South of the border

Here are some recent football results:

Celtic 0 Arsenal 2
Manchester City 2 Celtic 1
Portsmouth 2 Rangers 0
Wigan 3 St Mirren 1
Hearts 1 Sunderland 1
Bolton 0 Hibernian 0
Blackburn 0 Hibernian 0
Hearts 1 Bolton 1
Hull City 0 Aberdeen 1
St Johnstone 1 Burnley 0
Kilmarnock 1 Burnley 0
Rangers 3 Manchester City 2
Dundee United 2 Blackburn 0

Four wins for the English, five wins for the Scottish and four draws.

There is a well-established idea in English soccer that if Celtic and Rangers do go south of the border they will be no more than also-rans in the Premier League. This is generally accompanied by the widely-held belief that the majority of SPL teams would be on a par with the English Championship.

Essentially this belief stems from the fact that the Premier League is reputedly the best in the world, and certainly the richest. Added to this is the fact that the Championship is so strong, being one of the best supported leagues in the world and one of the richest too. The promotion fight is generally regarded as one of the most entertaining spectacles in football – just look at how many times the leadership has changed hands from week to week over the last few years.

However, the other side of this received wisdom is the poor opinion football fans in general have of Scottish football. The SPL is a two-horse joke; the national team is a laughing-stock. Scottish players couldn’t hit a barn door. Scottish goalkeepers are clowns. So if all those Scottish teams came down to play – note that no English fan would ever talk about it the other way round – they would be also-rans. Perhaps Celtic and Rangers would be in the Premier League (and destined for so-called mid-table obscurity), with maybe four or five clubs making the Championship and the rest in the lower leagues.

Where’s the evidence for this?

If it’s a question of money, then undoubtedly the English clubs are much better off. Well, the dozen or so that have received massive cash injections from new owners are better off – but plenty of clubs in England are in dire financial straits. The PL itself is supposedly rife with debt. The SPL has just this year had to re-adjust its budget due to the huge loss of earnings from television rights, but if they were to play in England they would receive a greater share of television money. Foreign investors seem to prefer English clubs, but if all the clubs played in the same league then some rich businessmen would be sure to take a punt on teams from Scotland. Attendances are lower in Scotland, but they would undoubtedly rise given new opposition. After a few seasons there would hardly be any difference between your average Scottish club and your average English one. And in terms of quality, they have Elgin City and East Stirling, but we have Carlisle United and Rochdale.

Population is often cited as an important factor in football success. A mid-2007 estimate of the respective populations of the two countries in question had England with exactly ten times more people: 51 million to 5.1 million. The 2001 census had Glasgow in third place with about 630,000 people, Edinburgh seventh with around 430,000 people and Aberdeen twenty-ninth with some 185,000 people in the city. Falkirk has around 34,000 people; in Annan, there are barely more than 8,000 souls.

However, Birmingham is a city with a population just shy of a million people (with Coventry and Wolverhampton the Midlands boasts another 550,000) whereas Manchester has fewer than 400,000 people and evidently United are far more successful than both Birmingham clubs and all the other Midlands clubs put together. Newcastle, Northampton, Portsmouth, Luton, Preston and Milton Keynes have similar populations and not even the most ardent anti-mag could try to claim that Northampton or Luton Town have been anywhere near as successful as Newcastle United. Northampton supports a successful rugby union team, but then so does Newcastle. And the population of London supports successful clubs like Arsenal and Chelsea but Brentford and Leyton Orient also manage to survive.

Population doesn’t mean much if people aren’t going to the game every weekend. The list of average attendances for clubs in the 2007-2008 season has Manchester United first with about 75,000 fans, Arsenal seventh with c.60,000, Celtic eighth with c.58,000, Rangers fifteenth with c.50,000 and no other Scottish clubs in a top hundred which boasted fifteen PL teams, nine Championship teams and three who are now in Division One. Evidently English clubs attract more fans – but that would mean more fans in Scottish grounds too if the clubs were mixed together.

Perhaps there is only one way to judge how the Scottish clubs would fare – with results. Last night Arsenal beat Celtic in a Champions’ League qualifier with a deflected goal (off somebody’s humpback) and an own goal. Hardly the stuff of legend, for all the supposed superiority of the London club and previous to last night’s meeting the Scots came out slightly better in the usual pre-season friendly matches.

The usual attitude with friendly games is that if you lose it was an irrelevant event, but if you win important omens can be seen in the result. But is there such a thing as a friendly between an English club and a Scottish club, especially with this argument as the ever-more-important constant backdrop? No. However, if you insist, we’ll look at results that mean something.

In spite of the fact that the lack of competition in Scotland leads to fewer England/Scotland ties in Europe, there have been fifty-nine games including last night’s. So far England have recorded 29 wins to Scotland’s 13, with 17 draws. Not too impressive. But most of those games were in the sixties. From the 1997-1998 season up to last night’s kick-off the record reads England 4 Scotland 4 with 4 draws. Looks a little different, doesn’t it?

Of course you can’t really compare games from European trophies either because access to European competitions is based on the very assumption that this article is trying to question, that Scottish league football isn’t as good. Those twelve most recent games involved only two clubs, and ten of the ties involved only one, Celtic. And friendly games over the past couple of seasons have thrown up some strange results between some even stranger starting elevens.

This lop-sidedness in Scottish football makes two clubs richer and the gap ever wider. We’re back to money again. And it’s not just the big European leagues that make more money, even the Mexican first division and the J-League earn considerably more income than the SPL, and now with the Setanta affair the money will be even tighter. Crucially, the Championship earns more too, and indeed earns more than most countries’ top flights. And money does bring more talent and better facilities. Reputation is an important factor too, and brings in important TV revenues, which have been the thing that has set the PL apart from the rest for well over a decade now.

But again, if the clubs were mixed together the reputation would be for all of them, and the kudos, and the cash. At the end of the day the Scottish clubs may start off at a disadvantage but they would soon reap the benefits and would pull level.

The only way to find out is to put the leagues together and let them sort it out on the pitch. And in twenty years’ time come back and we’ll look at the statistics again.