Celtic Fans Should Not Even Entertain This Guff Over European “Bragging Rights”.

Last night, the Ibrox club topped their Europa League group. Considering the “quality” – I use that in the loosest possible sense – of it I would have expected us to do the same and I would have been damned pissed off if we hadn’t. I would have raged about us being unable to beat a team from Cyprus home or away in it.

Betis, what can you even say about them? They played an awful lot like a side who knew they had a better shot at winning the Europa Conference League, and I don’t say that for nothing. At half time I took a look at that tournament. It wasn’t pretty.

For the next wee while we are going to have to suffer the interminable boredom of reading garbage comparing our “European record” and theirs. Dire stuff. I want no part of it, and no Celtic fan should even entertain this nonsense.

Let me put this in terms that will cut through the media’s reportage.

Say you were a university educated graduate who grafted his way to 2.1 honours degree.

Would you really be expected to sit and listen to a guy bragging that he’d bested you because he got a 92% in his evening class? Don’t get me wrong, that’s a damned fine score … but it’s levels below the one on which you’re being graded, and so the debate would be ridiculous.

We can only compare records here by examining their performance on the stage we were just on, and the simple fact is that they got zero points in six games last year and were annihilated by a PSV team which didn’t even see them in the road in the qualifiers in this one. That’s the only means of comparing us. That’s the only way to make it fair.

But let’s go further than that. Let’s go back two years, to their run to the final in the Europa League, which I said at the time was a mad fluke and should offer no indication as to how they would do on the bigger stage, if they made it, the following year.

They won seven matches out of twenty one games. They finished their Group with eight points.

We finished ours with nine. And we went out.

That’s our record the last time we played in this tournament, in a group which included Betis, who we beat at home just as they did.

Our group also included Bayern Leverkusen and Ferencvaros. That’s a superior group to the one they topped last night and so our performance was more than creditable.

But do we get credit for that? No because we went out, so of course we don’t. Instead, we got stick for dropping into European football’s basement.

Nobody cared that after exiting the Champions League we’d done damn well just to get Europa League Group football in having to play two tricky qualifiers before Ange even had his team bedded in, and then to take nine points from the Group? That was a minor miracle.

And then we came across Bodo in the Conference, and they comfortably took care of us, but they’d also comfortably beaten Roma in the Groups including giving them a 7-0 hiding.

Was any of that taken into account? Hell, no.

When it was clear last night that Sparta were going to win easily, and Ibrox’s path had been narrowed to two possibilities, I knew it would be hard to stomach, seeing them go through.

But I knew something else; if the drop between the Champions League and the Europa League is a big one, the drop from the Europa League to the Conference is even more dramatic.

Fiorentina, Ajax and Aston Villa look to be the best teams in that tournament.

Them and Real Betis, who have gone from looking like being a team who would have been satisfied with a Europa League quarter final spot to being potential winners of the third-tier competition. Ajax only made the Conference at all by the skin of their teeth.

And so when you consider that of the four, only Villa looks like a genuine contender, what do you conclude except that the club from Ibrox could have done far better in that sort of company than they look likely to do still surrounded by Liverpool, Roma, Milan, Atalanta, Sporting Lisbon, Leverkusen and others.

I am not tearing my hair out here.

But as far as the Europa League Groups go, that competition is far, far easier than the one we’re being judged in, and the only way for us ever to demonstrate that would take a disaster.

It would take either Scottish clubs losing their automatic place in the Groups and us suffering a real shock reversal in a qualifier and not getting through … or us surrendering the league title and it not even really being an issue because only one Scottish club is in the top tournament anyway.

If you are expecting a fair crack from this media, you are never going to get one. Betis were a mid-table team at best last year literally; there were five Spanish teams in this season’s Champions League. Four of them are in the next round. Sevilla, they’re out completely. Sevilla.

The Europa League specialists, out along with – need I do this? – Manchester United, Newcastle, Union Berlin, RB Salzburg, Galatasaray, Antwerp and ourselves.

That’s the Champions League, that’s a different planet from the one Ibrox was scurrying around on last night and so I am genuinely unimpressed for all the reasons I’ve talked about before.

And I don’t want to be judged by Europa League standards, because as I said, I would regard our participation in the Groups of that tournament as a calamity and I would not welcome it if it was offered to us just on the off-chance of some fancy headlines (which we damned well wouldn’t get).

The money is less. The company is not as sharp, but still sharp enough to turn out your lights out once you get past the Groups … it’s not for me.

I’ll take us being graded with the big boys, even if the report cards don’t shine, because that’s what we earn when we win a Scottish title, that’s one of the things we play for, and to wish to be somewhere else and to wish to be graded on that lesser scale, that’s a disservice to us, that dishonours what our club should want to be … maybe not what we are but what we should, with better and more focussed leadership, want to be.

This bragging rights argument is pointless and stupid. Let them brag. It’s an empty boast. At the end of this season, if we’ve won this title, that’s all anyone will care about.

We got our points the other night, we got a major monkey off our backs and we should be feeling pretty good about that. Ibrox has once again lost itself in euphoria. They think this is their year, they think they see the sunny uplands. But we’ve heard this record before … and we know how it ends.

As long as we do our job right, as long as people at our club take seriously this moment that we’ve come to, we will have the final word. That every single one of us is well aware that the destination of this title is going to come down to what we do rather than anything they do tells you where the power still lies.

Do not forget that over the next fortnight.

We’ll get our chance to show them at the end of this month. Until then, do not engage in their silly ass debate. It’s weak and its pathetic and its beneath you.