We’ve been seeing this question floating around – what does indeed the collapse of the ESL mean for Rangers?

Well we’re obviously seeing a lot of talk now about a British Premier League amidst a drive for restructuring the English game, and that’s all well and good – but in the here and now, the biggest relief is what it DOESN’T mean.

There’s not a Rangers fan alive who wasn’t looking forward to the CL – civil war in football between the ESL and UEFA/UCL could have completely disrupted next season to the point where no competitions got held at all amidst borderline anarchy.

Of course, as we know clubs realised they’d misjudged the situation, they didn’t realise what the purity of ‘earned’ football means to supporters, and in most of these cases American owners didn’t grasp the European way of football, as opposed to the more ‘commercial’ American sport structure.

And this isn’t a diss on yank sports – many of our audience are big fans of American sports like NBA and NFL – but they’re not how British and European sports are run.

Ultimately that misjudgement was understood – whether you’d say corrected is another matter. A lot of deep resentment is now rife.

But for Rangers there’s relief – because now we can concentrate on the UCL without any risk of the competition being ruined.

True, there’s still the autumn and winter spike of Covid to prepare for, so that will certainly affect things again unless the vaccine can fend it off, but on the pure and holy basis of normality, we can be relieved the ESL fell apart, because now we’ve got our decade-long wait for the UCL again to get excited about.

And not be denied it.