Earlier this year the people of Glasgow were encouraged to shell out £35 for a golden ticket to the Willy Wonka Experience.
A paradise of candy-coloured magic and ‘surprises at every turn’ was promised. The biggest surprise came when the cornucopia of sweet treats turned out to be nothing more than a warehouse full of sawdust and cheap plastic props.
There’s an old saying about a fool and his money and, as a new Scottish Premiership season gets under way this lunchtime, the usual hope, optimism and anticipation of Celtic and Rangers fans has been replaced by apathy, resignation and the feeling they’ve been had. They’ve spent their hard-earned cash on football’s answer to the Willy Wonka charade.
It’s not cheap to follow Scotland’s two biggest clubs. A pal who organises the weekly game of five-a-sides complained the other week of paying £618 for his Celtic season ticket, £138 for last season’s Champions League ticket package and another £50 for his Scottish Cup final brief.
All he asks in return is that the club sign some proper players and show a bit of a desire to make an impact in Europe. Right now, evidence of any ambition at all is thin on the ground.
The league flag will be unfurled before the game against Kilmarnock tomorrow and the squad of players available to Brendan Rodgers will be weaker than it was in May when Adam Idah struck to win the Scottish Cup final.
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Idah won’t be there for a start. Oh Hyeon-gyu has also left and, from a scenario where they had three centre forwards, Kyogo Furuhashi is now the only one left.
Paulo Bernardo is finally back after a transfer saga prolonged by weeks of nit-picking over a reduction to the transfer fee and wages. Beyond that, the only other signings are a 37-year-old goalkeeper on a free transfer and an Aston Villa back-up for £1million.
With £67m in the bank, Celtic’s manager really should be given the tools to do the job. And while Rodgers has become a little choosier over the players he lets in the door, it makes no sense for Celtic to start a new league season with a squad weaker than it was three months ago.
Privately, directors might look at events at Rangers and fancy their chances of winning the league with what they have already.
They might even argue that they could lavish tens of millions of pounds on players and *still* make no impact on the Champions League.
Spend it as they did last summer — when they blew £21m on a raft of players ill-equipped for first team football — and they’d be right. They won a domestic league and cup double despite their recruitment, not because of it.
So long as Manchester United are spending £52m on one defender like Leny Yoro, clubs like Celtic know that spending that much on five or six players might make no impact on Europe at all.
Rangers chairman John Bennett broke cover to address the shambles of the summer
Ibrox boss Philippe Clement has been forced to play first home games of season at Hampden
Old Firm meet again on September 1 for first time since Scottish Cup final
Until they actually give it a go, they’ll never know, of course. And Celtic never do.
Keen to bill themselves as a Champions League club, they should try thinking like one from time to time.
In February, chairman Peter Lawwell acknowledged the ‘inherent inefficiencies of holding excess cash’. And no one doubts that the double winners will add a few signings before the end of August.
Yet the very fact that they’ve failed to replace the departed head of recruitment hardly inspires confidence that the scouts left behind are nailed on to get this window right. When Brendan Rodgers warned of the dangers of snoozing in the transfer market, he could have been lobbing a hand grenade straight into the boardroom.
Celtic are fortunate in one regard. Happy to finish a toenail clear of Rangers in the league, take their shoeings in the Champions League, pocket the money then rinse and repeat, the mismanagement of the team across the city allows them to get away with all sorts.
Ibrox chairman John Bennett finally broke cover to address the shambles of this summer in a club interview this week. And ‘rinse and repeat’ was the phrase on his lips as well.
Tired of sacking managers by October, when the season ends early after a multi-million pound summer rebuild, Bennett insists he’s now all-in with Philippe Clement.
Good luck with that if Rangers are turfed out of the Champions League, lose at Parkhead on September 1 and find themselves trailing Celtic in the league after a few months of the campaign. Forced to move to an Airbnb at Hampden for a few months due to a debacle over the arrival of building materials, they’d be facing a perfect storm.
The club opened their season-ticket renewals on April 12, inviting supporters to ‘witness history unfold at Ibrox.’ So much for that.
Fans who paid their £600 in good faith have now been told they’ll be watching games at the National Stadium till god knows when.
Bennett can’t put a date on their return to Ibrox. And some still don’t know where they’ll be sitting at Hampden or if they’ll need a pair of binoculars to see the pitch from behind the goals.
Since beginning ‘the journey’ from the foot of the old Third Division, supporters have ploughed in tens of millions of pounds in the hope of restoring the club to a position where they can give Celtic a run for their money.
Now here they are, years later, hearing more talk of jam tomorrow from a chairman promising to get to grips with the ‘mythical’ player-trading model and slash unsustainable losses while gearing up for a difficult season or two along the way. If fans think they’ve seen enough of those already, you can hardly blame them.
Rangers can’t do much about the supply-chain issues delaying a consignment of steel from China. What they could explain is why they gambled on importing steel from China in the first place.
If cost-cutting was the name of the game, it backfired when they were forced to go cap in hand to the SFA to rent Hampden. And the loss of the Ibrox atmosphere for European nights will do nothing for their chances of reaching the Champions League and finally giving the punters some bang for their buck.
You’d go a long way to find two clubs from the same city run more differently than Celtic and Rangers.
Where the plc board at Parkhead are risk averse, conservative and careful with their cash, their Rangers counterparts have a tendency to roll the dice on everything - from the short-term signings they make to the steel they buy from China.
And yet, for all their differences, Glasgow’s big two share one thing in common. Year after year they take their own supporters for absolute mugs.