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You may have heard of a mystical country located somewhere in the north. A land where football has been pretty much invented. A place so pbadionate about football that a population of just five and a half million people supports more than 140 football clubs played in 12 senior leagues. A country where football is not yet acquired and which, hopefully, will never be a branch of the professional leisure sector, a country where football is still more a question of soul than money.
This place is Scotland. A beautiful country, confident and self-sacrificing. At once wild and cultivated, living here is living in a country of poetry, poets, scientists and scientists.
But his football leagues are wrongly widely denigrated – sometimes by his own citizens in search of humor thoroughly ", but mostly by people who have never watched a football game with their feet on the sacred ground. Alba.
As a result, players who practice their craft here are considered to be of poor quality or more generally simply ignored by observers south of the border. In England, even the high-end is commonly called stupidly "a pub league" or any other number of insults.
This condescending ignorance must be the reason why English clubs do not buy Scottish league players (only 11 Scottish players played in the Premier League last season) or if they do not, they do not will not pay much money for them, despite their naked and stupid financial incontinence. when buying players from virtually everywhere else.
Take John McGinn, for example. McGinn is superb. He has just won the title of player of the year and player of the year for fans at Aston Villa in the championship, and should also have won the goal of the season for his crier. He was axiomatic in their promotion. McGinn started at St Mirren and then at Hibernian. To anyone watching his rise from 2012, it was clear that he was a special player. it was the heartbeat that dictated the rhythm of how Hibs played.
At 23, last summer he moved to Aston Villa. The fees have been reported as incredibly derisory with 2.79 million pounds, with additions. This amount was surely very low as it came from Scotland. If it had been bought in an English club, for a player of his age and quality, he would have been at least ten times more and would have always been judged cheap. I mean, Villa just spent £ 20 million on defender Tyrone Mings. Ok, they have more money now that they've been promoted, but still, if Mings were playing for Hibs, he would have no way to get those rights, even though he only played 32 games in four years, 15 of which were in Villa on loan. £ 20m for Mings, £ 2.79m for McGinn. This is a ridiculous chasm, especially when McGinn is the most important and influential player of the two and will probably remain so.
Remember, when things get complicated and we are still waiting for the next big signing. Fans of other teams are scoriering #Villa and you just feel fed up, just remember this "We have McGinn" #AVFC #UTV #VillaFamily pic.twitter.com/672sC5O30r
– Chris Bennett (@kwxtra) July 22, 2019
The fact that no Premier League club was ready to buy McGinn last summer, even for only three million, shows how blind they are to the best of Scotland. At the same time, Huddersfield was ready to pay £ 5.7m for Ramadan Sobhi, a Stoke midfielder / winger so poor he only played four games before being loaned in January to Egypt's Al Ahly. . Ok, McGinn plays center, but how could it be worth less than half the money paid for such a flop? McGinn is now interested in Manchester United and Villa estimates that it is worth £ 50 million, no doubt now that it has been washed (washed by the Scots?) After a year in England. He did not get so much better. He has always been so good. The fact that he is now considered by one of the six best clubs shows how much the best English clubs are afraid to buy a Scotsman until another person in England has already tried his luck. He does not eat heroin-containing macaroni pies while singing Proclamator songs.
Currently, Arsenal is trying to buy Kieran Tierney at Celtic. Initially, they offered only 15 million pounds, then 18 million, then 25 million. It's almost condescending on the part of a club that pays Mesut Ozil a million pounds a month. Tierney is 22 years old, has played 12 times for his country, has proven himself on the international stage and has been good for Celtic for four years. I fully understand that these figures are alienated and that a symptom of the fatal financial model of the Premier League, but Aaron Wan-Bissaka has just cost £ 50 million to Manchester United, at 21, is not international and had a decent season at Palace.
It's an exciting prospect, but the idea that Tierney is worth half of that money – even in the transparent world of the Premier League – makes no sense. It's just anti-Scottish bigotry.
Look at Andy Robertson. Liverpool bought it in Hull for only eight million. Hull had only paid 2.5 million euros to Dundee United in 2014, where he was SPFA 's best young player of the year. Because Hull City had bought him for next to nothing because he was coming from Tannadice, they accepted a ridiculously low offer from Liverpool, who got one of the best side defenders of world football for them. peanuts. A back who is probably now worth at least ten times the salary that they have paid for him.
English clubs are simply aware or unwittingly to take sides for Scotland. Virgil Van Dijk has bought Celtic only 13 million pounds sterling from Southampton; barely two years later he had gained 62 million pounds. He had not gone five times better. The difference was that Liverpool really needed a center and he was not playing now in Scotland.
One of the excuses advanced to explain the disparity in the ratings is that the player comes from a "lower league" and must therefore "prove themselves" in the Premier League or Championship. This is an absurd notion, as evidenced by the transfer of Ramadan Sobhi. Although he is in Stoke City and is likely to pbad the test of evidence, he was still terrible.
Scottish football is sorely lacking in depth and misunderstanding. When Aberdeen played two games against Burnley in the Europa League, the financial gap between the clubs was huge, but the difference in quality was not. Yes, Burnley won, but if Aberdeen were a pub team playing in a pub league, that would not have been close and the Donations would not have drawn – and should have won – at home .
And by the way, as we should all know, there are every season in the Premier League teams horribly rotten, usually stifled by expensive and overpaid flops that regularly drop the Scottish highs. And if you hate this idea, you drank too much in the Premier League Kool-Aid. The idea that this is a unique flagship of high quality football is pure marketing, which has instilled a delirium of superiority to too many hypnotized.
But as few Premier League acolytes regularly watch Scottish football, they think that no leading Scottish team could beat a leading English team. In fact, they could and would absolutely, because Premier League players are often not so good and a lot of low performers.
Of course, Scottish teams sometimes lack playing expenses, which is exploited by the Premier League clubs at ridiculous prices (although they seem to find higher fees for players in many other "less important" countries). ). Scottish 11 in the Premier League in 2018/2019, this suggests a much deeper malaise in the English attitude towards Scotland.
Scottish football fans are a phlegmatic and realistic group, mostly unpretentious. We know our place in the order of things, but most could give you a list of 20 players, at the very least, who could fend for themselves in the high-end English, probably a lot more. Not because these players are all particularly stellar, but because they are of better quality than some of the poorest players in the Premier League.
Neil Lennon is right to use the example of Wan-Bissaka to compare / contrast with Tierney. The fact is that the PL market pays a certain (high) fee to the players. ?? clubs have noted this for years. There is a price and there is a PL price. Clubs (Celtic in this case) should note the same.
– Derek Rae (@RaeComm) July 17, 2019
So it seems odd that top-flight English clubs ignore Scottish players while dazzling millions of times. It's a bad deal. Even accepting that the very concept of transfer fees is bizarre and can not be based on an objective measureit still does not make sense to ignore such a great resource at the door. But I may have found the reason.
While I was writing my next book, can we have our football? – which will be available in about a month – I spoke to someone who works behind the scenes at a top flight club and they suggested that one of the reasons for this blinding attitude is that some clubs fear angry supporters who sign someone from Scotland is not ambitious enough or exciting, precisely because many have such a negative and uninformed view of Scottish football
"They prefer the club to name a player from around the world because it looks more glamorous than Dundee United or even Celtic, even though they have never seen the player. Buy someone from Rangers or Celtic and you're a boy used to the pressure of playing in front of a huge crowd, but no, they prefer to have a 30-million-pound defender from Spain or Columbia rather than # 39; Ayr. For some, it just seems to be better, regardless of the player. It's totally irrational.
Scotland is used to being ignored, marginalized and incomprehensible by England, as this week in politics will prove once again, hopefully for the last time. Negative and uninformed views of the game and players north of the border are easy to find. Due to the failure of the national party, it is clearly badumed that Scotland is a desert of quality and entertainment. This presumption is totally false.
John Nicholson
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