In Glasgow they have a word to describe the way the football landscape has changed. As Celtic‘s dominance on and off the field has hardened, they talk of the Espanyolification of Scotland’s footballing capital.
In Barcelona, Espanyol are the city’s ‘other team’, inferior to their great Catalan neighbours in every possible sporting way. They exist and they play and they compete but nobody would really call it a rivalry.
And it is what they say now about Rangers in 2025. Celtic supporters throw the word around gleefully. They revel in it. But in their darker moments – and there have many in recent years – Rangers fans acknowledge it too. The Espanyolification of Glasgow is real.
On Thursday, Rangers will play Manchester United at Old Trafford in the Europa League. They used to call these games the Battle of Britain because they usually involved the best of the English game against the best Scotland had to offer. But that’s not this. That’s not tomorrow.
United and Rangers meet as second-rate competitors – so far at least – in UEFA’s second string competition. They sit seventh and eighth respectively in the league table, clinging on to the two positions immediately above the cut line for automatic qualification into the last 16.
‘They are both average,’ said former Rangers hero Ally McCoist this week. ‘They are just really average’.
Manchester United and Rangers will meet in the Europa League on Thursday evening
United and Rangers clash as second-rate competitors in UEFA’s second string competition
At Rangers’ training base to the north of Glasgow there is a slogan along one corridor proclaiming them to be ‘the world’s most successful football club’. At Old Trafford before kick-off, an announcement regularly hails United as the ‘world’s most famous’. Both ring hollow.
Celtic now have 119 trophies to Rangers’ 118, despite the fact Rangers were 21 ahead at the turn of the century. United remain storied and undeniably popular but their reputation stands diminished on the back of years of Glazer ruination and footballing poverty.
Familiar problems haunt both. Financial restrictions – albeit on vastly different scales – have been supplemented by haphazard recruitment models, cultural and leadership vacuums and a rinse-and-repeat managerial appointment policy.
Dave King – a former Rangers chairman and still a significant shareholder at Ibrox – put it well when he spoke to talkSPORT this season.
‘The limited resources we had in competing with our neighbours have had to be applied very smartly,’ said King. ‘We have done the opposite – we’ve actually wasted money.’
King was talking about his own club but could just as easily have been talking about United and in particular the Erik ten Hag years.
There is no talk of an Espanyolification of Manchester and there never will be. But just as some Celtic supporters talk of the Old Firm rivalry being a thing of the past, so Manchester City no longer look across town at United when they go in search of their modern on-field threats and rivals.
Just as Celtic have managed to become smarter, more streamlined and simply better than Rangers, so too have City when it comes to United. And they are not alone. These days in England, just about everybody else seems to do it better.
Though Rangers have found form under Philippe Clement lately, their recent history is poor
Celtic have 119 trophies to Rangers’ 118. Rangers were 21 ahead at the turn of the century
Manchester City, similarly, have dominated rivals United in silverware over recent years
Thursday night’s game could be close and that possibility should stand as a particular embarrassment to United and their beleaguered coach Ruben Amorim.
When Sir Alex Ferguson took a team to Ibrox and won 1-0 in the Champions League in 2003, Rangers boasted a side comprising the likes of Mikel Arteta, Henning Berg, Michael Ball, Peter Lovenkrands and the late Fernando Ricksen. That game was played in an atmosphere that United defender Gary Neville later described as the loudest he had ever known.
Here in Manchester, Philippe Clement’s Rangers team is packed with players that may unkindly but not inaccurately be described as Championship standard footballers earning Championship standard wages.
While United, for example, try to find a buyer for Marcus Rashford and his £300,000 a week salary, Rangers are in town with a top earner – thought to be goalkeeper Jack Butland – on about £30,000 a week. This, incidentally, is the about the same number Rangers players were earning a decade ago.
In Scotland, there is a reason for all of this. The TV deal north of the border is staggeringly modest, worth about £40million in total per season across the whole of the top flight. In England, each Premier League club alone takes a basic figure of £90m from TV revenues, a figure that rises depending on where a team finishes and how often its games are televised.
These startling numbers underline and explain the demise of Scottish football. Rangers’ (capacity 52,000) most recent annual revenues were a club record of £94m while those of Bournemouth (capacity 11,300), for example, were almost £50m higher.
So while United can point to two decades of Glazer money drain, Rangers can talk about the disparity between north and south. Both clubs continue to lose money. But none of this is an excuse for simply doing things badly.
Rangers’ recent executive history has been as chaotic and changeable as that of United. Both clubs have new boardroom structures and indeed new football directors. Both have had problems fixing up their stadiums and issues around culture and environment and leadership. Both have been trying to cut costs around the playing and staff pool while at the same time catch up rivals who have simply learned to do things better.
Manchester United have endured their own struggles since Sir Alex Ferguson left the club
The Red Devils are currently searching for an exit route for wantaway star Marcus Rashford
The Celtic trading model is to sell one or two players each summer and reinvest smartly. Rangers would like to do what a club like Brighton does in England. Buy small and sell big. But they have palpably failed to do it.
There have been some exceptions. Calvin Bassey, Nathan Patterson and Joe Aribo were sold across the 2022-23 period for around £40m. Last summer, however, the combined income of the five players moved out of the club barely breached the £800,000 mark.
Just as United continue to suffer for handing transfer policy to Ten Hag over a couple of years, so Rangers regret being similarly generous with Clement’s predecessor Michael Beale.
‘Rangers are in a cycle they can’t get out of,’ said a source close to Scottish football. ‘They need to get back into the Champions League as that’s the only way to make the kind of money to catch Celtic.
‘But in order to get back into the Champions League, they have to catch Celtic. That’s the boiled down summary of their problem. So they need to find another way to catch up. They need to be smart and they haven’t been. As it stands, they look broken.’
Onlookers will note a lack of Scots – bar goalkeeper Liam Kelly – in this Rangers team. Here United and their opponents are different. While the English club wrestle with the optics of having to sell an academy graduate such as Rashford or Kobbie Mainoo or Alejandro Garnacho to create financial headroom this January, Rangers simply don’t have any and that’s another problem afflicting the Scottish game as a whole.
There is what experts describe as a ‘black hole’ in Scotland for footballers between the age of 17 and 21. Only last August a report by the Scottish FA accused its clubs of failing to bring through enough young footballers, after finding that players under the age of 21 in Scotland were playing fewer minutes than in countries such as Denmark, Norway and Croatia.
Those that are good enough tend to move abroad while the rest are no longer regularly deemed adequate for the two Glasgow clubs in particular. Fear plays its part too. A fear of trying young Scottish players ahead of more experience foreign imports. A fear of losing yet more ground on the journey towards where you feel you have to be.
Rangers and United will regret handing transfers to Michael Beale (right) and Erik ten Hag (left)
Onlookers will note a lack of Scots – bar goalkeeper Liam Kelly – in this Rangers team
Both Celtic and Rangers wanted to field second string teams in the Scottish Championship but it never got off the ground. Rangers did briefly field a Colts team in the fifth tier of the pyramid but they scrapped the idea, pulling their team out of the Lowlands League in 2023. Celtic and Hearts B teams remain in the league.
And so Rangers continue to drift. Clement’s team are 13 points behind Celtic. Rangers beat their rivals out of the blue recently – only their second SPL success against them in 13 games – but then drew to Hibernian and Dundee.
Amorim’s United – 13th in the English Premier League – beat City but then lost to Bournemouth and Wolves. Rangers literally cannot afford to sack their manager while United would surely shrivel up from shame if Amorim had to be despatched less than three months into his tenure.
Basic tenets of sporting existence such as self-respect and dignity are in play at Rangers and at United. Equally, a similarly frank question stalks both. Why change the manager if the structure on which he stands and works is so unfit for purpose?
Rangers reformed and returned to the Scottish Premiership in 2016 after insolvency and relegation. They won a title under Steven Gerrard in 2021 and reached the final of the Europa League the next season. United have occasionally shown signs of life, too. Second place in the Premier League in 2018 and 2021, they have also had a couple of recent visits to the final of tonight’s competition, winning it in 2017.
But managerial churn tells the story. United are on full-time boss number six since Ferguson while Rangers have burned through an identical number since McCoist left in December 2014.
It will feel like an occasion at Old Trafford on Thursday and that’s because it will be one. Rangers have only 3,500 tickets for the game but many thousands more are expected in the city. A fan park nearby has already sold out.
If this really is a Battle of Britain, however, it will be one fought with water pistols rather than cannons, a meeting of lost souls. Two huge football clubs traditionally very different but currently beset by problems desperately familiar to both.
