Anyone sad enough to watch Manchester City’s humbling last week at the hands of a team whose previous claim to fame was a name that scores 24 in Scrabble, would find it hard to believe the English Premier League is the best in the world.

But in financial terms, there is no contest. Celtic revealed last week that their turnover for last season was £73m, though they only reached that by making the last 16 of the Champions League, beating AC Milan on the way, winning the SPL and filling 60,000 seats at Parkhead week after week. They returned a profit again, reduced debt to just £3.5m and gave their manager some half-decent money with which to buy players. Not bad.

But Hull City, who will probably finish bottom of the Barclays Premier League next May, will generate about £60m this season alone. They will get half-decent crowds of just over 20,000, but their only hope of getting into Europe is if a big earthquake moves Humberside about 100 miles to the east, and aside from bulky striker Dean Windass taking a dive in the penalty box, such an event is unlikely.

There is no better way of illustrating the widening financial gulf separating our successful sides from the big five European countries. Celtic and Rangers last year competed very successfully with the best in Europe, yet a club that has never been in the top flight of football and may win no more than a couple of games, will match their income because of the vastly superior television deal down south.

Celtic’s chairman John Reid acknowledged the difficulties operating in that environment when I spoke to him after Celtic’s results. The Old Firm have long since given up on hopes of joining their rich English counterparts but it doesn’t stop the envious glances over the border. Reid’s a fan at heart but a pragmatist too and knows that delivering a profit and reducing debt while pleasing supporters is a hard thing to achieve. He lavished high praise on manager Gordon Strachan’s achievements while operating under “severe constraints”, which suggests Prudence will continue to be Celtic’s 12th man, if you know what I mean.

Reid knows that one dodgy linesman can make all the difference to finely tuned financial plans. No wonder he described the results as a “fantastic achievement” and with Champions League income all to itself this year, the year ahead will probably be quite good too.

Rangers’ results are out in a week or so and may be comparable in terms of financial achievement, but without Europe, the club has a poor financial outlook for 2008-9. Its debt had already risen to £16m and while income from the UEFA cup run and the sale of Alan Hutton will help, its income stream is very limited.

Sir David Murray has spent the last few days trying to placate fans following Carlos Cuellar’s move to Aston Villa three months after the high of a European final, and the chance of the SPL title for the first time in three years. Slim margins indeed.

Murray is worth £720m, according to the Sunday Times Rich List, but even he baulks at committing large sums, as he did in the past. He told me two years ago that he wanted to sell, and re-iterated it last year, and again last week; but who will want to buy?

Big business beasts are all over Scottish football. Dermot Desmond (£1.5 billion) is Celtic’s biggest shareholder, Stewart Milne (£400m) runs Aberdeen, Sir Tom Farmer (£130m) is atJohn Boyle (£120m) at Motherwell. But tellingly, most, if not all, got involved long ago. If anyone did have enough money and wanted to get involved, the sad fact is that to generate any decent income in Scotland requires constant over-achievement on and off the field, year after year, with no margin for error.

On the other side of Hadrian’s Wall however, the rewards for failure are pretty good. So Where would you put yourmoney?

Okay to reward success

I spent my recent holiday searching down the back of my sofa in the hope of finding a few pounds to help pay my gas bill, so it may seem a bit strange to stick up for people who earned between £200,000 and £600,000 last year.

Jack Perry and Lena Wilson of Scottish Enterprise (SE) or Mark Selway of Weir Group all came in for some flak for their salaries, pensions or share options. What is it about the mentality of some Scots who seek to punish success by having a go at financial rewards? By all means, have a dig when those high salaries are matched by failure, but both SE and Weir did pretty well last year.

For Perry and Wilson, it was their pension pot that came in for criticism, but it was unfair to single them out. The issue is much wider and the government has dodged it for fear of upsetting a big bunch of voters.

Selway is interviewed elsewhere by my colleague James Ashton and aside from being a likeable chap, by any measure he has done remarkably well at Weir. His one blot was the poor handling of the sale of its pumps division to Sulzer, but thankfully Jim McColl saved the day on that one.

Weir’s profits are up, it is acquisitive and knocking on the door of the FTSE-100. Locking in the man who led the company to that position for a further three years is pretty sensible in my view.

And so what if he trousers £3m. By 2011, it will barely be enough to pay half his gas bill. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a couple of promising armchairs to search.

john.penman@sunday-times.co.uk

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