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While we all dozed idly on beaches, in beds and office chairs through those summer months, a debate has been raging in the world of English football over the possible expansion of the Premier League. Feel you and a few million other football fans didn’t quite get to say your piece? This ‘debate’ will have taken place in some stuffy room in the Premier League’s London headquarters; the same old shower of obese, money-grabbing, pipe-smoke smelling, spotlight-hogging, impotent old duffers somebody left in charge of  running football in this country, and it will have been quite a sight.

What’s the most apt and oft-spoken criticism of our “beautiful game”? We’ve got it all backwards. Jokers like Michel Prattini (sic) and Sepp Twatter (sic) prowl the game like SS officers trying to maintain the status quo. To what effect? Denying us, the people, the fans, the men who pay these bloated European children, a game run in the way we want it to be.

Essentially, the talk is that the Premier League will be expanded, housing more teams, and one would hope, more competition. But FIFA statutes say that no top domestic league can have more than twenty teams in it. One swift side-step and what is rumoured to be on the cards? Two premier leagues! TV rights will be sold as one, and each league will have 15 or 16 teams in it as opposed to the current 20.

So Premier League 1 will be champions, the teams relegated from Premier League 1 will drop to Premier League 2; and so on and so forth. This is all good. It’s great for our game that the prestige we already enjoy with our league proudly at the summit of world football and expanding to include more teams, more fans, and yes, more money.

It will leave us in a near orgasmic stupor to stick two fingers up at an old establishment that hates us and is out to get us- I speak of the French-led European cohort of FIFA and UEFA who resent the English game. Telling Prattini he can go cook toast in the bath and that our league is going to grow is only a good thing. The rumoured invitation of Rangers and Celtic however, is not.

Clearly, the plan requires at least another ten teams, maybe more. A little messy, granted, but presumably the top ten teams from the Championship will be given passage to the top flight and incorporated somehow. These teams will have earned their place by entering into the English football league, by earning their position and keeping it for, in some cases, decades. Given the standard this is no walk in the park. The Glasgow giants have no such claim to fall back on. No no, these are unwelcome usurpers; parasitic invaders from the north who have no business in our league.

The truth is, this idea benefits nobody. To begin with, the deluded job seeking Glaswegians who follow the Old Firm (who have the temerity to claim that if they came down to the Premier League they would challenge for the title) need to be given a reality check. The Old Firm play in a league that is nothing short of a piss-take.

With the exception of these two teams, all the teams in the SPL are shameless shite, even when compared to such luminaries of the English game as Barnsley or even, (if one was feeling particularly malicious) Grimsby. Imagine this effect at a slightly higher level- Rangers and Celtic playing Premier League victory machines like Manchester United or Chelsea? You have to be drinking a crate of Special Brew a day to believe that they stand a snowballs chance in hell of winning the league.

Arsenal went to Celtic Park not six weeks ago, leaving Celtic humbled and humiliated. In pre-season they beat Rangers too. With the exception of one match, every game in Europe in the last five years between the Old Firm clubs and Premier League opposition has ended with the Premier League team on top. And this is just the top four. Tottenham, Aston Villa, Manchester City and even Everton all boast multi-million pound strike forces that the Old Firm could only dream of attracting. Two of them have new stadiums in advanced planning, Celtic have a concrete prison and a shit song they stole from Liverpool.

Moreover, the fact is that removing Rangers and Celtic from Scotland is far more likely to bring about the demise of Scottish international football, since the profile of their league will collapse and it will probably go bankrupt. All the Scottish players will be playing in England, but they will most likely be deposed by foreign players if the Old Firm hope to compete for anything other than fourth-bottom. Scottish players will have nowhere to ‘learn to win’ as they do now, nowhere to ply their trade and learn the game- oh so complex as it is- and as a result Scotland and its players will surely become as utterly non-descript as Wales and their merry band of also-rans.

The final point is this: they haven’t earned this share of the spoils. Like it or not, the football league is a competition, and teams earn their places. As a competition, it would have no credibility at all if these two ‘giants’ were simply plonked into the Premier League at the expense of two English teams who have and will be in their position on merit. The best we can really hope for in this scenario is that the Old Firm will be put in Premier League 2 and never come out again, but far more likely: the money men will try to worm them in to the top level.

Sure thing, come on down you arrogant, misinformed and criminally deluded Jocks. Join the ranks of the Also-rans and reminisce on the days when you played Champions league football, because south of the border is where the big boys play, and your prowess will be akin to a cocktail sausage next to a foot-long.