When a team wins or loses a European series at this time of the year, there is little talk of the defeat in terms of lost honor and prestige. The only thing that really counts is the cost, and Glasgow Rangers’ accountants will be gloomily doing their sums after the team’s exit from the second qualifying round of the Champions League Tuesday at the hands of Lithuania’s FBK Kaunas.
The cost of the defeat, 2-1 on aggregate (but who cares about trivia like goals when millions of dollars are involved?), will be an estimated $24 million to DaMarcus Beasley’s team. It will also make it harder for the team to lure foreign players to Glasgow without the promise of Champions League soccer, and make it more difficult for Rangers to keep pace with city rival and reigning champion Celtic. The knock-on effect could be that the usual duopoly in Scotland (no team other than Celtic or Rangers has won the Scottish title since 1985) becomes an even less fascinating one-horse race.
As Celtic is already in the group stage of the CL, it will receive all of Scotland’s television money for the tournament, according to the BBC’s Roddy Forsyth. Meanwhile Ranger’s manager Walter Smith said “we have to wait and see what transpires when we take into account the ramifications of not having European football. If the benefit of European football is that you get Champions League money to spend then, of course, when you don’t have it we will have to be careful with what we do.”