Celtic would have had to give up promotion to the Premier League for two years under a plan to take the club into English football, according to the former Football League chairman who says he led the talks.

Keith Harris set out the terms on the Keys and Gray Unleashed podcast, released on Friday. The Daily Record picked up his claims this morning, leading on the £40m a year in extra broadcast money he says the move would have brought in.

Under the plan, Celtic and Rangers would have gone straight into the Championship. The division would have grown to 26 clubs so that no English side had to make way, with Harris pointing out that existing members were never going to vote “for their own turkey dinner”.

If either Glasgow club won promotion in those first two years, they would have had to give it up. After that, the Championship was due to go back down to 24 clubs, and It was claimed that only one of the two could go up in the same season, even if they finished first and second. 

The plan at a glance

Desmond and the Murray lunch

Harris, who chaired the Football League in 2002, said the two clubs would not speak to each other at the time, so he dealt with Dermot Desmond and David Murray separately. On Desmond, he said: “Dermot Desmond I knew very well.”

The two boards eventually sat down under the same roof at a lunch at the then-Rangers chairman’s house in Perthshire.

“David said I’ll invite them in but I won’t host them, you can host them,” Harris recalled.

He says the SPL and the Scottish FA were on board, with “broad agreement that they would come into the Championship”, and some of the extra money set to go back into the Scottish game.

The resistance, in his view, came from the top of the English game, and Celtic’s own history was part of the reason.

Killed on cup final day

Harris says the plan died when an Observer journalist stopped him at the FA Cup final in Cardiff and told him the paper was running the story. “And that blew it. No question,” he said.

That final, Arsenal’s 2-0 win over Chelsea, was played on 4 May 2002. It was the same afternoon Martin O’Neill’s Celtic, already champions, lost the Scottish Cup final 3-2 to Rangers at Hampden.

Part of Harris’s case on the podcast was that Scottish clubs, without strong opposition at home, tended to go out of Europe at the first hurdle. O’Neill’s side answered that the following season, knocking out Blackburn Rovers and Liverpool on the way to the UEFA Cup final in Seville.

Harris still believes the move would have worked. “As I sit here now I think that’s still a good idea,” he said, although he rated the chances of it coming back as “as likely as Britain going back into Europe”.

O’Neill, back in the Celtic dugout more than two decades later, takes his side into tonight’s game against Dundee United at Parkhead (7.45pm) four points clear at the top of the Premiership. Here is how to watch Celtic on TV.