Monday 26 September 2016 21:02, UK
In his latest Sky Sports column, Niall Quinn looks ahead to Celtic's Champions League clash with Manchester City and reflects on the challenges facing Scottish football.
Celtic beat Kilmarnock by a hatful of goals on Saturday afternoon, while Rangers continued their flat return to the top flight by losing to Aberdeen. With their first home game of the Champions League coming up on Wednesday these should be happy times in Paradise as Celtic fans call their home place.
You would have to worry though. Not just about Celtic but about where the game in Scotland is going generally.
I'm sure that for many people all over the world the real start of the Christmas season every year comes on December 19 when they commemorate that evening in 1989 when Arsenal played Rangers at Ibrox for what was billed the unofficial Championship of Great Britain. Okay, maybe not everyone. But the winning goal was scored for Arsenal, by an up-and-coming messiah from the Crumlin area in Dublin.
Unfortunately there weren't enough wise men watching and he got transferred to struggling Manchester City soon afterwards.
The point is that the game against Rangers was seen as a serious occasion: the champions of England in battle against the champions of Scotland.
Rangers were missing Ally McCoist that night but had seven full internationals playing, five of them English and showcasing themselves in a World Cup season. Before the game managers George Graham and Graeme Souness - both Scots - were interviewed by a young, fresh faced, presenter called Jim White (whatever happened to him?) and they spoke about the prestige of the occasion. They backed it up by putting their strongest teams out. And me.
There were 31,000 at Ibrox on a chilly night in December. The game was broadcast live to fans back at Highbury and shown later on television. As I said, serious business indeed.
When we won most of Ibrox booed. Maybe Rangers had the last laugh though. Four of their players made the England squad for Italia '90 and another three went with Scotland. None of the Arsenal players made either squad and that was before the foreign legion came.
There is still enough romance about Celtic that Wednesday's visit of Manchester City will stir up hope and excitement in half of Glasgow. If he was watching his old club, Swansea, on Saturday afternoon, Brendan Rodgers will have noticed them exploiting some odd quirks in City's defence. For Pep that is still a work in progress.
Maybe Celtic can steal something this week but playing European football after Christmas seems like a very long shot. The hammering Celtic got in Barcelona a few weeks back was a cruel demonstration of where the power lies in modern football.
Scottish football is no longer the noisy neighbour for the English game. It's a distant and impoverished place that the English game has almost forgotten about. Last week the English Football League decided not to entertain the idea of having teams like Celtic and Rangers enter its ranks. Either club would have been very interested in getting a foot on that ladder.
The reasons are obvious. This year for example, Swansea, a Welsh club as the Old Firm will have noticed, will be guaranteed TV rights money of £97m if they finish bottom of the Premier League. If they appear on television more than 10 times they will get more than that. If they win the competition they will receive £148m. Should they finish mid-table - in 10th place, say - they can expect around £118m.
The current TV deal for Scottish football is dwarfed by that for the Premier League. No matter how you slice it, Celtic and Rangers are going to struggle to be seriously competitive with anybody but each other for the foreseeable future.
That is a great pity. If you grew up when I did, every decent team in England seemed to be backboned by Scottish players: the great Liverpool side of Alan Hansen, Steve Nicol, Graeme Souness and Kenny Dalglish, Forest with Archie Gemmill, Kenny Burns, John Robertson and John O' Hare, Leeds in the seventies with Billy Bremner, the Grays, Peter Lorimer and later Gordon McQueen and Joe Jordan.
Just having a Scottish accent back then seemed to be the equivalent of acquiring the pro licence today in terms of becoming a manager. Sir Alex Ferguson was the last of a line that runs back through Bill Shankly, Jock Stein, Sir Matt Busby and so many others.
Something changed in Scottish society that ended that production line. I'm not sure what it was that changed and I've never read a good explanation but, having qualified for six world Cups in a row, Scotland haven't been back to the big show since 1998.
There are plenty of clubs in the football world who aren't the great powers that they once were. For different reasons Celtic and Rangers are among them. Celtic have been a well run club for many years now. They are expected to make £30m from their European adventure this year. That will be really welcome but it amounts to less than half a Paul Pogba before anybody even starts wondering about wages.
Unless the world changes rapidly Celtic will be restricted to continuing their policy of scouting for good young players who they will lose to English clubs as soon as somebody south of the border notices them.
Is there a quick fix? Not an obvious one. The quickest route to madness for football people in small countries is to compare themselves constantly to the bigger league next door. The Scottish Premiership will never thrive if it is always seen as Premier League lite. It can have its own virtues and attractions.
To me as an outsider it seems that Scotland needs to get back to producing the brand of player that it was once famous for. That involves huge investment in coaching going all the way down to grassroots level and strengthening the top league so that it isn't an eternal competition between two clubs in the same city.
It's not a quick process but if you look at the success of places like Iceland or Belgium it can pay off.
The success of their international sides and the visibility of their top players feeds back into the system and draws kids into football in greater numbers. In Belgium the domestic league, a modest league overshadowed by lots of other competitions on the continent draws in £40m a year in TV rights before foreign sales. If you create enough good players, people start to identify with your clubs and with your system. They will buy the season tickets and the subscriptions.
They'll still follow the Premier League and there is no harm in that. A lot of people who will pay a lot of money to see the Rolling Stones also enjoy a quiet gig with a singer songwriter in a small venue where they feel a connection.
For Celtic and Rangers the Premier League isn't the enemy, just like the Bundesliga isn't the enemy for the Dutch or Ligue 1 isn't the enemy for Belgians. The Premier League and its rights deals and its superstars are the proof of the appetite there is out there to latch onto some competition to believe in.
I am convinced that if you get your coaching right, your community programmes right and you share the knowledge and the talent the Premier League will do nothing to you except promote football.
Yes, the good players will be swallowed up by the big Premier League clubs but what better advertisement would there be then to have the modern Hansen, Nichol, Dalglish and Souness playing Champions League together for a top team?
People pack baseball stadiums in countries like Cuba or Venezuala to see the next players who will go to the major leagues in the states, to see the older guys who came back and the fellas they thought might have made it. They love what they have for what it is and what it produces.
The challenge is producing players with the technical knowledge and skills to compete anywhere, be it home or abroad. Produce them and all the other things will come.
Celtic may surprise everybody on Wednesday night. Celtic Park is a special place where special things happen. But either way there is no point in looking back and wondering what happened to the Lions of Lisbon or the unofficial Championship of Britain.
Where Scottish football is in 10 years' time is more important than where it has come from.
Niall Quinn is chairman of Fleet Street Sports media group and writes for SportsVibe. Read his column every week on skysports.com and the Sky Sports apps
