This afternoon, some of the lads from my supporters’ bus are heading to Perth for the game. For a few of them, it’s the start of a long week, because at 3:00 AM tomorrow, a handful of us are flying out to Germany. We’ll spend the next couple of days enjoying ourselves and relaxing before the match on Tuesday.
Some of those guys won’t even make it back from Perth with enough time to do more than get home, grab something quick to eat, and crash for a few hours before having to get up again. It’s going to be exhausting. And as tired as they’ll be, I can only imagine what it’s like for the players. A European game on a Tuesday is tough enough without a Saturday kick-off away from home at 5:45 PM. There were better times to play this game.
I can’t understand why we’re playing away on a Saturday evening when we’ve got a European fixture on Tuesday. I was genuinely pleased to hear Rodgers address this yesterday, as it’s been bugging a few of us. The boss rightly pointed out that our match could have been moved to Friday night instead, and when you think about it, there’s no reason it couldn’t have been.
The Ibrox club likes to beat the drum for itself, and after their second Dynamo Kiev game, where they went out of the Champions League, Clement went on a rant about how the SFA doesn’t help teams. I disagree with him only because he was talking about postponing games, which would only lead to a fixture pile-up, something he wouldn’t want to have to deal with.
But simply moving our game from Saturday to Friday night wouldn’t have caused any problems. It wouldn’t have created a fixture backlog, and it wouldn’t have messed up anyone’s plans. Even the TV companies can’t claim there was some unmissable premium slot for our match.
On Sky, there was a women’s game that could have been accommodated on one of their many sports channels, and Premier Sports – who are showing the game tonight – aired two Spanish matches. These could easily have been moved to other channels that were broadcasting fringe sports no one in the UK was watching.
It’s high time that clubs were given a say in these decisions because they often defy any sort of logic. This one, in particular, feels like a piece of nonsense. Celtic are being absolutely disadvantaged by having to play late on a Saturday. I’m not crying conspiracy – it’s just a complete lack of common sense and forward planning.
Our club isn’t asking for special favours – just a bit of basic competence. People who can read a fixture list, see a potential issue, and resolve it before it becomes a problem. That’s not too much to ask. The schedulers have all the information in front of them. They know which games could be affected, and yet, it seems like no one cared enough to fix this.
It’s a decision that makes no sense whatsoever.
Rodgers was quick to highlight the partnerships between the German leagues and their TV companies. But what he didn’t mention is that in Germany, the leagues are run by the clubs, which are run by the fans, and they get a say in all of this. Here, the clubs are powerless and the fans have even less clout than they do.
The governing bodies are run by rank incompetents – the kind of people who couldn’t even keep a VAR chief for two months after hiring him.
Rodgers nailed it when he said, “Borussia Dortmund will play Bochum tonight as they were allowed to move that game to give them three full days to prepare for the game against us on Tuesday. For us, we’ll probably not be home until midnight after our game on Saturday and then it’s a very quick turnaround with travelling and then playing the game.
“For most British teams, TV slots seem to take priority over the actual game and preparations. A Friday night game could work well as a way to start the weekend, but that’s up to the TV companies. It’s beyond the clubs – there needs to be more cooperation between the federations and the broadcasters.”
The boss is saying this is down to the governing bodies when they sign the deals.
And they do the bare minimum. They don’t care enough, as long as the money is coming in. If that inconveniences clubs or fans, so be it. We might be able to live with that if the TV deals we got were competitive with those in other parts of Europe. But they’re not. They’re embarrassing. The deals are amateurish, with poor numbers, and we’re getting short-changed because the people running the game are dreadful at it.
As long as that’s the case, we’ll have to keep putting up with this nonsense. It’s clear that it frustrates our manager, and I wish to God more people at the club shared his view. If they did, maybe we’d actually do something about it.