Andy’s Sting In The Sting (24/01/25) “Hanging on in There”
Date: 24th January 2025
(Photo:@Homesoffootball)


In a week where we learned that Real Madrid have broken past 1 Billion Euros turnover well done to both of our relatively impecunious Glasgow giants.
Reaching the knock-out phases is an achievement.
Two not so easy games in February to get to the Round of 16 is still a result.
It already looks like Celtic might be lined up against the Real money machine, Barca who can’t make their numbers work or Bayern.
Money spinning, yes, but tough.
Rangers again punched way above their weight at Old Trafford in what lazy journalists on both sides of the wall were trying to call the ‘Battle of Britain’.
‘Jetting in for the Battle of Britain’.
Come on guys.
No wonder the MSM is withering.
And sorry, but Rangers potential next opponent possibilities are way too complex for me to call.
Here are three thoughts that came to me this week in the QUEH.
Andy’s Madchester, Hat Trick.
Madchester 1.
I admit I probably know a lot more than most about the damage that gambling is doing to individuals in our communities in a full predictable spectrum.
It goes, from empty pockets and pissed off, past broken promises, to permanently skint, and then a complex cocktail of deceit, despair and suicide for the unluckiest.
That’s factual and not a debate unless you’re King Donald with his noblemen hoodlums.
I am permanently embarrassed and a little disappointed that Scottish Football has a betting title sponsor, Wm Hill.
A football partner who isn’t a real partner to anyone but its shareholders.
A partner who always wants fans, that’s us, to lose when they deal with their organisation.
Hills don’t make anything that you can carry home or eat.
They don’t add to communities.
They just normalise their particular cash extraction business and believe me are experts at grooming customers.
And of course they take a guaranteed percentage of every bet.
Always.
It also says something about the sheer profitability of these gambling giants that they have deeper pockets and therefore offer significantly more than other commercial sectors.
That’s why the SPFL accepted the deal in a dreadful one sided negotiation.
The Celtic and Rangers ‘gambling tops’ also effectively endorse the industry to their supporters including the kids, and set the scene for a lifetime of misery for some of them.
This week Public Health Scotland came out publicly saying that Westminster has lost the fight with the gambling lobbyists and their various forms of ‘bribery’.
Politics is riddled with self-interest, we know that.
The news is PHS is undertaking a new study into ‘Gambling Harm’.
They said this week,
“It is a common practice among producers of unhealthy products like tobacco, gambling, ultra processed foods to protect their commercial interests by getting their retaliation in first”.
And is also well known that the UK Government derives considerable revenue from gambling taxation.
All dirty and compromised by filthy lucre.
A couple of years ago 18,000 adults in Scotland admitted experiencing personal problem gambling within their last 12-months.
Shocking and the size of a small town.
Well done William Hill, Westminster et al.
Madchester 2

What is it about Madchester, the city when tartan is swapped for royal blue?
Most of us still cringe at memories and thoughts of what happened there in 2008 when 150,000 blue fans descended for the Uefa cup final against Zenit.
And again yesterday there were arrests for a catalogue of things.
39 and counting.
Peter McPhee, SFSA long time member emailed today, “Andy ask in your blog why a royal blue jersey somehow seems to come with entitlement and attitude that just doesn’t occur when the Tartan Army are in town.
Ian Archer, the late, well respected football journalist after a riot in Birmingham in October 1976 wrote in the Herald about the fans:
“A permanent embarrassment and an occasional disgrace”.And Peter McPhee also suggested that we need a new collective noun for a big group of misbehaving Rangers fans: “
An entitlement of Rangers fans”.It made me smile and we all need to smile.
All club fans in Scottish football should be self-policing like the Tartan Army.
The good fans need our help and they are the silent majority.
Madchester 3
Pyros, Fan Behaviour, and Songbooks
This week both big clubs warned their fans in detail about what happens in Uefa matches if behaviour we see week-in week-out happens.
It’s called Strict Liability and basically means the club takes responsibility for what the fans do.
It works.
Uefa mandates it in its competitions.
Consequentially Uefa games have less crap.
The current ultras, of all ages, their pyros, fireworks and bad, anti-social behaviour is just a repeat of an old cycle but it is damaging.
It does nothing for the game.
Edinburgh City barred their problem group and kept the perpetrators out of the ground.
Well done guys.
Andy’s Sting in the Tale
1. The Curse of Alzheimer’s Bites Again
2. Watch Live Football with Alcohol on Tap
3. Lise Working Smarter?
4. Haalandonomics
5. Chairman’s Awards
6. Looking Outside
1. Balls
Footballs used to absorb water and in practice sessions you never knew which was the heaviest one.
And, yes, you could get a sore head but none of us really knew that heading heavy footballs was linked to this cruel brain wasting illness.
For us it was just a sore head and some paracetamol. Dennis the Lawman and Jimmy the Calderwood in one week.
Not the first and not the last of that generation.
Fifa and Uefa are too passive and I’d guess it’s because they are scared of organised compensation.
2. Enjoy a Pint at Your Seat Watching Your Favourite Team

All you have to do is be a Bristol City, Southampton, Birmingham or Newcastle Women’s team fan.
A wee trial started this week to see what happens when alcohol is allowed in the stands like in rugby.
The same could easily happen in our lower leagues.
Fans aren’t all daft.
We accept it will be a long time till it is part of the Glasgow Derby experience with rival groups sharing a fino sherry or vintage port.
3. Playing the Game Norwegian Style

Lise Klaveness the President of Norwegian has stopped attacking Gianni directly.
It’s been noticed that what she says is sensible and she may or may not get one of the guaranteed 2 women’s seats in April.
It can be fun to throw mud at both the establishment’s tent and also the individuals.
I guess that’s politics in the UK but it doesn’t work.
You have to be on the inside to make real change.
4. Mad Money
Why does Erling have a new contract of nine and a half years allegedly tying him the Man City till 2034?
Worth up to £1Billion.
And amortised by the club against future media-based revenue streams.
Answers on a postcard because it’s all beyond my paygrade.
5. Who are Andy’s Two Winning Heroes?
Thanks once again to the thousands of you who voted in our SFSA Fan Awards.
I’ve just seen the winners list and can’t disagree with your choices and hope you like mine.
We’ll announce it all as per usual on Off the Ball tomorrow 24th with our own Alastair sharing the best table in football.
Andy’s Sting is:
A weekly column from me, sitting writing this from the fourth floor of the QEUH south of the river on a windy wet day.
I’m officially on day minus 6 of my planned stem cells prep programme and due to start my 5 days of ‘Fludarabine’ today leading up to a wee one-day dance with an even more powerful, ‘patented-sledgehammer’, called Melphalan next Thursday.
By then my ‘ Fludarabine-emptied’ bone marrow factories will be putting up ‘welcome’ signs for my young German donor’s blood gift.
It’s hopefully the start of my new immune system, it will be also be a change of blood type and maybe even an end to my annoying gluten intolerance.
Maybe I’ll start supporting Bayern too?Thanks.Sting is Sting, any opinions are mine and are just that, opinions.
Andy’s Album of the Week
Elvis Costello : Almost Blue

This record annoyed the music press when it came out in the early 1980s and got staggeringly mixed reviews, mostly negative and deeply myopic.
The NME hated it.
Declan’s early success as a new-wave, wave-rider, (he was never punk) had somehow waned quickly.
I think, in retrospect, he just ran out of good material and the market had by then pigeon holed him and moved on to big hair.
A marooned and abandoned 70’s ‘punk icon’, destined to one day, if he was lucky, to touring in some hastily created ‘Punk Show’ around crappy theatres in places like Skegness and Whitehaven.
But Elvis was cleverer and better than that.
He jumped into his breakout project with both feet and headed for Nashville the capital and melting pot of Country Music.They were wilder days and it was said to be a time of personal relationship problems. Drink was being taken too.
A bit of a mess.
Almost BlueA daft concept?
A blue(s) album from Nashville from an ex-‘punk’ singer from England re-finding his way.
12 deeply personalised tracks, 11 covers and 1 self-penned that lay bare his soul.
If you wanted to see it.
Recording was not easy and he seemingly did not get on with the producer who looked down on him, his type, and his ideas.40 odd years on the album is better than ever and has more than ridden the tests of time.
It’s still edgy, it’s still rough, and it’s easy to see why it was a severe challenge to the rabble then working as music critics, even in the posh titles.
In my mind’s eye I can picture them in their rhinestone cowboy outfits and Stetsons dreaming about the yet to come square-dancing craze and heaping praise on repetitive ‘real country’ i.e. ‘ethnically correct’ rubbish with titles like “I didn’t know I loved you till you busted my jaw”.
‘Almost Blue’ is a fine, no a great album and I’m ashamed to say before this week I hadn’t played it in yonks.
‘Tonight the Bottle Let Me Down’, ‘Good Year for the Roses’, and ‘Almost Blue’ are tracks that stand out in any company but the whole record works.
And I’ll finish on a wee story.
I was sitting in the over-busy, BA, posh- seats lounge in Singapore en route home from sunny Sydney when a bearded man asked politely and quietly if he could take the spare seat beside me.
I said of course he could.
It was the man himself travelling almost incognito, intentionally. We exchanged some polite stuff as he sat down but I could see he was tired.
I respected his privacy but when I got up to leave an hour or so later I said goodbye and told him ‘Almost Blue’ had opened so many musical doors for me.
He beamed.
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