Glenn Gibbons: Old Firm failure matters little to rest of Scotland

No AMOUNT of revolutionary innovations by administrators, police or politicians will be enough to neutralise one of Scottish football’s most enduring absurdities. It is that Celtic, Rangers and all who sail in them labour under the misapprehension that their misadventures in Europe will somehow have a harmful impact on the fortunes of their SPL neighbours.

This preposterous notion springs from Uefa’s equally ludicrous co- efficient and ranking system, whose complexities have been devised for the primary purpose of separating (and, therefore, protecting) the rich from the poor.

Just as the major clubs from the most populous countries – that is, those with the most profitable TV audiences – more or less remain aloof from the tiresome business of having to pre-qualify for the Champions League, the Old Firm in Scotland distance themselves from the annual scramble for a place in the continent’s minor tournament.

Yet, at Parkhead and Ibrox, there remains an unchecked readiness among spokespersons to insist that they are representing Scotland in Europe and that even the supporters of other clubs should wish them well because of the need to maintain a healthy co-efficient.

In fact, the Glasgow clubs represent nobody but themselves and whatever revenues accrue from foreign fields go into their bank accounts and no-one else’s. If they choose occasionally to buy a player from another Scottish club, the seller will benefit, but more often than not from a fee substantially below the true market value of the goods.

The apparent widespread concern over Scotland’s ever-accelerating slide down the rankings is, like most other aspects of the entire co-efficient business, utterly without justification. The fact is that qualifying for the group stage of either of Uefa’s competitions has nothing to do with some arbitrary pecking order. It is dependent entirely on the level of performance of which a team is capable. It has been argued in many parts of the media that a declining co-efficient will make progress in the respective tournaments more difficult for Scotland’s representatives.

The answer to that assumption is, paradoxically, a question: if, for example, Manchester United or Barcelona were obliged to play three qualifiers against the champions of, say, Albania, Cyprus and Finland, would anyone seriously consider their chances of advancing to the group phase to have been diminished?

If anything, the bizarre machinations of Michel Platini, the Uefa president, will make it comparatively easier for Scottish champions of the present impoverished standard to reach the tournament proper in the Champions League, because of the relatively recently introduced ‘Champions Route’.

This is the arrangement which allows title winners in smaller countries to play each other in the pre-qualifying, thereby avoiding collisions with the third and fourth teams from England, Spain, Germany and Italy. The mechanism this season has allowed such as Apoel of Cyprus, Genk of Belgium, BATE of Belarus and Plzen of the Czech Republic to reach the group stage.

Unlike Rangers, they earned their passage. The Scottish champions’ failure against Malmo was unrelated to their ranking, but owed everything to their inadequacy.