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Instead Of Wishing Celtic Would Leave, Why Don’t Other Clubs Just … Get Better?

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Craig Levein wants us out of Scottish football. The Ibrox club too.

He says the game would “thrive” without both teams.

Ask just about any expert whether he’s right or wrong and see what answers you get.

This is a pitiful mantra we’ve all heard too many times. Football in Scotland needs these two teams but it needs to be rid of them more.

Levein goes further than most of the other cretins who have proposed this in the past.

He wants the game to kick us out and charge us £100 million to go.

He lives in cloud cuckoo land this guy, as evidenced by his years long fantasy that he was actually a football manager, and who somehow managed to beguile the SFA into making him national coach.

As I’ve said previously, when the game here considers clowns like this to be elder statesmen you know there is more wrong than just one club dominating the landscape.

He says that ours is the “least competitive league in Europe”; that will be news to the Germans, where Bayern Munich is chasing their twelfth title in a row.

More to the point, it would have been news to the Italians not that long ago, utterly dominated by Juventus, and to the French whose league was so consistently won by Paris St Germain that some there thought that the run might never end.

But in France, Monaco and Lille break the cycle in spite of going up against the most fabulously wealthy club side on the planet and in Italy the last two titles went to the Milan clubs, first Inter and then AC Milan.

That after Juventus had won nine in a row.

Nearly everything Levein says is waffle.

He’s banging on about the day “the broadcaster gets bored” pouring money into England, apparently not realising that there are multiple broadcasters fighting for the chance to show that league.

And why? Out of altruism?

The excitement of it? The love of the game down south?

No, it’s about money, and the day multi-national companies get bored making money is the day that Hell freezes over.

You’ll notice that there is not one original thought in this whole diatribe.

He even offered that overused suggestion “to drive (them) down to England myself.”

The jokes just write themselves on that one. (“How many people can you get in Craig Levein’s car? Two in the front, three in the back and however many you can fit inside the stadium he’s towing behind him.” Hey, I didn’t say the jokes would be funny, I just said that they practically write themselves.)

Nowhere in this giant brain-fart is there the suggestion that it’s up to the rest of Scottish football to be better, to be smarter, to actually come up with clubs which don’t put eleven men behind the ball every time they visit Celtic Park but who actually have the guts and ambition to dream big.

At Hearts they do a lot of talking, but I have to give them partial credit for talking like a club which isn’t satisfied being third place.

Levein and others bang on constantly about this about being about finance; how does he account for Lille winning a title in France where they are probably more outgunned than any of the clubs which plays in this league?

The trouble with our league is that every club in it but two are content to wallow in self-pity and the soft comfort of low expectations. Their managers rarely find themselves under pressure.

If Neilson can keep them a consistent third, he can be Hearts manager for life and that’s part of the problem right there. In the meantime, he cannot consistently get the results against the teams around him which would turn their much quoted ambition into a reality.

Because that’s the thing here.

Not one club outside Glasgow can consistently beat the other teams around them, so that by the time they arrive at Parkhead or Ibrox they are out of any realistic running and they’ve accepted another season amidst the mid-table scrap.

When that mind-set changes and when one of those clubs grows a set instead of fantasising about a time when English football soaks up the competition – and the sources of the money – we’ll never see anything different.

Thank God the boards at Monaco and Lille showed more bottle.

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  • Jim The Tim says:

    Aye let’s go and leave, the B team or the women to progress through the resultant shit leagues.
    After 5 years we would be back to the beginning.
    Gers may be operating as Sevco 2.

  • Martin says:

    Correct. We are currently 34 points ahead of hearts. If we assume a loss to them against the Glasgow clubs that’s 18 points accounted for by this stage of the season. Why are they a further 16 points behind?

    The issue is not that they can’t compete with Ibrox and Celtic. The issue is they can’t beat the rest of them. As you say, that’s the barrier these teams will need to break first.

    Loads of people moan about our dominance but as yet not one has come up with a credible plan to fix it. They break of passivity and blest about somehow hampering Celtic financially or otherwise. In other words… They only see their own success as possible by us doing favours, or our fans happily bankrolling their clubs. Maybe if they looked at a longer term plan to make their clubs better they might have more success.

  • Benjamin says:

    I will say this for Hearts. They’re better than some give credit for being. They actually managed to win TWO group stage games in Europe this year which is two more than the Glasgow clubs managed combined.

  • John says:

    This is a man who knows lots about football, remember he was a Scotland Manager and put a team out without any strikers.( enough said !!!).

  • Hunbasha says:

    Another example to back up your argument is Aberdeen and Dundee United in the 80s, both clubs winning the spl and doing extremely well in Europe under Alex Ferguson and Jim McLean. Levein is just livid that he’s not cut from the same cloth as these two guys. Once a Hearts manager… always bitter! Funny how the same sort of stuff happens at Slimecastle, as it does at Ibrokes.

  • Effarr says:

    I wonder what his thoughts would be if Old Firm Sevco was ruling the waves rather than waiving the rules.

  • SSMPM says:

    The assumption he thinks is that both Glasgow teams would be invited when only one of them is a big club. However even assuming that we’d just go down south then the SPL would have another 2 teams promoted to make it a 10 team league again. Then we’d pay £50m each, totally £100m, and somehow we would be on a level playing field with the other EPL teams, when actually we’d start with a £50m deficit on each of the EPL teams. Bonkers accountancy me thinks. So now I think neither him or Liz Truss should become governor of a bank.
    £100m divided by 10 clubs is £10m per club and knowing his strategic planning from previous experiences he couldn’t even buy 2 CCVs for his 10 man defence. Numpty

  • Kevin Dunne says:

    Leven is really embarrassing himself , Scottish football woulda survive without both sides of old /new firm , and even if they wanted no team can just walk in to a top league anywhere without earning the right to be there, they,d have to start from lower leagues and progress from there. He knows nothing at all ,complete and utter IDIOT

  • Al says:

    There is no bright future for us in Scottosh football. Like it or not we are moles to big for it. It cannot keep up with us and yet at the same time its holding us back.

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