Levein Should Park The Clown Car And Ask His Club How They’d Feel About Scottish Football Without Celtic.

Craig Levein is never going to win himself a spot in Mensa. That man is such a complete fool, one of the many who swirls around Scottish football.

His return as a manager in our league is ghastly.

He is one of those people who clings on here like a habit some people can’t kick. Amongst fans he’s long been seen as a joke. His reinvention as a pundit was a triumph of mediocrity and that would have been bad enough, except he fashioned himself a return to management somehow. It’s ghastly.

Levien’s latest brainwave is so dumb, so backward, so without value that it should make him a laughing stock, but instead, in our media it’s resurrected an old argument so creaking that Hugh Keevins would consider it ancient and stale.

That Celtic and the Ibrox mob (who of course this clown refers to as “the Old Firm”) should move to England and that would somehow free the rest of Scottish football from the chains that bind it, and all would be well in our national sport.

And it’s such a wretched argument that you can think of a couple of counterpoints to it without even firing up the braincells necessary to stick on the kettle.

If he wants to know how the concept would be greeted, honestly, by others in the game he should start by asking the directors of his own club why they don’t cobble together the coalition that would be needed to just kick us out and leave us to find our own solution, letting the rest get on with it.

I’ll tell you why he doesn’t do that; the idea would scare the living daylights of those people and they know it and we know it and the media which is indulging this stupidity knows it and Levein himself cannot be unaware of it.

The TV money, paltry though it is, would leave with us. Major sponsorship would flee for the hills. Clubs which already exist right on the break-even line would plunge into debt. Those in debt would be at mortal risk.

And nobody outside Scotland would care. Within a couple of years this would be the League of Ireland. Can you even imagine the sort of people who’d end up running it?

Neil Doncaster would end up President of the SFA with his statue outside Hampden.

Scottish football is in a thoroughly awful state, the worst it’s been in in my lifetime and you can blame England for that, and Sky and whichever other bogeymen you like, but nobody will point the finger at the people most directly responsible; the clubs themselves who have seen reform agendas galore which could change the landscape, and the media which runs down our national sport every chance it gets.

Bad governance at the SFA and the SPFL is tolerated instead of challenged, and so the whole game rots from the inside.

And you know what one of the symptoms is? Craig Levein.

It’s a disgrace that we have people like Derek Adams, bitching about bad standards, and Craig Levien in management roles at clubs; the irony of it is not lost on me but apparently hasn’t dawned on those who cover the sport as pundits.

That’s why people like Dick Campbell are still feted as if they were towering giants. That we have people like Martindale being hailed as geniuses for redefining what anti-football looks like. That Hearts and Aberdeen have novices in their jobs. That Hibs keeps on trying, and failing, to find its answer. None of those things are the fault of Celtic or the club across the city, and the sobering thought is how much worse those clubs would look without what we bring to the table.

The worst thing about this ludicrous “answer” to the ills of the game here is how intellectually lazy and fundamentally dishonest it is. “Let’s not worry about how we improve standards, let’s imagine life without the two biggest teams and then we could have a genuine race to the bottom.”

The idea stinks like a fish hold that’s been left open in the summer sun.

Whatever happened to the concept of other clubs improving?

If Aberdeen had shown even a bit more application, I do believe they could have won the League Cup and exposed a gaping hole which nobody will now confront or consider; that Scottish football’s alleged “big two” right now look like cumbersome fading powers with glass jaws and that if there was ever a moment for a challenge from elsewhere this might be it.

But every other club in the league is in the poorest state we’ve seen in years, with a parade of old, tired names at some of them and rookies running others.

These clubs should all be looking to get better.

People who care about the game should be exploring every option for improving it. Instead, it all reeks of self-interest and short termism and braindead nonsense like this.

This is why our game is a joke. This is why it’s stuck in the mud. We have goons like this being treated like elder statesmen and their daftest ideas encouraged as though they were revolutionary thoughts. We will never move on as long as people like this have jobs in the sport.