Back in the mid-1980s, Aberdeen and Everton won the European Cup Winners' Cup within two years of each other. Both teams had a period where they could justifably lay claim to being the best side in Europe: Aberdeen beat then-European champions Hamburg in December 1983 to win the Super Cup; a superb Everton side won the English league twice in two years, but were denied the chance to lift the European Cup in the aftermath of the Heysel disaster.

A few weeks ago, Aberdeen were hammered 8-1 on aggregate by Sigma Olomouc, the heaviest European defeat for a Scottish side in nearly 50 years. Earlier this week, Everton swatted aside the same Czech outfit 4-0 - and that on the back of their 6-1 thrashing by Arsenal days earlier. On Saturday, their threadbare squad stretched to the limit, Aberdeen gave a debut to 16-year-old Fraser Fyvie, the youngest player to play for the first team in the club's 106-year history. Everton, meanwhile, are expecting to rake in £22million from Manchester City for a middle-of-the-road central defender, Joleon Lescott. The chasm in resources between English and Scottish football has reached unprecedented proportions.

Part of the appeal of football is that, because of the low-scoring, just about any side can beat any other side with the right combination of organisation, guts and luck. But the charm of the underdog is fast fading into memory. An ever-smaller number of clubs is dominating European football; an ever-smaller number of clubs is dominating football in England, home to the world's richest league. The sheer spending power of the bigger teams is eliminating the unpredictability of football, one of its biggest assets. The biggest clubs, of course, want to rule out any chance of smaller teams preventing them from gorging on the wealth of the Champions' League by cutting ties with the small fry and forming a European league. The day that happens is the day the lights go out.