Verrix

Nowhere did I call you a "diddy" club... That was his choice of words, not mine. Still, you only get crowds of ~50,000 (although when you were in the championship in 09/10 season, it was ~43,000) which is mostly because you have a fairly good standard of football, because you bring in fairly good players, which is because you get £40 million in TV revenue every year. Money talks, and without it, those players wouldn't be there. That said, you're basically not able to advance anymore, you can't compete with the fanbases of London, Manchester and Liverpool, Newcastle is just too small.

By asset, I mean squad player being used in rotation for the top 4, a first team player for Europa League teams and a key player for anyone else. If you can't even concede that... Well, the 7 I mentioned would get into your starting XI IMO. Feel free to debate that if you want. Funny you mention that... A Spanish Blog linked Fraser Forster with the move to them. I don't put much faith in rumours, but then again, you don't get rumoured to be going somewhere for no reason. I mean, look at the other guy mentioned, Ter Stegen! If his name's in the same sentence as Forster's, then you know he's highly thought of.

Ho Ho, glory hunting? That's a new one. Do explain how Celtic fans fall into this "glory hunting" category? "Diddy"? We have a world-wide fan base, courtesy of the Irish and Scottish diasporas. No offense, but I've never heard of the Geordie diaspora... You accuse us of having won nothing since 1967, the year when we won the greatest honour in European club football, the Champions league? Quoting Wikipedia: "[Newcastle]'s last major honour was in 1969 when they won the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup." Not really comparable trophies, are they? Since then we have won the league 19 times, the cup 15 times and the league cup 8 times. We also reached the final of the Champions League again in 1970 and the Europa League final more recently in 2003. Compare that to the one second division trophy you have won in this time (and only after being relegated in the first place). Now that is "jack shit". I didn't really want to bring up that last point, but then again, you were being a rude little cabrón. I'm surprised you did bring that point up... Surely any real Newcastle Utd fan would've known about the lack of silverware? Who's the "glory hunter" now, pal?

Previous to now, if you didn't win the league, you didn't make the group stages of the CL, even though you entered the qualifiers by coming 2nd. You'd get financially muscled out of the CL qualifiers in the non-champions/runners up route. It's not much easier now though, even with Rangers gone, because there are more qualifying rounds. The difference this season is that we have proper model in place for the club, these things take time. This is now Lennon's team that he's built himself and not inherited from the previous regime. The scouting staff have really put in a shift and put together a cracking young team on the cheap. Feel free to post on the various Celtic forums, I won't begrudge you that. If you want to contribute to the discussion in the mean time, feel free. BPL is shorter and easier Berwick are as likely to get in the SPL as FC Utd are to get into the BPL, so I don't think we need to be thinking about renaming anytime soon lol

Firstly, we sold Ki to Swansea last summer for £6 million and he walked straight into their first team when he couldn't even get break into ours. Our left back Izaguirre looked like he was gunna be off to Utd for £15 million summer before last, but then he went and broke his ankle. Kayal is another guy who'd do a job for a mid-table BPL side who needed a decent passer, tackler and all-round hard working industrious midfielder. Same with Brown, Ledley and Mulgrew. Adam Matthews is a looking like a gem of a player, and is debatably the best British U21 right back. Hooper, Forster, and Wanyama would be an asset to *any* BPL team. Hooper and Forster because they're English (and we all know how much that counts down South...) and that they're both playing at a very high standard, exemplified by their respective European performances. Wanyama is there too because he looks like he could really be something special, honest to god. The rest of our squad is pretty much all youngsters for whom it's too early to tell. Anyway, if we had anything like the TV revenue you had, we'd certainly be doing better than 15th in your league and half our squad wouldn't be playing for us. Well, Barcelona were so impressed with Fraser Forster they nicknamed him 'La Gran Muralla' (the Great Wall). Don't see Krul getting any such praise... Take from that what you will.

Barclays Premier League. It's called not the English Premier League, because firstly, that's not it's official name, and secondly, it contains one Welsh team, and possibly two as of next year, which would make up 10% of the league.

Firstly, thanks for a civil reply, difficult to come by when venturing onto another team's forum. The quality of La Liga is higher, I agree, although if they shared their league winnings/tv revenue out properly then that gap would widen between your league and theirs. Well, Juve seem to have sorted themselves out, nice new stadium and a pretty swanky side playing some nice football. The two Milanese sides have some financial difficulties, Napoli is a one-man team, Roma has a history of being 'close, but no cigar' with no sign of that changing, Udinese is run extremely well but have pushed their small club about as far as it can go and Lazio is the only club I would tar with the Neo-Nazi brush. Agreed, but they're certainly a league on the up though. Dortmund won the "Group of Death" in the Champions League this season, and Bayern Muenchen will have Pep Guardiola next season, who is the best manager alive IMO. Their national team is star studded and young. If they can keep most of it playing in the Bundesliga and have their clubs build their teams around this core of young, homegrown talent then the Bundesliga model will be a success and surpass the BPL. And who's fault is that exactly? Seriously though, Ajax are sorting themselves out, they have a really talented young side and are implementing the model that other clubs like Porto, Udinese, Benfica (and us) are advocating. I spent last year living in France, and all I can say is that PSG is the universally hated club of France and their club model is a cancerous growth that stifles competition and prevents a better Ligue 1, which is a shame because Stade Rennais, Lille, OL and OM were giving it a fair go before then. I don't know about the dearth of Scottish talent (I don't think we ever had that much, we are a small-ish country who just happened to be ahead of a lot of other nations with regards to tactics for a while and eventually we were going to get overtaken). We've also had more than our fair share of excellent managers over the years... Alex Ferguson, Jock Stein, Willie Maley, Matt Busby, Bill Shankly, to name a few. The league situation is purely down to money. Firstly, clubs were run very poorly for far too long, racking up unacceptable levels of debt (Motherwell, Dundee, Livingston, Gretna and Rangers being the main ones). That has set the league back a lot. On top of that, the league has been marketed awfully. The Austrian league raises more TV revenue than the SPL, which is a shocking statistic, so it's no wonder the league has deteriorated since the European title winning years. Maybe this will change sometime soon, we're due a league reform next year, so hopefully the (largely incompetent) SFA are going to get their finger out, thrash the problem out and get it sorted once and for all.

Scathing attack on your league and decide to pick up on my knowledge of Serie A? Well guess what? I lived in Italy for a year, so I'm probably more entitled to talk about their first division than you are. Tripe? The only thing that's tripe here is your ability to add to the discussion constructively.

I fail to understand why fans of BPL teams feel they have to under-rate the SPL habitually. League 1? This is a serious question: do either of you watch Scottish football? Did you not see Liverpool struggle to beat Hearts 1-0 on aggregate earlier this season in the Europa League qualifiers? This is a Hearts team that lost many of its best players over the summer and are languishing in 8th place at the time of writing. Championship? You have to be kidding... Either you've been living in a cave this season, or you failed to notice we came 2nd in a group with Barcelona, Benfica and Spartak Moscow. We have performed in the Champions League this season time and again, which is the best club competition in the world. Moreover, we have performed consistently well against English teams over the years. By my count, that's 7 wins, 5 draws and 6 losses (including the 2 losses to Arsenal since that article was written). That is not Championship standard. On top of that, we work on a shoe-string budget relative to the BPL. Our current squad was put together for the measly sum of £15 million. Think what we could do if we had even half the budget of a BPL team... We certainly wouldn't be a Championship level side if were given a whopping £40 million a year! (soon to be £60 million for you lot...) There is no chip, and we're not bitter. We're perfectly happy playing in the SPL, because it means at the very least we're playing in the Champions League, and playing well might I add. I'd rather have the big teams like Juventus and Barcelona come to us once in a while, than over-rated mediocre sides like QPR, Stoke and Fulham week in, week out. And don't give me that rubbish about how you get "big" teams like Chelsea, Utd, City and Arsenal to play against all the time as well. Chelsea and City couldn't even get out of the group stages of the Champions League this season, which is pathetic given how Chelsea spent 23 times as much on their squad than we did on ours, and City 27 times as much! Arsenal are not half the team they used to be, and the same could be said of Utd. They both had piss easy groups this year and proper European teams would send them both running home with their tail between their legs, any day of the week. Don't buy into all this Sky propaganda that you have "The Best League In The World" (after all, they do have a conflict of interest right there...). You have fallen giants like Leeds, Forest and Liverpool (to a lesser extent) who have been replaced by teams with no history (City and Chelsea, anyone?) who throw money (courtesy of Sky) at Johnny Foreigner to come prop up the team and earn a trophy or two along the way. IMHO: - La Liga has better quality, Real Madrid and Barcelona blow anything your league has to offer out of the water. - Serie A has more passionate fans, fans who stay through thick and thin, no plastics or prawns for that matter. - The Bundesliga treats its fans properly, better railway service and cheaper tickets, none of this fleecing the fans malarky.