Plans were announced in the past week for a revitalised structure to the English Football League, from the Championship down, by the 2019/20 season.
The idea is to standardise the whole pyramid in line with the Premier League, with reduced divisions of 20 teams, and add a “League 3”, comprising teams from the current League 2 and the first tier of the present non-league system, the Vanarama National League.
Among that news, however, an old spectre has floated into view: the prospect of this being a logical juncture for Scotland’s undisputed dual leviathans, the bitter Glasgow rivals Celtic and Rangers, to finally enter the English football system.
It has been a tumultuous few years for top-flight football in Scotland since Rangers dissolved in a bog of financial foul-ups that led to their demotion to the fourth tier of Scottish football in 2012.
That debacle has left Old Firm rivals Celtic to push on unopposed in the Premiership, unsurprisingly cruising to four titles in the four seasons since Rangers fell off a footballing cliff.
But that dark period now has very real light at the end of the tunnel: last month, Rangers confirmed their promotion to the Premiership for the 2016/17 season. One of the greatest rivalries in world football is back on.
We have been here before with the potential Scottish invasion of England. Rangers’ former chief executive Charles Green — the kindest way to describe him is a “divisive figure” — previously openly declared ambitions to shift the blue half of Glasgow into the English leagues.
That was back in the grim days of 2013 when the newco Rangers club were facing plans to condense the existing four Scottish divisions into three, a move that would have consigned the then-Division 3 leaders to another season in the basement division.
So far, so normal, until Green began claiming he would test any attempts to block such a move under European sex-discrimination legislation (weirdly, there’s some legal logic behind such outlandish statements — a Uefa-sanctioned cross-border professional women’s league used to exist in Belgium and the Netherlands).
He might also point to the involvement of Welsh teams in the English pyramid, or even to Berwick Rangers, a club located so far in the north of England that they opted to play in the Scottish leagues. The headlines nevertheless made for another fittingly lurid moment in a colourful chapter of Scottish football.
Among the purists flapping that it’s just not cricket — or lower-league football — let’s consider the wider picture. With so many clubs struggling to make ends meet below the Premier League, it might just rescue lower-league professional football in England as we know it.
Celtic and Rangers consistently post crowds of 45,000 to 50,000. Rangers were even achieving this in the lower leagues for visits of such footballing titans as Montrose and Peterhead. More pertinently, they take thousands of travelling supporters around the country to their away fixtures.
While Scotland’s lower leagues are ordinarily frequented by laughably low crowds, the same cannot be said at a similar level in England. The mooted new League 3 would represent the lowest fully pro division in the country, but would doubtless include numerous clubs that regularly welcome 4,000 to 5,000 fans.
There’s already solid fan bases, then, but it’s still a cash-strapped landscape. Annual wage bills often equal a month’s take-home of a top Premier League player.
Imagine the impact the Old Firm’s high-profile, unprecedented border-crossing transfer deal could make. It’s conceivable that record-breaking gates around the grounds of Leagues 1, 2 and 3 could follow as the Old Firm progressed up the English footballing ladder, swelling previously barren coffers en route.
Faithful fans around England (and Wales) might balk at the thought of away-day travel expenses to reach Celtic Park or Ibrox. But if it could help the often-precarious bank balances at the clubs they love potentially tipping into the black, it would be a small price to pay, quite aside from the excitement of experiences crowds tenfold larger than they ordinarily experience.
If it happens, Scotland could be an unlikely saviour of English lower-league football.
[ aworkman@thenational.ae ]
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