This weekend just gone, Celtic picked up the Scottish League Cup for the nineteenth time. That news probably didn’t come as a surprise to anybody. It’s a football competition in Scotland, and Celtic was in it. The result was a formality from the moment the draw for the first round was made. It might be a lightly-regarded competition, but it’s still another key indicator of Celtic’s total domination over the Scottish game.
Very few people will have made money on this result. Even with the Old Firm rivalry, Celtic were heavy favorites with the majority of bookmakers, just as they always are. Betting on Scottish football isn’t like betting on Rose Slots website, where anything could happen after your bet is placed. Online slots are volatile and unpredictable. Scottish football is dull and dependable. You can rely on very few things in life these days, but you can still say with confidence that death and taxes are inevitable, and Celtic will win all the silverware on offer. We hoped, perhaps foolishly, that the resurgence of Rangers would bring some of that online slots-style excitement and surprise back to the sport. It would seem that we were wrong.
The manner of the victory wasn’t crushing. Despite all the hype, it was a routine 1-0 victory over a Rangers side that tried hard but were simply lacking quality in crucial areas. Celtic may have had Frimpong sent off three minutes after they scored their opening goal, but by the final whistle, that didn’t matter. Even if there had been another thirty minutes beyond that, there never really felt like there was a realistic prospect of Rangers scoring. This is the whole problem with the current state of Scottish football in a nutshell. It may occasionally look like someone might be about to step up and challenge Celtic’s dominance, but when push comes to shove, it never happens. A treble treble is an incredible achievement, but it’s shameful that the other clubs allowed it to happen.
The fact that we’ve arrived at this point can, of course, partially be blamed on Rangers. If it weren’t for their years of questionable financial activity and tax avoidance, the club would never have been sent to the bottom of the Scottish football pyramid. Nobody stepped up to fill the void that they left, and Celtic only got stronger in their absence. Having a two-horse race every season wasn’t ideal, but it was more exciting than a one-horse race. Fans of the English Premier League might find this out this year, with Liverpool well on their way to (effectively) wrapping up the title by Christmas. Some English fans have complained that it takes the excitement out of the league. They should speak to a Scottish fan and find out how it’s felt to go through that feeling for an entire decade.
This isn’t to say that Rangers aren’t getting better. They definitely are. We feared that Steven Gerrard was a celebrity appointment when he first got the job, but he’s showing signs of being a competent and tactically astute young coach. Rangers are better now than they were two seasons ago, and two seasons from now, they might be better again. How long will Gerrard stay there, though? We all know he wants the Liverpool job – which isn’t likely to become vacant any time soon – but could he really resist an approach from a Premier League club? Brendan Rogers raised eyebrows when he traded Celtic for Leicester City, but it looks to have been the right move for him. If someone of the standing of Wolves, Newcastle, or Crystal Palace came knocking for Gerrard, should he be expected to turn them down? And if he did, would Rangers end up going backwards again in his absence?
We shouldn’t even blame Celtic for this state of affairs. They can only beat the teams that are put in front of them, and they can’t help it that the team that is put in front of them isn’t particularly good. There’s an argument to be made, though, that without proper competition, they’ll begin to stagnate. They’ve already won the League Cup. Only a fool would bet against them winning the Scottish Cup, and they’re almost certainly with the league again, too. That will be a quadruple-double and more history, but further afield nothing has changed. For all their domestic success, Celtic is no closer to challenging for major honors in Europe. In fact, all the evidence suggests that they’re falling further behind. When did they last make a serious impact on the Champions League, and when does anybody seriously expect them to in the future?
Celtic can only improve in Europe if they have better competition at home. They can only face stronger competition at home if someone else steps up and provides it to them – and we simply don’t know where it’s going to come from. That’s bad news for Scottish football as a whole. It makes us less competitive in Europe, and it makes the sport less exciting to watch as a whole. It’s boring for adults, and it’s especially boring for children. If we lose the children, the game is over.
We invite you to ask yourself one further question: Has the average Scottish footballer got better in the past ten years, or have they got worse? With the exception of Andy Robertson, who’s a generational talent, where are the breakthrough Scottish talents? Where are the players who will help the national side qualify for a major tournament? Are they even watching Scottish football right now and dreaming of becoming a professional, or are they watching something else because everybody already knows the result of Scottish football competitions before a ball has been kicked?
Celtic deserve every bit of the congratulations that come their way every time they make a new piece of football history. They’re doing incredible things. For the sport as a whole, though, someone else needs to come and wrest away their crown sooner rather than later. If they don’t, who’s to say Scottish football will even exist at all twenty years from now?
