Jeff Stellling Owes Celtic An Apology For His Daft Use Of The “Level Playing Field” Phrase.

In this gig, and in any business that involves the use of language, you have to be very careful about the words you use and what those words mean.

Now, I am a huge admirer of Jeff Stelling and thought he was one of the best things about Sky Sports. I enjoyed listening to him, I enjoyed his opinions, and he is obviously highly knowledgeable and intelligent.

As someone who is not a great lover of TalkSport, I think it’s a personal tragedy for him that he’s ended up in that gallery of goons and intellectual pygmies. But today, he made some comments that suggest maybe he’s found his level after all.

I’m not going to judge him on one bad performance, but it was a particularly bad performance because of the use of a specific phrase.

Someone in his business—someone who has worked in communications, someone who’s worked in the media at a high level—should understand what words mean.

Discussing the rash of transfer rumours around our club, he suggested that a Celtic side without Hatate, Kyogo, Carter-Vickers, and O’Riley would be weakened enough that it would put us back on an even keel with the club from Ibrox, as if Celtic would ever sell those four players in the next week without replacing them.

There is a limit to the tolerance of supporters, and that would breach it by several orders of magnitude. It’s such an absurd suggestion that it’s not even worth discussing properly, let alone writing an article about.

Where I have a serious problem with what he said today was when he claimed that, as it stands at the moment, the Scottish league is a one-team league because Celtic’s advantages are such that it’s not a “level playing field.”

I take serious exception to that choice of words.

He knows as well as I do—or he should know—that in strict, literal terms, it means that in a contest, all participants have the same chance of winning before it even begins.

But he’s not so stupid as to think that in professional sports, that’s what the term has come to mean, and that’s not how the term is applied.

Professional sport is a meritocracy, and that means that the best teams and the best players have the best chance to win. That’s how it works. There’s nothing inherently unfair about that. That’s how it’s supposed to be. Whingeing and moaning about that is vaguely pathetic, and talking about the unfairness of it all is contradictory to what sport is about.

What would be the purpose in trying to be the best if you were punished for being the best? This is why European sport so fundamentally differs from American sports, and why our version—I don’t mind saying—is vastly superior to theirs. The draft system, where the weakest team in the league gets the first pick of the upcoming best players in order to maintain balance—what is that but nonsense? Being punished for your success?

No. In professional sports, the term “level playing field” is about regulations. It’s about making sure that everyone plays by the same set of rules.

This is the principle on which all of European football is now built.

This is why there are financial sustainability rules. This is why Manchester City are facing major sanctions from the Premier League for violating its financial sustainability regulations. This is why there was so much outcry up here about the EBT years and financial doping, and why that still irritates and infuriates Celtic fans to this day whenever our advantages are criticised as somehow detrimental to the game.

Perhaps Stelling missed the report from yesterday in which the Football Index named Celtic the best-run club in Britain, ahead of every team in the Premier League down south. Perhaps he didn’t see the report but has missed the subtext. We are here on merit. Every advantage we have, we gained ourselves. We’re not the beneficiaries of sugar-daddy largesse. We are not the recipients of enormous sums of money from television revenues. We do not pay players £100,000 a week or run up enormous debts in pursuit of trophies and titles.

Celtic fans built Celtic, and we play by the same rules as every other club in the country. When the season starts, we start on zero points, just like every other club in the country. To win things, we have to accumulate those points by scoring goals, keeping goals out, and winning games, just like every other club in the country.

We have better players, and we do it better than they do. That’s how it works. Manchester City are chasing their fifth title in a row in the so-called most competitive league in the world. They’ve done so by spending oligarch wealth, and the football regulators think they’ve broken the rules to do it. They’ve tilted the level playing field.

If Stelling wants to talk in those terms, maybe he should start there. Maybe he should look to that and not to a club in the north which does things by the book, legitimately, and which was built from the ground up with the hard-earned money of ordinary fans.

Yeah, you’re damn right that one pissed me off.

For a professional pundit to use that term in that fashion, to talk about Celtic and the advantages we have in Scotland, is ludicrous. It is scandalous. It is unacceptable.

Stelling owes us an apology for that because it was one of the stupidest statements I’ve heard from a supposedly intelligent person in a long time.

It’s an insulting statement, and it’s simply wrong. If nothing else, it seeks to gather sympathy for a club that doesn’t deserve any, because everything I just said about us is the exact opposite of how things work over at Ibrox.

Their club has benefited from the largesse of its directors, who have funded the club above and beyond its earnings. Last season, they had the highest wage bill in the country, and they had that, and the players that went with it, whilst running up debts that someone else paid. A lot of us have said for years now that this shouldn’t be allowed. Why? Because it tilts the level playing field. Clubs should only spend what they bring in the door.

Like I said, I’m not going to go on a massive downer about the guy because he’s made one error. He’s usually much smarter than this, and I’m going to put it down as an honest mistake, but he really blew an easy one here. That was a poor choice of words, and someone in his profession, with his reputation, should have chosen them a little more carefully.