"For the good of Scottish football, Celtic and Rangers must now be helped to leave for England", Jim says. which is a pretty neat statement of the fundamental error committed by all those who advocate this plan. Because of course, Rangers and Celtic would not be going anywhere. Rather, the Premiership would be coming to Scotland, and the idea that whatever was left of a Scottish League would somehow flourish in this eventuality is optimistic to say the least.
Rangers or Celtic would still be playing in Glasgow every weekend. The papers would still be full of Rangers and Celtic stories. Rangers and Celtic would continue to sign the best Scottish players, and attract more fans, and more sponsorship money, and broadly suck the life out of the competition even more effectively than they have managed to do while part of the same league system. The reason the OF have continually raised the possibility of 'moving south', in the face of opposition from almost every concievable direction, is because it really would suit them. That they have managed to convince anyone that it would be good for anyone else at all strikes me as amazing. Anyone who cares about Scottish football in general should regard this idea as a total non-starter.
Reading the comments on Jim's post, there seem to be a lot of people who think that it is 'good marketing' or some magic powers that have allowed the big two to pull away from the rest over the last two decades, or that this change is somehow inevitable. It is not. There are two main factors responsible: The increased money from the champions league, and the re-structuring of Scottish football, with the creation of the break-away SPL, that allowed the top clubs to run things for their benefit.
The first of these we can't do much about, but there is plenty that could be done about the second. We just haven't done these things (or in many cases have undone them) because every decision made since the creation of the SPL has been designed for the benefit of the Old Firm. The most obvious examples of changes which could have an immediate effect on the competitiveness of the SPL:
1) playing each team twice a season instead of four times, as suggested above, helps the 'medium-sized' teams, as they play the OF less and smaller teams more.
2) a share in gate revenues (doesn't have to be 50%) for the away team, as used to be the case. This also gives clubs a more stable income stream over the season.
3) a more equitable distribution of TV money. There is no need to make the prize money for coming first in the SPL a lot more than for coming 6th, when the ChampsLeague prize money already rewards the achievement.
The OF need to realise (or be forced to realise) that their long-term interest requires a stronger scottish league, and their short-termist thinking in fixing our domestic game for the maintainance of a duopoly is one of the main causes of its current weakness.
