Why Rangers and Celtic Colts plan could be ominous for our lower leagues

This one is the easiest to operate of them all. It has a 100 per cent accuracy rate and requires just a simple calculation.

It helps you determine whether a decision favoured by football executives is good or bad. In order to establish the truth, all you have to do is remove the money element from the situation.

I know – taking the persuasive power of filthy lucre from football is like extracting oxygen from air – but it’s remarkable how this straightforward action helps you get to the bottom of things, and aids in the exposing of corporate waffle in the process.

Take the European Super League. Go on, take it, far away. But before you do: remember Florentino Perez and his fellow loons arguing that it was all for the protection of the game’s great global ecosystem, that it was an essential way to keep kids interested in the sport?

Well then, Florentino. If your intentions are that pure, do it anyway. You won’t be needing JP Morgan and the other locked-in guarantees of extra big money.

Do those things you believe will safeguard football for the sake of doing them. Do them for…slightly less dosh, or at worst the same. What’s that? Silence.

Project Big Picture, you say. Ah yes, that other protectionist racket motivated, in part, by the Glazers’ deep love of the English football pyramid (stop laughing at the back).

So come on then, lads. Share with the pyramid! You don’t need to horde even more of football’s top-level wealth before doing so. We’re here. We’re all ears. Surely there’s stuff you could do...

Silence.

Bad ideas, the pair of them. And the same goes, at our lower level, for the Papa John’s Trophy. Take the palm-greasing quality of money out of that, and do you think Under-21s in a lower-league cup would be greeted as warmly by lower-league execs, that so many talking heads would come out to welcome and spin it?

Nah. Without pound signs, it doesn’t fly. What does that tell you about the basic worth of the idea?

When money is little more than a means of making the little people look the other way, it tends to be the giveaway. And so to Scotland, where the Lowland League are to gain two new teams; teams called Rangers and Celtic.

Rangers and Celtic will soon have Colts teams in the Lowland League (photo: PA)

Those clubs’ “Colts” have been voted into the fifth tier. The sell is that it will be for “one season only”, with no promotion available to those particular sides.

The league’s chairman, George Fraser, told the Herald that it is all in the name of innovation and advancement, a way of giving Rangers’ and Celtic’s under-played kids some real football (where have we heard that before?).

“From the Lowland League point of view, there will be financial benefits for us as an entity – both commercially and from the entrance fee that Rangers and Celtic will pay,” he added. “The tangible benefits for us will be the exposure of the league and the whole pyramid.”

This all sounds a little like those folk who said EFL Trophy crowds would spike when people in the downtrodden divisions realised they could now watch Aston Villa’s sort-of reserves.

The Trophy was a “pilot scheme” too, incidentally. Five years on and it’s like the bad penny that won’t go away.

No Under-21 team has yet reached its final. There is no sense of dismay about this at those big clubs, because…it doesn’t really matter. It’s a training exercise, a way for bloated clubs to loosen their belts.

The cup isn’t the same as a result. Likewise, league competition without full jeopardy isn’t league competition. And, as the recent howls of protest against the ESL showed, people here rather like league competition.

The Scottish FA, for instance, railed against the idea of a league based on “patronage rather than sporting merit”, one that tarnished “the fundamental principles of the football pyramid and meritocratic competition.”

Over here, the EFL was also strong in its condemnation, saying such an idea went against long-established principles and the importance of communities.

Well, those communities didn’t get the same say when the Premier League was barging into their cup, waving their wads. So arguing against the ESL on principle might not fully wash when some of those principles, a few levels down the ladder, have been openly for sale.

Those beneath the Lowland League had a different measure of the Colts plan. The West, East and South of Scotland leagues said in a statement: “There is no sporting integrity with this proposal, nor commitment to the pyramid from the SLFL, should they permit the Old Firm Colt teams to join what will become the middle tier of the game, to play a series of friendly matches throughout the season with no prospect of either of the Colt teams gaining promotion or relegation.

“[We] see no benefit in this proposal other than self-interest and a small financial reward for SLFL clubs, but can see a serious risk to the future of the pyramid structure in Scottish football.”

Don’t think certain big cheeses south of the border won’t be watching all this with considerable interest, either. So again: that test. Take the “small financial reward” away and look at what’s left. Would it have received the same warm welcome, and been put forward as the best idea for a bold new future?

You know, I know, we know, they know. Like hell it would.