As Celtic crashed out of the Champions League without even reaching the group stage I was somehow left pondering the appeal of a club like theirs. Celtic were comfortably bested by un-fancied Polish outfit Legia Warsaw 6-1 on aggregate. It was a tie that Scotland’s flagship side were never truly in and surely dented the attractiveness of the green side of Glasgow. And maybe, with it, dented the attractiveness of Scottish football.
As far as fans are concerned, Celtic have an appeal that I can quite understand. Your team is your team. You could have been born into your allegiance or you could have developed it later in life. It is of no consequence to Celtic’s fans that they are in a league too weak to challenge them. They turn up, they watch their team, cheer when they win, go home disappointed when they lose. The same experience that any football fan has.
What is harder to imagine is the appeal Celtic now hold for a player who is deciding where to play his football. If you are Scottish then I can just about wrap my head around it, they are now the pinnacle of Scottish football. But surely players who are looking for something competitive, a challenge, will find nothing that they require in the Scottish Premier League.
I don’t want to belittle the SPL, but historically, minus a few blips, it has always firmly been a two horse race. Certainly in recent history it has been a contest competed solely in Glasgow. But now, with Rangers trying to fight their way back into the top flight, the SPL is a non-starter.
With SkyBet, a £10 bet on Celtic to win the league will return £10.15 in May (or earlier) when they win it. Their nearest rivals Aberdeen are in no way genuine challengers, just 33-1 outsiders. So much so is the league title race a write off that SkyBet’s most heavily featured betting market for the league is the ‘Scottish Premiership Without Celtic’ market. It took a fair amount of scrolling for me to find somewhere that I could actually put a bet on Celtic to win the league.
Ah, of course, the Champions League. The grandest of all stages that every player aspires to reach. Celtic have this on their side. Not only are they in the competition this season but they are essentially guaranteed entry every year. Quite an attractive prospect for a potential signing. But even that doesn’t seem a draw for most.
Celtic are undoubtedly a huge club. It depends what you feel constitutes a ‘big club’ but it could be argued that they are a bigger club than England’s own Everton or Spurs. But it’s hard to imagine players like Leighton Baines, Romelu Lukaku, Christian Eriksen and Hugo Lloris making the move up north to play for Celtic, even without the lure of Champions League football at their current clubs.
Celtic need a rare combination of attributes in their potential recruits. Players impressed by the lure of Europe’s biggest club competition who are also happy to go through the motions for 38 games in the SPL. All the evidence suggests that these players who are looking for an easy life in Scotland are not the kind of characters who would also bring you European success. And that is why Celtic struggle and it was no surprise to see them slump to defeat against Legia Warsaw.
With that defeat came the feeling in my mind that the one appeal of being a Celtic player had disappeared. With Celtic you could play Champions League football without having to be good enough to be picked up by the likes of Chelsea, Barca or Inter. I could foresee an exodus of Celtic Park with no players of any real quality coming in to replace them.
Of course, as we all know, Celtic were handed a ‘get out of jail free' card. For the last two minutes of the second leg of their Champions League qualifier, while already 6-1 up on aggregate, a careless error saw Legia field an ineligible player. A crime so sinister that immediate expulsion from the competition was the only fitting punishment. Celtic were awarded that second leg 3-0 and scraped through on away goals.
They have a second bite at the cherry against Maribor, and hold the advantage after a 1-1 away draw in the first leg. Celtic can progress to the Champions League group stages and give players a reason to play for them once again.
But the harsh fact remains that Scottish football is such that it cannot attract big players or big TV audiences in its current form. But unless the powers that be were willing to expel their biggest and most profitable side it’s hard to see how their league can have any real meaning again. The inevitable return of Rangers will help.
But ultimately you wouldn’t be able to watch Floyd Mayweather fight/destroy an amateur from your local boxing club every week without getting tired of it. And you’d be hard pressed to continually refer to it as a ‘contest’.