Rangers are well and truly ditched from any hope of being in the revamped Club World Cup after rankings confirmed the club is 61 in Europe alone and miles down on the global scale after it was deemed only Champions League points would have any value in measurement.
Following internal discussions, Europa League points and achievement were completely axed as criteria for entry, so despite Rangers’ stunning and repeated achievements, they count for absolutely nothing as only UCL group achievement is counted.
And on that front Celtic have a few points in the last few years, so despite Rodgers breaking every unwanted record there is along with his predecessor, they lie an average 37th, but that’s Europe-only, and Europe in itself only gets 12 slots in this competition.
So basically Rangers (and Celtic) are a chasm away from this competition, and Celtic’s position of 37 is only symbolic from a couple of draws in the group stage and one win, over two recent seasons.
Rangers’ incredible Europa League achievements are dismissed, and because of that, instead of being a shoe-in to be in this competition, our non-existent UCL points leave us miles away.
The problem for us is this could have given us a very nice £50M, which would have been very handy indeed.
But that executive decision to dump the Europa League means Rangers, globally, are non-existent in the criteria and Celtic aren’t much better.
Any timmy trying to point score with this one is embarrassing themselves, because it’s pretty clear only one Scottish team has been credible in Europe in recent years.
Just a pity we were so ill-prepared for the Champions League when it came about.
As an aside, these numbers are so warped that Chelsea are apparently ranked fourth in Europe and Leipzig 11th.
It’s a bit of a meaningless table in truth, but it is worth about £50M.