Big two ready to nudge B-team revolt off sofa in football’s Phil and Holly row
THE bickering over what to do with Premiership B teams is Scottish football’s answer to Phil and Holly. Taking up half the sofa are Celtic and Rangers. The heavyweight anchormen of the scene have been angling for years to get colts teams into the senior leagues.
And what they want, they usually get.
On the other end of the couch are the lower-league clubs. If Holly Willoughby was chippy, insecure, living hand to mouth and cutting around in a ‘Say No to B Teams’ t-shirt they’d be dead ringers.
The two sides do their best to feign mutual respect. They fake bonhomie and put on a show for the cameras when they need to. Underneath the pretence, however, they’ve no real interest in the wants or needs of the other. They’re out for number one.
Stuck in the middle are the SFA and the SPFL. The hapless directors of the set-up spend every day trying to find half-baked compromises all sides can live with.
They must have thought they’d knocked it off when they dreamed up plans to drop a new fifth-tier Conference League featuring Premiership B teams into the middle of the pyramid.
Offering a little something for everyone, the proposal from the Pyramid Working Group looked like a fait accompli. Because the new competition would be independent of the SPFL, they didn’t even need to ask the clubs who have voted ‘no’ to B teams every year since Joe Biden was a nipper.
Now the SFA have thrown a spanner in the works by giving their 102 member clubs a vote on the matter at their AGM. And the creative differences are setting in.
The Old Firm regard themselves as stars of the show. They resent the lower-league hangers-on who hoover up cash and demand a say while bringing nothing to the party.
The lower-league teams say Celtic and Rangers are wealthy, entitled and out of control.
And giving them carte blanche to drop their B teams into the middle of a new fifth tier — instantly relegating 200 teams below — is a case in point.
THAT’S why teams in League Two, the Highland League and the Lowland equivalent plan to use their vote. The ‘Say No to B teams’ campaign is building up a head of steam and a vote on June 6 is likely to be a good deal closer than the SPFL or SFA expected.
Will playing part-timers from the Lowland and Highland League prepare elite young players in Glasgow for first-team football? Doubtful.
As Aberdeen point out, there’s no ‘one size fits all’ solution. The Dons, like Hibs, think they can spend their youth development cash more wisely — and that’s fine.
When the Pittodrie club pulled out of the B team plan, Queen’s Park declared an interest in stepping into the breach. And the reaction of their own fans was savage.
Bankrolled by Lord Willie Haughey, Scotland’s oldest senior club are desperate to run before they can walk.
They’ve yet to finish their new stadium. They don’t have a manager.
The idea of a Championship team with crowds of under a thousand shelling out £400k a year to field a B team in the Scottish Conference strikes many as preposterous.
Think it through logically, however, and a Queen’s Park B team makes perfect sense.
Sporting director Marijn Beuker was lured on a ten-year contract from a Dutch league where colts teams are perfectly normal.
Asked to develop a worldclass youth academy and a sustainable player trading model, he must know there is no way these kids can go straight into a Premiership first team, en masse, at the age of 17.
And if a couple of hundred loud, angry, irrational fans overrule the club’s director of football because they don’t like the Old Firm much, then Beuker might as well rip up his contract and book a flight home. He’s wasting his time.
Irrespective of whether Queen’s Park are in it or not, a Conference league is coming. Celtic and Rangers are the main reason Sky Sports throw money at the SPFL.
Their size and box-office ratings give them a sway the other clubs can’t match.
If the minnows push back too hard against B teams, they’ll be playing a dangerous game.
A rebellion at the SFA AGM would trigger more threats over a breakaway elite of 20 full-time teams ditching the also-rans, going it alone, and taking that new five-year Sky contract with them.
That’s why the lower-league renegades should mind how they go before voting no.
Push Celtic and Rangers too hard and one day they’ll find themselves nudged off the sofa like poor old Phil.