The Glass Ceiling

 

The Glass Ceiling

One of the things you notice about all of the clubs who hold records for most domestic trophy wins in their history, is that they tend to come from smaller footballing nations. Thus, many of those in the so called ‘big five’ European football leagues would doubtless sneer at a club like Rangers boasting of 55 titles as some sort of European or world record. Real Madrid, for instance, has won over 20 European and world titles, as well as many domestic honours. Can we compare the two? I’d say not because we aren’t comparing like with like given the relative strength of competition in both leagues and at the top level in European football.

Scotland has played organised football since the inception of the Scottish Cup in 1873. The league followed in 1890 with Celtic among the founder members. Indeed, Celtic remain the only Scottish club to have played its entire history in the top division. In the early days of Scottish football, clubs such as Queens Park and Renton would challenge for honours but the adoption of professionalism meant that the clubs with bigger supports could pay more and began to out-perform the early giants of the game. Both Maley’s Celtic and Struth’s Rangers, accumulated a vast array of honours and only the post-World War Two football boom, which saw crowds of 65,000 at the Edinburgh derby or a 45,000 crowd into Pittodrie for a cup tie with Hearts, allowed the competition to be truly open.

Despite Celtic’s astonishing success in the period between 1965-75, there was a sense right into the 1980s that a number of clubs could win the league each season. Consider the fact that had Hearts not bottled it at Dens Park in 1986, they would have joined Celtic, Aberdeen, Dundee United and  Rangers as Champions in that decade. Indeed, Scotland would have had 5 different champions between 1982-87. However, a huge change was on the horizon and was to  begin the decline of provincial clubs believing they had a chance in the title race. It began with a relatively unknown footballer in Belgium called Jean-Marc Bosman.

Bosman challenged the right of football clubs to hold a player’s registration or demand a fee for them once their contracts were over. In every other profession in the EU, he argued, once you complete a contract you are free to move on to another employer with no fee being due. Anything blocking this was an obstruction of trade. The judges agreed with him and football was changed forever. Money then became the prime motivator for many players who were virtually owned by their clubs before the Bosman ruling. Could Aberdeen have held onto players like Miller or Strachan for the years they did, had the Bosman ruling been in effect? Could Dundee United, who often put teenage stars on exceptionally long contracts, have held on to Narey, Sturrock or Heggarty had an agent been there whispering in players ears of the money on offer elsewhere? The fact that the clubs had almost complete control of a player’s destiny, meant provincial clubs could hold onto talented players until they, the club, decided otherwise and thus build decent sides.

The Bosman ruling was a wake-up call to many Scottish clubs and led to typical  Scottish humour of the terraces. One fan remarked to me at the time of the Bosman decision with typical earthy humour, ‘players can just leave when their contract is up? Yer baws man!’ The phrase, ‘leaving on a Bosman’ entered the football lexicon and players started signing shorter contracts with an eye on a better deal or a lucrative move when it was over. To a degree there had always been a food chain in football with the better players ending up at bigger clubs but the Bosman ruling accelerated this and Scotland’s medium sized clubs were increasingly losing talent to leagues which paid more money. This was most brutally demonstrated when Aberdeen lost striker, Adam Rooney, to Salford City in 2018. He was reportedly paid £4000 per week to play in non-league English football. That a top Scottish club could lose a player to a club in the 5th tier in England is astonishing but money talks.

After the Bosman ruling was settled in the courts in 1995, taking with it the ‘three foreigners’ rule, a huge influx of foreign players began in the big leagues of Europe. The football agent became an important figure and by 1999, Chelsea became the first side in the UK to field a side made up entirely of foreigners. Scotland wasn’t immune to this influx and many foreign players joined our clubs. Some undoubtedly added to the quality of the league but many were journeymen who simply blocked places in the team and stifled the development of home-grown youngsters. It was judged cheaper by some clubs to bring in a foreign player than invest properly in youth systems.

Jean Marc Bosman himself said of the changes to football after the ruling which bears his name…

‘Now the 25 or so richest clubs transfer players for astronomical sums and smaller clubs cannot afford to buy at those prices. So, the 25 pull further and further away from the rest, deepening the gap between big and small. That was not the aim of the Bosman ruling.’

The very nature of football’s rapacious and unfettered capitalism saw this gulf developing everywhere as the good footballers followed the money. In Germany, Bayern Munich completed an unheard of ten in a row this season. In Italy, Juventus completed nine straight titles a couple of years back. In Spain Barcelona and Real Madrid have won all but 6 titles in the past 35 years. In England few would bet on anyone other than Manchester City or Liverpool for the title. While here in Scotland, no one outside the big two has won the league for 37 years. Is there an appetite to watch a game so stacked in favour of the big clubs both domestically and in Europe?

With the same clubs turning up in the latter stages of the Champions League year after year, some have lost interest. UEFA will doubtless pander to the demands of these ‘elite’ clubs fearing they’d go their own way if they didn’t, so the whole flow of the game is geared to suit them. Thus, we have the anomaly of Celtic and Rangers being too big (financially) for Scotland, yet too small to seriously contemplate having any chance of winning the Champions league. We tell ourselves that taking part is the important thing and accept the glass ceiling hemming us in just as Scottish clubs accept they’ll never dethrone the big two.

In the first half of my life, six different clubs won the Scottish Championship. In the second half it has been just two. I can’t see that changing in the near future unless there is a revolution in our game. Some suggest a wages cap and a cap on transfer fees might be one way to spread the talent more equitably, but it would fall in the courts just as the argument against free movement of players did in the Bosman case. Others suggest that the prize money and TV money accrued by Scottish football should be distributed equally rather than based on where you finish in the league. With Celtic and Rangers attracting up to ten times the attendance of some of their rivals, the gulf would remain.

So, the big two continue, locked in their loveless embrace like a married couple who dislike each other but have nowhere else to go. They are the chief selling point of Scottish football as their multi-layered rivalry is uniquely fierce. Their supporters consider finishing second to be a disastrous season and the clubs bestride the SPFL like two giants in a playground. What stops them becoming bored with this situation is getting the better of each other and their jousts with better quality opponents in Europe.

That is not to say I am anything less than delighted with Celtic’s championship win this season because I am, I just wish we could find a way to level the playing field and smash the glass ceiling both at home and in Europe. We’d all benefit from a more competitive league. Wouldn’t we?