The Champions League is the holy grail for Scottish clubs. The “Promised Land” of riches that other European clubs take for granted. As the Scottish Premiership just enjoy the scraps from Sky Sports table when it comes to coughing up the cash in television deals, the Champions League offers a minimum of £20m for reaching the groups stages.
But also just as importantly, the rest of the SPFL members receive often a life saving sum of cash. In 2017, Celtic earned £27.5m just for reaching the group stages and the rest of the Scottish Premiership teams received £370,000 because of the Hoops success in the competition, a figure that was DOUBLE to what it was in 2016.
Yesterday I wrote an article welcoming the news that UEFA’s flagship competition was under review for a revamp but did add a note of caution as to the motives of the move.
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Today, the President of the European Leagues, Lars-Christer Olsson, said that the extra automatic places should be granted to the champions of smaller leagues and not to the the elite leagues, “We think the three extra positions should be allocated in a way that more associations can be represented in the Champions League.
“It must not be given to one of the ‘big five’ associations.
“We are also of the opinion that the so-called country cap of the Champions League should stay at maximum five teams from the same association.
“We are actually preferring champions from Scotland, Denmark or Switzerland to qualify, for example, rather than team number six from England or Spain”
I did offer a word of caution yesterday to the motives behind this and in true “money is king” style, the English Premiership clubs are reportedly completely against the move as it would threaten revenues received from the League Cup competition which is worth some £100m to the English clubs.
I am hardly surprised at this move my the EPL. The soul was ripped out of that league the minute Sky Sports pumped billions into their game and where clubs now celebrate finishing in the top four with more enthusiasm than winning a trophy, it is not surprising that the thought of losing out on money and not medals is the driving force behind the opposition to these plans.
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