The price tag would grow and grow and grow until you wondered if it was even a good idea any longer.

English clubs would need to be compensated because at whatever level we started in the league we would be jumping other clubs in the queue. The most obvious early solution would be increase the size of the top flight … that’s a non-starter.

The changes to the Champions League will hurt the EPL because it increases the number of games they have to play.

UEFA’s suggestion that the league reduce the number of teams has been scorned by those running it.

Do you think those same people would welcome the addition of teams?

Not a chance in Hell. A 20 EPL is the way it’s going to be.

There is no room to increase the size of the Championship or Leagues 1 and 2 either; all have 24 teams already and none of them is going to voluntarily vote to admit two more sides and four more games in an already crowded schedule.

Those teams play 46 league games already.

50 league games would be the longest domestic season anywhere in Europe … and the question arises again as to how you justify skipping two teams from outside the setup above sides which are already there.

So compensation to the English clubs is a certainty and it would be the right thing to do.

It would also be expensive, and that would have a lot of people questioning what the point was.

Scottish Football’s Price Tag Might Be Even Higher

Can you even imagine what Scottish football would bill us for leaving?

Don’t forget, not only would we need permission from England to attend the party but we’d need the SFA’s permission and the sanction of the other clubs to leave this game behind.

For openers, I don’t think other clubs would vote to let us leave.

They have every right not to permit this, and I don’t think they would be shy about exercising their rights to keep us here where the money ourselves and whatever club is playing at Ibrox is substantial.

The reputational damage to the league might be even worse.

Who wants the watching world to see their league as a backwater with nothing to sell it to the wider world?

There are elements of jealousy and envy and simple spite at play here. You cannot rule out clubs voting to keep us here for those reasons. Even if they approved it, it would come at a cost.

The fees would certainly be in the millions, and it would not be a one-off payment either but staggered payments lasting years if not decades. Much of what we earned would have to flow back here to support the game we left behind, and that would only be right.

Some have suggested us leaving our B teams in Scotland … it’s an idea but clubs as they stand right now won’t permit those clubs in the setup and I very much doubt they would approve a move such as that, even if we weren’t allowed promotion and relegation.

It would also raise the hackles of UEFA.

The Scottish game is our home and we have a responsibility to it which would exist whether we were playing here or not.

We couldn’t avoid it. So we’d add it to the cost.

Where Would We Start In The English League Set-Up?

Forget an invite right to the top table; it is never going to happen.

We would have to start somewhere on the pyramid, and that would mean taking the place of another club in the line.

We’ve talked about compensation already; now we have to wonder what our position would be.

The common wisdom is that we’ve have to start “at the bottom.”

A Liverpool director has apparently told the media that we would need to begin in League Two.

But that’s not the bottom of the pyramid at tall.

There are leagues on the English pyramid below League Two.

When Sevco was born it started in the lowest professional league on the ladder; the lowest league on England’s professional ladder is the National League set-up, the fifth tier of the game, comprised of both professional and amateur sides.

To do it right would really mean starting there; that’s a minimum of five years of climbing through the ranks playing, for years, against teams even worse than the kind of opposition we presently face in Scotland.

What kind of state would our first team squad look like five years into such a climb?

There would not be a Callum McGregor in it, I assure you.

What’s our level of tolerance for a climb like that?

What if we reached the Championship and didn’t get out of it for a couple of years?

Is the move worth it then, or would we long for Scottish football all over again?

How Would It Change The Match-Day Experience For Us?

The match-day experience would be radically different if we were playing in England, and that’s part of what makes me wonder if the move would ever be approved by the fans.

How many could afford to regularly travel to away games?

This isn’t a few hours on the coach any longer, this is travelling across the country for over-night stays, flying if we’re lucky or sitting on long journeys on the bus or the train. If fans go at all.

We would get no warm welcome in much of England.

Our club, right or wrong, carries a lot of perceived bagged; the “no surrender to the IRA” mob would be out in force and in our faces all the time. It would not be the most pleasant experience.

On top of that, we are used to seeing our team on TV. Almost every Celtic away game in Scotland is shown on television these days. We would not get that treatment if we were part of the English setup.

Oh I guess it’s possible that Sky and others would choose to show us as part of a “Scottish football” package but I doubt the other clubs would go for that.

So unless the move allowed us to stream away games – like the virtual season ticket does now – our whole way of following Celtic would need to radically change.

We’d be entering an era of not being able to travel to watch the club but not being able to watch them at home or in the pub either. Fans are not ready for that; they don’t understand yet what it would mean.

Even the fans who grew up knowing that if you weren’t at an away game that you’d be listening to it on the radio have become used to away matches being on telly.

Ripping that away from them, and from those fans who’ve never known anything else, would be a major culture shock.

How Long Before We Saw European Football Again?

Oh man, it would certainly be many, many, many years before we were able to play in a UEFA competition.

Five at least, unless we won an FA Cup.

In reality it would probably take us a lot longer and that’s a long time to be removed from the greatest football competitions in the world.

We might not have the muscle to get to the latter stages from Scotland but where we are now is infinitely better than having to slog through five years of football before even the prospect of it was on the horizon.

All of football might have changed before we make it.

Imagine we got there and found that something UEFA had sanctioned was allowing easier access to the Group Stages already and that teams like Aberdeen were frequently competing there?

Would we arrive in those tournaments stronger than we are now?

There is much reason to wonder because a lot of the ramifications of this haven’t been properly thought through at all.

Which is why the next section is the most important one, asking the most important question.

Would We Really Reach The EPL As A Super-Club?

There is a presumption that Celtic would reach the EPL and be a fully-fledged super club on arrival in that division. I think it’s a little disconnected from reality, and I’ve never thought it was a lock.

There are a lot of things to consider here.

First, the compensation package we’d have to agree to just to leave Scotland and get into the English set-up would be momentous and if we were going straight into the EPL it would be easy enough to meet those commitments.

But we wouldn’t be going straight into the EPL … so how would we pay the compensation packages from the lower leagues of England, with no access to TV markets and no access to European football?

Remove that kind of money from the table and we fall back on a season ticket base which may or may not want to pay to watch us playing Hartlepool.

Even if that wasn’t an issue, and that the bulk of the compensation was dependent on us reaching the EPL promised land, that would eat up a lot of the cash we assume would be available to spend on a better class of players.

We are a PLC.

Do you know how many of the Big Six are a PLC?

Do you know how many PLC’s are in the top flight of England?

The super-clubs are owned by oligarchs and mega-rich foreigners.

That’s how the Super League concept was born in the first place.

Yes, we would have a higher profile. Yes, we’d be bigger than the Newcastle’s of the world.

But we would continue to be run on a break-even or for-profit basis; as a PLC that’s the only choice we have unless we sold up to some sheik or billionaire. PLC’s find it very hard to become super-clubs.

They aren’t built to reach for the skies in that way.

Celtic would be an attractive prospect to any footballer on the planet.

That doesn’t mean that even with EPL gold that we could afford any. Could we, for example, pay a footballer £200,000 a week?

As a club founded to feed the poor and starving of Glasgow’s east end … should we even want to? Is that how our club should strive to be? Or are we more?

These are the serious questions we’d have to ask ourselves – and which our club would really have to ask us – before setting out on some English football adventure.

At stake wouldn’t just be our future, it would be our soul, our identity, our culture, our values.

And that’s why I’ve never believed that it would happen.

It’s why I’ve never really believed that it should.

There are too many obstacles – practical and ideological – in our way. Scottish football is our home. A European competition which makes us better and richer is a certainty, just as the collapse of the current TV bubble … it’s a tough thing to accept.

But I’ve never ceased believing that it’s the best thing.

Share this article