Celtic and Rangers in the Champions League ensures ritual humiliations are only going to get worse - Hugh Keevins

Chelsea splashed out £280million in the last transfer window. One club. That’s more money than Celtic and Rangers will put out on new players over the next 20 years. Combined.

But everything is relative. Cost of living crisis? What cost of living crisis? The less well-off clubs are bracing themselves for the electricity bills that will soon be dropping through their letter boxes as energy costs soar. And preparing a case for daytime kick-offs to be introduced this winter so that floodlights become temporarily redundant on the basis they’re too expensive to switch on.

But, so far as Celtic and Rangers are concerned, money – the spending of it or earning of it – is no object when the Champions League group stage begins this week. Rangers can charge eye-watering prices for their home ties in the competition because they know supporters will raise no objection in the form of a boycott.

Celtic fans have devoured their club’s more competitively-priced package deal and ignored the official request not to travel to Spain for the tie against Real Madrid if they don’t have tickets for the occasion. Celtic will get 1800 tickets. Madrid will get an invasion force, even if the group has been decided before the last round of fixtures.

Domestically speaking, the gulf in the Premiership between these two and the rest is widening – but not to the extent of discouraging supporters from attending one-sided matches. There is now an apparently insatiable appetite for watching palpably weaker teams being trampled underfoot by the Old Firm.

That was underlined at Tannadice last Sunday when the Celtic fans gleefully chanted “We want 10” while Dundee United were subjected to the equivalent of a public flogging. There was a time when a