Since 1985, no club other than the Rangers and Celtic have won the Scottish league. Scotland may have a pride place in the history of football, but to an outsider its top tier league for long has been boring. To worsen the situation, the revered Rangers -the one half of the Old Firm -ran out of money last year and entered Administration. The giant of the Scottish football now ply their trade in the fourth division of the country, leaving Celtic the only force capable of winning the title.
For some years now, La Liga, the top tier Spanish league, which is followed much more widely than the Scottish competition for obvious reasons, has been treading a dangerous path -that of boring, and sometimes abhorrent, duopoly .
In 2003-04 Valencia, under the able guidance of Rafael Benitez, won the Spanish title, their second under the Spaniard. Since then Madrid and F C Barcelona.
The financial might of these two 'global brands' and the unfair distribution of television broadcast money has ensured they play a league of their own in the upper echelons of the division while other teams simply slug it out for the rest of the slots.
If things continue this way, the number of viewers of the league are bound to come down, no matter how the Big Two go about increasing their influence in the Far East.
However, the current season has given the neutrals some hope. A look at the Spanish table after 16 rounds reads: 1. FC Barcelona, 2. Atletico Madrid, 3. Real Madrid. One might point out that Barcelona still are at the top. Yes, they are leading, but only by just. Both Barca and Atletico are on 43 points -14 wins, 1 draw and a loss. Their goal difference also reads the same -34. Barca hang in there, courtesy the one extra goal they scored, a stat that could have been altered if Atletico had scored one more goal in their 3-0 win over Valencia.
Of course, Atletico's inspirational manager Diego Simeone still refuse to look at the table or talk about the title. “Barcelona's statistics are incredible and it's very, very hard to keep up with them,“ he recently said.
But for the sake of the Spanish league, one just hopes, he does what Benitez achieved with Valencia.
