Is Scottish football failing after Celtic and Rangers embarrassments in Europe? Not at all… | OneFootball

In case you missed it, last week was a bad one for Scottish football.

Celtic contrived to lose a 4-0 lead to LASK with an hour to go and failed to qualify for the Champions League, while Rangers lost their qualifier against FK Jablonec for the Conference League. Hibs were beaten in injury time by Gent and Motherwell lost 7-2 to Freiburg.

Those last two were at least playing teams with a lot more resources. The same can’t be said about the Glasgow clubs: this was the sixth consecutive time Celtic have gone out at the same stage to financially inferior clubs; and FK Jablonec finished 5th in the Czech First Division.

This is no disastrous blip, nor a set of unlucky results – they were both nearer to capitulation. Again. Scottish clubs once were a power in Europe. That’s a long time ago.

In this century, three runners up in the UEFA Cup is all they’ve got to show for their European involvement. The last was Rangers only four years ago. There’s no hope of that happening again, perhaps ever. No club is now anywhere near good enough to beat even average teams over two legs and there’s no sign they can buy their way out of this slough of despair

It’s easy to think football here is failing in Scotland.

But it is failing only on the European and international stages. Domestically, despite the expected predictability of the Glasgow duopoly (though not last year) and Celtic’s virtual title monopoly which their fans never tire of, it remains the best supported football per capita in Europe. People love it. There is widespread interest and a vibrant professional and very storied amateur culture. The lack of any success outside of Scotland is showing no sign of it putting anyone off.

So it’s actually very successful.

This is rather the opposite of Premier League clubs which qualify for Europe but often seem like bland extensions of a corporate global leisure industry, richer than Cresus but poorer in the most important ways. Bullying their way through competitions, using the leverage of their often vastly superior finances but pretending it’s a competition of equals. Most people can’t even watch the clubs in Europe on TV because a paywall demands that you further enrich the already rich in a mammon doom loop. The result for regular qualifiers is an overwhelming sense of ennui at yet another season playing the same old clubs again. It doesn’t look like success, except for the results.

There’s no such feeling of ennui up here, quite the opposite. Hearts actually qualified for the Conference League by beating Rapid Vienna on penalties and it was joy unconfined. You’d have thought it was the semi-final because expectations are so low.

We can talk all day about the poor development of Scottish kids, poor weather, poor pitches and poor management at pitch and board level, but I’ve long thought one of the biggest reasons is that all the leagues are so entertaining that the declining standards are never challenged. The Glasgow clubs aside, though increasingly not even Rangers, you rarely know who might win any game in any of the leagues. And for the country’s size, much of  which is mountains, there are so many clubs that are close together creating a season full of passionate local derbies in the league and cups. There are six professional or semi-professional clubs in a 30-mile radius around here alone. More if you include amateur teams.

If you watched the Fife derby on BBC Scotland, you’d have seen all of this on display. The passion is undiminished and kept alive by a younger generation, attracted by relatively low ticket prices and Scottish culture. It would probably be to the national team’s advantage to stop importing cheap mediocre overseas talent but is there a sign that fans care? Not obviously.

The SFA have shown themselves hopeless at addressing almost any and every issue. Scottish football has tried many times to sell its soul to the highest bidder but has always failed. As a result, the finances are relatively modest but that keeps things in touch with reality.

There used to be a discussion about Rangers and Celtic joining the Premier League, then about joining the Championship but now they’d both be third-tier clubs or lower and it’s not talked about any more.

Because domestic football still attracts healthy support, the imperative to change anything is radically reduced. Indeed, you can feel the European losses being shrugged off as Saturday rolls around again, as though such matters are nothing but a brief fling, a holiday romance or a knee trembler in football’s toilets, but the league is home and hearth.

If any team does happen upon a few great talents that could lead a team deep into Europe, they’d just be bought by an English club immediately for a pittance anyway. John McGinn is a good example. St Mirren sold him to Hibs for £100k, then he went to Villa for £2.75million in 2018. The sort of money in the Premier League more normally wasted on players who rarely, if ever, even play was spent on a generational talent.

So maybe these latest losses don’t matter much. Success in Europe would be nice but it really is the league which matters to most people’s sense of culture, place and enjoyment. Maybe despite the players bought from all over the world, the leagues are just too much good fun to change. It might not be competitive in Europe but so what? Scotland loves its football regardless. It’s far more entertaining than higher profile leagues with better results in Europe.

Everything we love about it probably makes it uncompetitive outside the country now but were it to sell its soul like the Premier League, with its love of money above anything and patchy record of entertainment, just to become more successful, the results may be better but the quality of entertainment and culture would be severely diminished.

The lesson of all this is that football is first and foremost about entertainment, the result shouldn’t be all that matters, it isn’t all about winning or the pundits and presenters’ favourite cliche of ‘getting it over the line’. It’s not primarily about European or international success if we have to sacrifice our enjoyment to achieve it. Football is fun, everything else is secondary. A radical idea, I know, especially in these corporate times, but we’d do well to remember it because it’s a more sane way to live.