Great Britain And Ireland Club Premier Cup - Soccer

Great Britain And Ireland Club Premier Cup – A New Football Trophy Idea.

My new idea is a Great Britain and Ireland Premier Cup.

The idea is that the cup would be for all Scottish Premierships sides, plus all English Premier and English Football League sides, plus 4 or 5 sides each from Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and the Welsh Cymru Premier.  

My idea is that they would call it the Great Britain and Ireland Club Premier Cup so that even if the political divisions of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland change, there would still be the same trophy. Because Great Britain refers to the island that Scotland, Cornwall, Wales, and England are on. While Ireland refers to the island that Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland are on.

Other possible names for the trophy include;

United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland Premier Cup.

British and Irish Isles Premier Cup.

Issues-

Fixture congestion.

Some would say there is fixture congestion in the leagues that would stop this new trophy.

But to make way for the trophy, we could get rid of the Scottish League Cup and English League Cup.

The Scottish League Cup, and English League Cup would still be counted as major honours but it would go the way of the European Cup Winners Cup. An important historical trophy of the past.

In Scotland they could even have league re-organisation, so that we have a 16 team Scottish Premier, with 30 league games a season.

This would massively free up the calendar to make way for a new Great Britain and Ireland football trophy.

My idea is this new trophy would need to be a group stage trophy leading to a knockout round, leading to a final.

This would massively help Scottish, Irish, and Welsh football.

The Welsh and Irish sides playing 6 games a season against Scottish and English professional sides would massively help Welsh and Irish football.

The Scottish sides would benefit in terms of finances and status by playing big sides from England each year.

Clubs like Aberdeen. Glasgow Celtic, Glasgow Rangers, Ross County, The New Saints, Shamrock Rovers, Linfield, and Dundalk would be great in such a trophy.

I do not accept travel would be a huge issue. Look at the trips teams do in the Australian, New Zealand, USA, Canadian, Indian, and Chinese professional sports leagues.

A trip from Dingwall to Limerick is relatively easy. And the potential gold mine of playing massive English sides would be enormous.  

The big English sides could treat the group stages like they have treated the early rounds of the FA Cup and English League Cup, where they develop new young players. Then as they get to the later stages they play their first team players.  

It would be a great way to help develop soccer in Ireland and Wales.

UEFA have allowed the Scottish to have English, Welsh and Irish sides in the Scottish Challenge Cup, so UEFA should be OK about cross border trophies.

I do not support merging the Scottish, Northern Irish, Welsh and English leagues as that would damage football history, could lead to Scottish sides going decades without winning trophies or playing in Europe.

If the Scottish, and English leagues merged people would just think the new league was a continuation of the English league. So all the trophies English teams had won, would be counted as real trophies, while all the trophies Scottish sides had won would be counted as non-league trophies.

Plus people would think Scotland was part of England, if we merged the leagues.

I think the preferable option is to have 5 strong leagues, across the UK and Ireland rather than just one.