Rangers and Celtic should give Scottish clubs £50million each to be allowed to join Premier League – Craig Levein
Rangers and Celtic should give £50million each to other Scottish clubs for “allowing” them to join the English Premier League, says Craig Levein.
The 58-year-old has bemoaned the distance between the Old Firm and the rest of the SPFL, and believes the answer is for both to leave Scotland for the riches of the Premier League while sending big-money back to fund the rest of the division in their absence.
Rangers are 25 points ahead of third-placed Hearts, with Celtic another nine points ahead at the top of the table, which Levein doesn’t expect to change with the financial disparities between the Glasgow pair and the rest, and while admitting it was a “pipe dream” he also believes “it will happen one day” when “a broadcaster gets a bit bored” in England.
The former Hearts and Scotland boss told the Daily Record: “I hesitate to say if this is the poorest top flight because I’d need to see all the facts and figures from down the years.
“But what I would say is we’ve probably got the least competitive league in Europe.”
He then outlined his solution: “My views are very straight forward – when the next financial crisis happens in the Premier League in England and they are looking for something different then I would absolutely drive the Old Firm down there myself.
“I would love the two of them to play in England and represent Scotland, get the money that’s associated with that which would allow them to grow and be competitive in that league.
“And at the same time if they both gave the teams in Scotland £50m a year, so a combined £100m, for allowing them to move down there then that would allow the Scottish game to grow immeasurably.”
Realistic?
Clearly, it is in the interest of the rest of Scottish football for the biggest two clubs to vacate the competitions and leave the door open for others to win more.
But Levein is pushing his luck if he expects the Old Firm to hand over £100million for something that he is so massively in favour of.
Rangers and Celtic may have big budgets by SPFL standards but put them in the English top flight, who have outspent the rest of the big five European leagues combined this season, and it would be a different matter.
What would be the incentive for the Glasgow giants to head south and immediately be fighting for survival or even get relegated because of their relative lack of spending power?
Both are arguably good enough to hold their own, but plenty of clubs with more than enough quality to thrive have run out of luck in the Premier League and gone down.
The precedent of Swansea and Cardiff being in the English pyramid means this question will continue to come up, and there are arguments for it from a Rangers point of view, even if the club has enough of a fight on its hands just to win the battle with Celtic right now.
The money available to the rest of the Scottish game is basically inadequate, but Levein’s idea of pushing the Old Firm out of the way while asking them to pay big-money for the privilege seems like a “pipe dream” indeed.
In other Rangers news, an international manager’s needless decisions have lost the Light Blues millions in the transfer market and nobody benefited.