Aston Villa and Crystal Palace: are they the baddies?

This article is part of the Rory Smith on Football newsletter – a guide to help understand what is happening on the pitch, off the pitch, and why all of it matters. To receive it in your inbox, sign up here.

Few comedy sketches have the cultural half life of Watch the Football, David Mitchell and Robert Webb’s pastiche of the breathless, overblown tone pioneered by Sky Sports and aped by everyone else to promote even the most mundane of matches. Neither Mitchell nor Webb cares about football. The routine aired almost 20 years ago, on a show that skewed more cult than mainstream.

And yet it is so good – not just piercingly accurate but somehow clairvoyant, too – that it is instantly familiar, endlessly cited on social media, part of the game’s lingua franca. It is sufficiently widespread as a reference that, last year, the presenter David Prutton expertly lampooned it for Sky Sports. Mitchell himself said he was “delighted” by Prutton’s diversion into the meta.

On Saturday at Celtic Park, though, it was a different That Mitchell and Webb Look sketch that came to mind. Before what was probably the biggest game the Scottish Premiership had seen for 40 years, Celtic’s ultras unfurled a banner, bearing the face of their septuagenarian manager, Martin O’Neill. “There’s a fairytale about this club,” the slogan read. 

That is not, of course, how everyone else saw it. As far as the rest of the world, suddenly and uncharacteristically fascinated by Scottish football, could tell, there was only one fairytale in town, and it was Hearts: the team that had not won the title for 66 years, the team that could break 40 years of Old Firm dominance, the team with a quarter of Celtic’s budget and a fraction of its heft.

Mitchell and Webb covered this too, albeit in a very different context (and not one which should be taken as a literal comparison): Mitchell plays a German soldier on the Eastern Front, concerned by the fact the emblem on his uniform is a skull. “I can’t think of anything good about a skull,” he tells an officer. He looks pained as the realisation hits him. “Hans,” he says. “Are we the baddies?”

It is perfectly natural that Celtic should resent the fact they have spent the last six months being cast essentially as Hearts’ antagonists, the overbearing and oppressive powers-that-be, the entrenched establishment being taken on by the plucky maroon underdogs. Nobody, after all, wants to be the bad guys.

In green-and-white eyes, after all, the romance is theirs: the listing club rescued by a legend extracted from retirement, not once but twice, handed one last mission by the team he loves. Looked at from a Celtic perspective, Hearts are less brave insurgents and more vessels for English money and Premier League expertise, yet another example of the distortive effects of multiclub ownership. 

The reason it has not been presented that way, especially outside Scotland, is not because of any particular “anti-Celtic agenda,” as one of the club’s former players – I won’t name him, because he’s a friend, but he was very much the Robin to Henrik Larsson’s Batman – put it on Saturday. It is not even, though it could be, because of a recognition that someone challenging the Old Firm is good not only for Scottish football, but for Rangers and Celtic, too.

It is, instead, because these sorts of stories are vanishingly rare in modern football. In the last two decades, the game has been systematically cleansed of underdogs: first by its own economics, which have created a self-sustaining cycle in which the rich get richer and everyone else is cannon fodder; and then, more recently, by the algorithmic conquest of the media that surrounds the game. 

The former has made it impossible for smaller clubs to compete with the giants. The Champions League functions as such a distortive economic engine that most domestic competitions are the Scottish Premiership now.

Three teams have won La Liga in the last 22 years. Bayern Munich have won all but one of the last 14 German titles; Paris Saint-Germain all but two French crowns in the same time frame. All but three Dutch championships this century have gone to Ajax or PSV Eindhoven. Olympiacos have been defied in Greece only five times this century. 

England might scoff at the situation north of the border – English football scoffs at everything these days – but the Premier League has not, for some time, been a bastion of competitive balance. That is by design. As one executive said, a few weeks after Leicester City had justified the marketing spiel, romance was fine as a one-off. Any more than that and it would be bad for business. The last FA Cup final not to feature Manchester City or Chelsea was in 2016.

That nobody seems to mind is, at least in part, because of the fact that we are increasingly told this is what we want. The big clubs are what drives the interest and the traffic, the subscriptions and the advertising. They are what keeps the whole show on the road, their prominence reinforced by platforms designed to feed us more of the same. There are plenty of executives who regard the teams outside the elite as little more than a shoal of remoras, sustained by the giant they serve.

And so, even when fairytales do happen, they are often relegated to subplots. On Wednesday, Freiburg will face Aston Villa in the Europa League final; it is only the second major final in the German club’s history. Their story is a potent counterpoint to so much of modern football: a team that has been a byword for stability and social inclusion, that has had just two managers in 15 years, both of them promoted internally. 

Next week, Rayo Vallecano stand in the way of Crystal Palace in the Conference League final. They, too, are remarkable: a neighbourhood team, effectively, that plays in a dilapidated stadium in an unremarkable part of Madrid, one where fans must still queue outside the box office to pick up a paper ticket, will take part in a major European final.

Neither of those stories, though, seems to have cut through particularly; where they have been mentioned, it is largely to illustrate the point that the Europa League and the Conference League are now little more than sandboxes where the Premier League’s emissaries can fill their trophy cabinets. There is, at times, something close to disdain: is this really the best Europe can do? And despair, too, a genuine worry that these competitions might be damaged by allowing Freiburg to get to a final.

One glance at Scotland this season, though, should tell us the opposite. There is a deep-rooted and genuine international hunger for something new, something different, something that breaks what has become a familiar and dispiriting cycle. The Wall Street Journal covered Hearts last week. There was an actual backlash in the United States that the game was not broadcast to Paramount+ viewers, despite the game being promoted on the CBS Sports website throughout the week. L’Équipe and Gazzetta dello Sport, among others, have covered the story. 

That is not because New York tycoons or American television viewers or the reading public of France and Italy hate Celtic. It is because these stories – the ones in which odds are overturned or dreams come true or the unexpected comes to pass – are so unusual now that, when they do appear, they tend to capture the imagination.

They remind us that what actively engages an audience is about hope, and possibility, rather than watching passively as economic reality plays out, again and again. In that story, Celtic are not the bad guys. Nor are Aston Villa or Crystal Palace. The game has just been engineered in such a way that, just occasionally, it has to feel that way.

Photograph by Neville Williams/Aston Villa FC via Getty Images