Celtic Football Club has managed to claw their way into the next round of the Champions League! This is great news for Scottish football, but where is the Scottish Premier League heading in the long term? The EPL competition is growing from strength to strength as the game in Scotland is dying a slow and painful death.
In Scotland, two teams share the honors between them year after year. Rangers and Celtic dominate this lopsided competition and if this is allowed to continue, the SPL will not survive in the modern era of professional sport.
The solution to this problem is simple – incorporate the Scottish into the English league. Welsh football clubs did this years ago and teams in the EPL already travel to Newcastle to play, so traveling a little further north should not be a problem. Some would argue that discontinuing the SPL would be detrimental to the nation’s culture, however failing to ensure the future of Scottish football clubs would be far more damaging.
Here is how you do it – pick a date in the future, the 2015 season for example, and put the top two Scottish teams from the previous year into the EPL, and the two next best into The Championship (the second level of the English football pyramid). These four teams would then compete in the English competition and could be promoted or relegated in the normal fashion. The remaining Scottish teams would compete in a Scottish competition, the winner of which would replace the worst of the four Scottish teams in the English competition.
This solution obviously doesn’t cover every aspect to the problem, but it’s a start. Sporting bodies need to move with the times or they risk becoming obsolete.
