blogspfl-blog

[blogspfl-blog]

What’s the point of English football?

After seeing Arsenal lose 5-1 to Bayern Munich on Tuesday evening, sending them out of the Champions League by virtue of  a 10-2 aggregate defeat, I started thinking about the average EPL fan and their potential reaction to the events that had just unfolded. I wondered if yet another embarrassing exit from Europe for a Premier League side would even slightly alter their view of the league's position as the “best in the world”. You'll be pleased to hear then that almost all were incredibly self-aware and only too happy to admit to the shortcomings of the leag- of course not.

Celtic fans, ridiculed by English supporters and pundits alike since having the nerve to win their domestic league and enter the Champions League back in July, were eager to join in with the laughter at Arsenal fans' expense, only to be quickly reminded that they play in a division that someone's 84 year-old grandmother would score regularly in etc. Similar tweets can be found whenever a betting company tweets in a nauseating fashion about Celtic's current unbeaten streak, accompanied with green ticks and four-leaf clovers. Within a matter of seconds, @BigDavo1966 has penned a reply, normally a well-articulated point comparing its standard to that of a pub league, with a couple of crying-face emojis thrown in for good measure.

Having been born and raised in England, I'm no stranger to this kind of talk when somebody down here lands on the topic of Scottish football. When I'm asked which team I support, I sometimes wonder if it would be easier to lie and say 'I don't like sport', rather than having to listen to someone who has only watched three Old Firm matches in their life give a hot take on football north of the border. Given my accent, the initial look of surprise on someone's face when I reply “Hibs” is completely justifiable. Perhaps less justifiable however, is the inevitable, excruciating patter that often follows.

If you are lucky, the person asking may be clued up on the extensive contribution Scottish football has made to the English game, from club legends on the park to managerial greats off it. For people of my age though, it is usually a very different story. Having grown up incessantly watching the EPL on Sky Sports, they know of nothing else other than the top flight in England. They, through arguably little fault of their own, have bought into the media-driven hype about the Premier League being the world's greatest competition. You can imagine their surprise then, when teams from the league are regularly well-beaten in the Champions League.

Manchester City, were unable to defeat Celtic in both meetings in the group stages earlier this season, despite summer signing İlkay Gündoğan costing more than the entire Celtic squad combined. When the Scottish champions went to the Nou Camp in September and lost 7-0, articles were written in English newspapers about the future of clubs from smaller nations competing in UEFA's flagship competition. Fast forward some six months, and you'll hear no such scrutiny of the standard of the EPL on TalkSport this week. Nor did you when West Ham were knocked out of the Europa League in August by Romanian side Astra Giurgiu, or when Southampton finished third in their group in the same competition, unable to defeat Hapoel Be'er Sheva, the Israeli champions who Celtic saw off in the playoff round of the Champions League.

So why actually is it that some followers of English football fans seem so permanently angry with the Scottish game? One possible reason could lie in the extensive media coverage the SPFL seems to receive in comparison to your average pub league. It possesses all the hallmarks of a superiority complex, telling people from a country with less than a tenth of your population that their league is rubbish. In an excellent piece written in response to “that Times article” published earlier this week, Evan McFarlane posed a fair question when he asked whether any fans of the Bundesliga would take the time out of their lives to consistently make derisory comments about Austrian football. You'd have to suggest they probably wouldn't - certainly not, as McFarlane points out, to the extent where they'd question why Austrians even bother playing football in the first place.

I myself have come to find the EPL quite boring, with the “must-not-miss” games becoming increasingly missable, as the increasing number of televised games makes it feel all a bit saturated. In spite of this, it will be a cold day in hell before you catch me tweeting Bet365 or Ladbrokes calling the English league overrated every time they even mention it in passing. For now, I'll just have to settle for watching EPL sides being repeatedly bodied out of the Champions League, longing for the day a Scottish chairman takes a chance on the highly-rated Doris, a pensioner from Wolverhampton, who has been touted as the “next top goalscorer in the SPL” (sic) by hundreds of English twitter users.