Celtic’s Euro Co-Efficient Is On The Brink Of Disaster. It’s Another Stain On This Board.

The Record has a mocking, gleeful article up this morning about how the club from Ibrox might go right into Champions League Pot 2 if they get there. We’d be stuck in Pot 4. The “good news” is that we’d be a Pot 2 team in the Europa League if we were put there instead. Not that I would consider that to be particularly good news.

But it would make a difference to our co-efficient, because we’d be in a much simpler competition. That should enable us to rack up more points. This is how the Ibrox club has leapfrogged us; they get better European results, because they’ve played a lot of football in a lesser competition. But this only tells part of the story, and here’s the problem.

Our co-efficient performance is terrible because we’ve made no effort to improve it. I feel no qualms about putting it in exactly those terms. We have not made the slightest attempt to prepare ourselves for European football over the last couple of years. We’re content to be there and to take the money; as a club we don’t have any sort of plan for progressing.

In recent years, we’ve watched our co-efficient level fall to a shocking low and it is projected to get worse, not better. We’re at least partly responsible for the falling level of Scotland’s co-efficient, although none of the teams has exactly set the heather on fire in that regard, not even the one from Ibrox who often get the credit for Scotland’s automatic Champions League place, something that is not going to last much longer in any case.

More and more, UEFA is moving away from making the national co-efficient a factor anyway. More and more it is going to come down to what the individual clubs are able to do on their own, and that’s not great news from us with our record.

This board has presided over a disastrous slump, because it does not take European football seriously even as they sell us merchandise and an image based on us being a sleeping giant held back only because we don’t have access to a larger television pool.

Had they taken steps to enable us to do better in the Champions League campaign, not only could we have performed better but the league would have taken care of itself and we’d be certain to secure that pot of gold which is up for grabs in next season’s competition. That’s now slipping away from us, in the ultimate example of their short-sightedness.

You cannot look at this team right now and wish for European football any time soon, because it’s dreadful to watch and there are weaknesses in so many positions.

Furthermore, even if we’re in the Europa League next season (and I hope to God we’re not) I don’t think we’re ready for it and we could be piling more embarrassment on to ourselves.

Even the likelihood of a Pot 2 spot in the Europa does not make me feel any better about the prospect. We are in trouble across the boards, and a couple more bad years in Europe and we’re going to find ourselves cemented in Pot 4, our reputation ruined and our chances of improving severely curtailed.