There is a big debate in Scottish football about the present shape of the Premier League. The proposition on the table, and we are told, likely to be approved, is a two-league set-up with a ten club top tier, the bottom club being relegated and the second bottom involved in a play-off with the runner-up in SPL2. It seems that member teams are being manoeuvred into supporting this silly plan on the basis that anything else is not financially viable.
The thinking behind this is that the smaller clubs need to be playing Rangers and Celtic four times each season to maintain a sufficient level of income. However their chairmen seemed to have failed to notice that the clubs with most to gain from this set-up are Rangers and Celtic themselves, as Old Firm matches are these days the only ones where a full house can be guaranteed, even in the smallest of grounds. They are also glossing over the fact that in an expanded twenty club, two tier SPL, half of the member clubs will not be playing Celtic or Rangers at all. There is also the proposition for the likes of Inverness, Ross County , Kilmarnock, St Mirren, who might slip from the SPL1 with potentially 20% of the clubs being relegated every year, and the hard-core addicts who are their travelling support, having to slog up and down the A9 four times a season in SPL2, cost far outweighing income, becoming poorer and more and more dispirited, while the two top dogs, who have been wagging the tail all along, laugh all the way to the bank and continue to monopolise the lucrative European slots.
It’s not too late to stop this madness, so please, Mr Boyle, Mr Romanov, Mr Thompson, Sir Tom, etc, see sense, listen to the fans and give them what they want, a 16 club league, the kind that worked very well when I was a lad, before greed overcame everyone. You can ensure financial stability by capping expenditure, as well as by increasing income. This could be done in several ways; for example, by requiring that at kick-off the majority of players on the field and on the bench have come through the clubs’ own youth development structure, and also, by banning loan signings from clubs outside the SPL, a cheap way of fattening squads at the expense of young, developing Scots players.
There was a time: ten members of the greatest club side in our history, the Lisbon Lions of 1967, were born in Glasgow, and the eleventh came from just outside the city. Jock Stein wouldn’t have dreamt of borrowing a striker from Blackburn bloody Rovers. We can do that again, as they still do in Croatia, Uruguay, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and other nations of a similar size to Scotland, all of them internationally competitive and with viable domestic leagues. Our national game started to decline when we stopped believing in ourselves. That happened in 1978. It’s time we forgot that and recovered our pride. We might not beat the whole world, but we are at least as good as most of it.
