No room for tea and sympathy on champagne wages at the Old Firm
NO ONE thinks it is easy to play for Celtic — or Rangers, for that matter. The requirement to win more or less every week, largely against Scottish teams who go out of their way to defend and make life difficult, is an onerous one.
Your performances are dissected and analysed to the nth degree. Same goes for your words. Criticism of either can be unsparing, to say the least, when things aren’t going to plan.
You live in a goldfish bowl. You can barely shop, socialise or even go for a walk without your professional life leaking into the personal. People, some more invasive than others, feel entitled to their piece of you, their pound of flesh. Social media becomes a place you simply shouldn’t go.
It takes a strong constitution to succeed consistently in that environment. No doubt. Particularly in these isolating times of restricted human contact and disrupted support networks.
Anyone who has a passing interest in the Old Firm, however, is aware of this. They have no need to take up Celtic defender Christopher Jullien’s offer to wear his boots for a while and feel how heavy they are.
They might, however, rather enjoy a few weeks on the pay packet the Frenchman receives for donning them.
Jullien’s insistence that people outside the tent think it is easy to play for Celtic — and that manager Neil Lennon, of all people, tells the players this — is a curious thing.
It reeks ever so slightly of a ‘woe-is-me’ attitude. Of the pained thespian, hand splayed across the brow in anguish, resigning himself to the ghastly truth that those cackling hyenas in the stalls shall never understand the emotional tightrope one must walk to play the perfect Widow Twanky.
It offers a suggestion that people have no real right to let rip at a Celtic team that, 12 trophies on the spin or not, has won just six of its last 16 games in all competitions inside the regulation 90 minutes. That this life Jullien has chosen can be more of a curse than a blessing.
Oh, diddums. This could all have been so much more straightforward if you had simply been told the truth.
Whether looked upon as a low-rent league from the outside or not, inside the joust between the Old Firm for the SPFL Premiership is a brutal place to be.
It is a world driven by bitterness, whataboutery, politicking and oneupmanship. And being the big dog. Sometimes, with spectacular explosions of colour and moments of beauty. But often dark and unsettling and claustrophobic.
There are no off days. Celtic, if the last count is anything to go by, run an overall wage bill in excess of £50million. Going by educated estimates, at least six of the other 11 teams in their league pay their players an average of between 12 to 20 times less.
Even at Aberdeen and Hibs, you’re talking about something like six to eight times less. That means Celtic must be expected to beat everyone they play, every time they play them. Other than maybe Rangers, who have narrowed the salary gap quite considerably in recent times.
Even then, they should still get the better of them more often than not.
They should be capable of doing something in Europe rather than being bowled out of the qualifiers by all sorts of flotsam and jetsam and being taken apart 4-1 at home by Sparta Prague reserves.
Jullien will be paid millions of pounds over the course of his four-year contract. Like most of his team-mates. He also cost £7m to buy from Toulouse in June 2019. He is in a high-stakes game driven by big money, defined by big money, based around big money.
And you can’t separate that money from what happens on the pitch. No matter how much the managers and the coaches and the players might like you to.
It has been studied in depth. The nature of football’s market means more money buys better players. And that has to translate into better results at the clubs splashing it around. When it doesn’t, heads roll.
It’s the name of the game from Parkhead to Porto Alegre and it is disingenuous to pretend otherwise. Particularly when you are involved in a skewed race that only two of the horses can ever win.
Yeah, similarly-paid executives in other walks of life don’t face anything like the same levels of scrutiny or swift retribution. At the same time, workers expected to turn up and deliver on paltry wages day-in, day-out would love the security of any kind of four-year deal far less one worth a total well into the seven-figure bracket.
Different trades bring different baggage and conditions in our ever more inequal world. To even suggest that the behaviour of football fans should be tempered by logic and clear thought against this backdrop is to betray a lack of understanding of what the game means as a whole rather than just within a dressing-room.
Going to football games as a fan is not about logic or clear thought. It is about escaping much of that. It is about emotion, tribalism, instinct, venting pent-up frustrations, being a participant in a spiky pantomime.
The bigger the outfit you follow, the more likely it is to milk you dry for the privilege. Strips, season books, merchandising, ticket schemes. That money makes the game go round, but doesn’t it also give you a say in how your club should be run or what should be expected of it?
Hurling abuse outside your own ground might not be everyone’s cup of lapsang souchong. In the midst of a pandemic, it is pretty ill-advised.
However, it always rankles when those who do it — like those outside Celtic Park just recently — are written off from on high as not being real fans.
What does a real fan do, then? Sit on his hands when results aren’t going well? Stay in the house and buy a subscription for club TV? Be logical?
Give over. It is their very willingness to forsake logic for loyalty that makes them the willing cash cows our football would grind to a halt without.
The Scottish game’s biggest remaining attribute by far is its passion, its madness, and these people whose clubs play such a central role in their lives.
These people who will still be there when the players and the managers and the chief executives have retired to a quieter life.
Celtic spent most of the nine-in-arow years up against teams who had no right — and no finances — to beat them.
Now Rangers finally appear to have got their act together, they are wobbling.
It isn’t hard to understand the challenges Jullien faces right now. But if it’s sympathy he’s after, he can forget it. That just isn’t what his business is about.