DAMAGED BEYOND REPAIR
Forget the sticky tape, Think Tanks, Atlantic League or whatever other dreamy ideas that have been thrown around. Let’s just admit our game is...
SCOTTISH football is finished in its current form. It still throws up the odd laugh here and there, of course, but, as a proper professional sporting concern, it is going nowhere other than backwards. What other conclusion is there to reach as we go round and round in circles, obsessing over silly gestures and players throwing bits of sock tape, whiling away the time between Old Firm matches because there is no longer anything else that really matters?
We’re still in the middle of the post-mortem into the last Glasgow derby, after all. Four weeks after it actually took place.
Even by previous standards, with a related hearing at Hampden not due until February 6 and only likely to make things worse, this really is quite spectacular.
Paranoia? Invective? Club statements about SFA bias? UEFA investigations into fan behaviour? Conspiracy theories? Disorder? Missile-throwing? Sectarianism?
Yup. All that’s been front and centre this season, too. Exactly as it was before Rangers ran out of money and went on ‘The Journey’ to becoming, well, just a different kind of financial basket case.
It was only a matter of time until we went completely back to the future by bringing that whole, done-to-death subject of the Old Firm escaping to England back into the public realm as well.
And, alakazam, as if by magic, up popped West Ham boss David Moyes during the week to dress up potential entry for Scottish clubs into the Carabao Cup as a new way of roasting a decidedly old chestnut.
In truth, momentum has been building on this for a little while now.
Just a few days before Moyes floated the idea of some kind of British Cup, a report surfaced over emails allegedly sent between Ibrox and Parkhead back in 2011 about fashioning yet another crack at bailing out down south.
Complemented by Ibrox manager Steven Gerrard talking on former Liverpool and England team-mate Jamie Carragher’s podcast about how the Scottish leagues ‘filtering’ into England would ‘save’ the game here, this, forgive my cynicism, is beginning to show all the hallmarks of a concerted campaign.
Get used to hearing a whole lot more about it, too — because although a potential fight to the wire between the Old Firm for the Premiership title this term is an exciting diversion, it cannot mask the bigger picture.
White noise about off-field rows and politicking gains such traction in Scotland because there is nothing else to fill the vacuum. The actual product, across the league as a whole, is not good enough. It no longer fires the imagination. The gap between the Old Firm and the rest looks bigger than ever.
Results so far this term confirm that. The four games between the big two really are going to decide the championship and that was rarely, if ever, the case in the days before EBTs, big-tax cases, wee-tax cases and Duff & Phelps put a spoke in the wheel down Govan way.
There were always countless banana skins on the road to a title. Trips to Pittodrie or Tynecastle or Easter Road always carried a certain peril.
Not now, by the looks of things. Indeed, the current condition of the supposedly larger provincial clubs points to a game with little left to offer as it stands.
Aberdeen have looked a busted flush for a while. So stale that they have had to go back to the Red Ultras types they kicked out years ago to inject some atmosphere into a funereal stadium.
They have no real model based on rearing home-grown or cheaplybought players for profit. Indeed, their transfer dealings are largely atrocious.
Hibs are another club thin in key areas. Their majority shareholder Ron Gordon cracked jokes back in November about being ‘The Invisible Man’, while vowing to put his rebuilding plan to the board by the end of the year.
It is now almost February and we are still waiting to find out what it is.
The less said about Hearts, meanwhile, the better. Punters pour fortunes in. In return, they have received a main stand costing almost double the estimates, a team sitting bottom of the table and an owner still trying to find a role for Craig Levein that he won’t make a ricket of.
There’s only so much you can expect from the rest. Motherwell, Ross County and Livingston have been doing okay. St Mirren and Hamilton exist to survive.
St Johnstone, meanwhile, just continue to make you wonder why anyone bothers to support them.
They appointed a head of football in Kirsten Robertson and almost no one knew anything about it until she appeared in a Sunday newspaper a month later, talking about her new job. Now, their grumpy manager Tommy Wright has thrown the toys out of the pram, refusing to take responsibility for a shambles of a transfer window. It is amateur hour in the extreme.
By all accounts, crowds are down at the majority of clubs this season, mind you, and that trend will surely continue when Celtic keep winning everything and the only club that looks like having any chance of stopping them is Rangers.
Against this backdrop, talk of the Old Firm planning their futures elsewhere was always going to resurface. The difference is, though, that more things seem possible now than prior to Rangers’ meltdown in 2012.
FIFA give the impression they may soon be open to cross-border leagues. UEFA are under constant pressure to review their tournaments, their model of financial redistribution, their very existence. The upcoming Europa Conference League is just part of trying to keep the wolves from the door.
All over the game, rich no longer want to subsidise poor. And why shouldn’t that be as true in Scotland as at the highest level?
Celtic and Rangers will have no obligation to keep shoring the SPFL up should the sport crack open and offer opportunities elsewhere. Their responsibilities are to their fans and shareholders alone.
Of course, the Old Firm leaving Scotland may also clear the way for others to follow. You suspect that’s why Dave Cormack is back at Aberdeen and the likes of Gordon and Mark Ogren are in at Hibs and Dundee United, respectively. They can’t be basing their future plans on simply things carrying on the way they are.
Look, talk of Celtic and Rangers going to England or forming an Atlantic League redux with teams from Holland and Belgium will trundle on for years. It will be indescribably boring, but it cannot be any worse than this current landscape of interminable, imbecilic debate on players gesturing at punters, winking at opponents or grabbing each other by the short and curlies.
Things have got so bad that I’m back to flicking through Henry McLeish’s 2010 Review of Scottish
Football for a spot of light relief. What innocents we were back then, thinking we could solve all our problems together, believing nothing could ever be more tiresome than spending almost every summer droning on and on about league reconstruction. What fools.