Graeme Souness has delivered his verdict on the unfair financial distribution in Europe as Rangers and Celtic suffered heavy defeats this week.
In the Champions League, Borussia Dortmund destroyed Celtic 7-1, while the Gers were crushed 4-1 at home against Lyon in the Europa League.
Souness disclosed that Bournemouth, a Premier League team, received more than £100 million in TV money last season, but his former team, despite being in Europe, only received £8.28 million.
“This last week has been a sobering one for Scottish football and a reminder of how the game has evolved in a cruel way for our clubs,” he wrote in the Scottish Daily Mail, as reported by the Daily Record. Glasgow’s two giants have both suffered heartbreaking losses.
“Celtic faced a Dortmund team who lost 5-1 at Stuttgart two weeks ago and had to come from 2-0 down to beat Bochum last week, so Brendan Rodgers’ thinking would have been: ‘We’re firing on all cylinders and they’re not, so we can go there and take them on and outscore them’. I can understand that thinking, but it didn’t happen and Celtic came unstuck on a grand scale, losing 7-1.
“In my old team Rangers’ case, they were playing at home in a European competition where they had previously gone to Malmo and won, and thought they could take on the opposition this time — Lyon. They also got beat up badly, which again showed up the huge gulf.
“It’s a simple question of economics and where the money is in football, now. Rangers earned £8.28million in domestic and European TV money last season. My local team Bournemouth — which is not a football town and where 11,000 will attend home games — got in excess of £100million. That’s the gulf in money we are looking at. It came to the surface all too quickly in Dortmund and Glasgow.”
