Originally Posted by
Pretty Boy
The league is gone. No club other than Celtic or Rangers has won it in my lifetime thus far and at not even 40 and assuming a relatively 'normal' lifespan I don't expect that to change. If anyone did it would be a bigger achievement than Leicester winning the EPL, it wouldn't get the same coverage or plaudits but it absolutely would be.
The bigger concern for me is the cups. There was a spell when there was a real mix up of teams winning them. From 2010 to 2016 Dundee United, Hearts, St Johnstone, ICT and Hibs all won the Scottish Cup. Celtic won only 2 of 7. Since then they have won 7 of 9. In the League Cup over the same period Kilmarnock, St Mirren, Aberdeen and Ross County all won it. Celtic won only 1 of 7 and Rangers 2 of 7. Since then Celtic have won 7 of 9. The ludicrousness is summed up by the fact Brendan Rodgers has managed Celtic for 5 years over 2 spells and never lost a Scottish Cup game:faf: When even the cups with the unpredictability of knockout football become something of a closed shop then you have issues.
It's not an exclusively Scottish problem though. In the FA Cup since 2000 it has been dominated by Chelsea, Arsenal, Liverpool Man City and Man Utd winning 22 of the 25 finals. If you look at the 25 years between 1975 and 2000 you see West Ham, Southampton, Ipswich, Spurs, Everton, Coventry and Wimbledon winning it, a couple of them multiple times. The League Cup was a bit different in England as the top teams paid so little attention to it for years, particularly in the early rounds, but the last decade has still seen only Newcastle win it outside the traditional 'top 6'. Again if you look through the 80s and 90s you see teams like Norwich, Oxford, Luton, Sheffield Wednesday and Leicester win it.
Money has irreversibly changed football. There were always bigger clubs who had more money to throw about and thus were more successful but the TV deals, the guaranteed number of games in the Champions League, the huge sponsorship deals, the new fan markets and so on means what was once a gap has become a chasm. The gap previously could be bridged on occasion. Hearts and Hibs did it in the 50s, Dundee and Killie in the 60s, Aberdeen and Dundee United in the 80s. In England Derby, Leed and Forest did it in the 70s and Aston Villa and Everton in the 80s since then you have had Blackburn and Leicester in a 30+ year period (and the former spent serious money to achieve what they did). Is it a coincidence that the early 90s and the advent of Sky fottball and the CL saw these real closed shops emerge? I'm not much of one for coincidences.