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

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.