As Celtic edge closer to an unbeaten season in the top flight it poses the question: should they really be playing in this league at all? It will be their sixth consecutive title and nobody in the league is anywhere close to giving them a game at present. It would be far more interesting to go into the lower tiers of English football and work their way up.
At the start of the season English football league clubs were balloted on whether they should allow Celtic and Sevco to join under plans to introduce a League Three, which would take teams from the current League Two and Vanarama National League, and could conceivably include the Old Firm. As expected, the clubs rejected proposals.
It was a blow for Celtic. They are never going to simply be allowed into the Premiership, but they could go into the fifth tier and would expect to be playing Premiership football within five or six years and then establish themselves as a force in what is currently the most loved and most lucrative league in the world. Surely that is better than spending the next 100 years beating the same old teams in Scotland?
Take Swansea. The Welsh club have been in the Premiership for several years now and if they stay up again this season, they will benefit from spiralling TV deal revenues and soon be far richer than Celtic. The Hoops will be left behind by far smaller clubs than them, simply because they are outside the party.
Swansea could be scrapping it out with The New Saints and Bala Town in the Welsh Premiership, but they are not: instead they welcome Chelsea, Arsenal, Liverpool, Tottenham, Man Utd and Man City to the Liberty Stadium every year. They can attract the players that know they will be beamed on TV screens around the world thanks to the Premier League’s global popularity, and dish out the high wages the TV deals allow them to pay.
Celtic could do a far better job of it than the likes of Swansea thanks to the fanbase, the infrastructure and the history of the club. Right now Scottish football is in the doldrums. A Heritage sportsbook review of the lines shows Celtic are such overwhelming favourites to win every game it is barely worth betting on. Zero defeats and two draws all season is ridiculous. It starts off as fun, but soon gets boring. The bookmakers stopped taking bets on Celtic winning the league long ago. But how would they fare in the English Premier League?
The draw they earned against Man City earlier in the season suggests they could mix it with the Premier League teams, but right now they do not have the quality to challenge the big teams in England over the course of a season. If they don’t do something soon, the gulf will only widen. Some of their best players might abandon ship if they ended up in the fifth tier of English football – five years minimum is a long time for someone like Moussa Dembele to wait for Premier Leageue football – but they could do what Sevco did in Scotland and steadily climb the leagues. Lobbying for that has to be the main focus of the club going forwards.
