Adam Rooney

For a moment the World Cup suggested that we might be about to enter a new phase of footballing fun; an era of upbeat, cheery, good-humoured entertainment. And then the pre-season arrived, smacking us collectively round the face with a dose of depressing reality, doing its best to smother all hint of optimism.

Over in America Jose Mourinho, his team instructed to play football almost as dour and humourless as his public persona, appears to be on a one-man campaign to extinguish the light. Meanwhile, Everton are doing their best to demonstrate that the game has abandoned all connection with financial reason as they secure the services of Richarlison, a player unlikely to feature in a most-wanted list constructed around his own kitchen table, for an eye-melting sum of £50 million.

But even this is as nothing in deflating the mood compared to the news emanating from Scotland. Normally the revelation that Aberdeen’s striker Adam Rooney had signed for a club in England would barely raise an eyebrow. That is what has happened for generations; there has long been a hosepipe sucking the ambitious down to where the money lies.

But the balance between the two footballing economies used to be thought of as the one defined by the likes of Virgil van Dijk leaving the persistent champions Celtic to join Southampton, a middling Premier League team.

This summer’s move, however, is something depressingly different. Because Rooney has swapped the club which finished runners-up in Scotland for the past four seasons, a club which once won the European Cup Winners’ Cup, for Salford City, a side just promoted to England’s fifth tier. The motives for his departure were made plain when it was revealed that playing in the National League he will earn twice what he was paid at Scotland’s second club. Or as used to be said, there were thousands of reasons why he left, every one of which had a picture of the Queen printed on it.

Now there might appear to be exceptional circumstances at work here. As Accrington Stanley’s chairman, Andy Holt, angrily noted in a series of hostile tweets, Salford are an unusually well-funded operation, backed by five former Manchester United players and a Singaporean billionaire.

But it was what was said by Motherwell’s manager, Stephen Robinson, that really hit home. Robinson had tried to recruit Rooney himself this summer, only to be blown out of any negotiating position by Salford’s ambitious offer. The thing is, however, he was not surprised. It was not the first time it had happened to him. As manager of one of Scotland’s most established clubs he finds himself increasingly unable to compete with non-league sides in England. According to Robinson, the Class-of-92-funded Salford are by no means alone in their ability to outbid the big guns north of the border.

“Fifty per cent of National League clubs pay more than the bottom half of the Scottish Premier League,” he says. And no figure puts the decline in Scottish competitiveness into quite as stark a perspective as that.

Scottish optimists were hoping that Steven Gerrard’s arrival at Rangers this summer, bringing with him several Liverpool cast-offs, might signal the start of a reversal in the usual talent drain. Not to mention, now that a challenge to Celtic hegemony has been engaged, spark a return of lucrative competition in the domestic league.

Sadly, for the pessimist, Rooney’s move has indicated something altogether different: the Scottish Premier League is in danger of becoming a feeder division for England’s fifth tier.