Ignore those who claim Celtic’s success is “bad for Scottish football.” There are worse things.

Whenever Celtic is doing well, you start hearing a lot of theories from the media about how bad our success is for Scottish football, as the so-called geniuses of our press corps do their bit “for the good of the game.”

Yes, even writing that makes me want to burst out laughing.

Is it possible that these people, with their one-club obsession, really care about the good of Scottish football? I find it very hard to believe.

But this is that time of year when you start to hear about how one-club dominance is bad for the country. How one club hoovering up all the trophies is a disaster for the game. If you have a long enough memory, think back to when it was a club from Ibrox winning everything in sight, while Celtic were a floundering joke. Was anyone talking about what was bad for the game then?

I can assure you, they were not.

This isn’t a new idea—it’s an old one. It’s an idea that rears its head whenever Celtic is successful. I doubt it was said during Celtic’s first nine-in-a-row, and I know it wasn’t said during the nine-in-a-row secured by the first Ibrox club, Rangers.

There have been long periods of dominance in Scottish football before, none of which were ever termed harmful to the game.

Now, let’s acknowledge something important: Celtic’s current run of success is without parallel. This isn’t like other times when one club was better than the rest. No team in the history of Scottish football has enjoyed sustained success on this level. That’s just a fact.

No other club has won doubles and trebles with this kind of regularity over such a timeframe. Even in Rangers’ greatest years, they never put together a run like this. What Celtic has achieved over the last decade—across three different managers and multiple iterations of the team—is simply incredible. It’s a credit to the club that it has managed this consistency, even with an opponent determined to make every mistake possible.

It doesn’t matter how bad they’ve been; we still had to be very, very good to accomplish what we have. Their problem is that we’ve managed to be very, very good during this time, which has only made their failures look even worse.

We’ve also been aided by the inability of any other team to sustain a challenge. For years, we’ve waited for a “best of the rest,” but none have emerged. At the start of this season, Aberdeen gave us hope for ten matches—they looked like they meant business. Unfortunately, we might be partly to blame for derailing them with our performance in the cup semi-final. That beating was severe, it was savage, and it shattered their confidence. Once they started to slide, they couldn’t stop.

This has been the story for years: any team that looks capable of putting together a run falters by mid-season. The truth is, we do need a sustained challenger. There’s an opportunity for a club to get it right: build a good backroom team, implement a coherent plan, and spend wisely. If someone manages that, they could grow under the radar and, in five or ten years, become unrecognisable from what they are now.

But let me be clear: the Ibrox club will not be that team. People should stop waiting for it to happen. It won’t. That club will never engage in the kind of strategic review and long-term planning necessary to build a real challenge. Their focus is always on short-term fixes instead of laying foundations.

Eventually, someone else will figure it out. With no weight of expectation and smart investment, they’ll build something that works. I’d welcome it—not because I think Celtic’s success is bad for the game, but because competition would make the league stronger.

Celtic’s success is actually good for the game because we are a model of how a club should be run. If every club operated like us, Scottish football would be in a far healthier state.

But you’ll hear it anyway: on the radio, on social media, in the press. People pushing the narrative that Celtic’s success is bad for the game. When you do, here’s what to tell them:

What’s bad for the game is the idea that a club which spends more than it earns, which relies on its directors pumping in ever-increasing amounts of money just to keep the lights on, is seen as a legitimate challenger. A club run recklessly, heedless of the consequences to itself or to others, winning a title would be bad for the game in Scotland—or anywhere.

And then see what they have to say to that.