BILLY BREMNER MEMORIAL JOIN OUR CAMPAIGN
Date: 6th November 2025
Dream On
By Donald C Stewart
Ah! The romance of the cup.
As I begin this on Saturday morning, there are two semi-finals still to happen, both of which will capture the imagination of many across the whole of Scottish football because they represent two sides of a single coin.
On the first side, there is the hope of Motherwell and St Mirren as they go into the semi-final at Hampden, knowing that they will at not be the Old Firm in the final. Non old Firm supporters are delighted. Gives us all hope because it allows those of us who don’t follow either Rangers or Celtic to have some skin in the game.
Many want the name of the cup to bear a different engraving than the two Glasgow Giants, although the West Coast of Scotland has the monopoly on the four clubs contesting the weekend semi-finals.
The other side of that coin is obviously the Old Firm, and it is great to see both Rangers and Celtic placed together prior to the final, thus allowing another club an opportunity of going in like Aberdeen did last year at the Scottish Cup final.
There is another element of the two semi-finals which in terms of Scottish football is important: the difference in financial muscle. One semi-final shall have riches on the pitch, the other clubs who have scrimped, saved, invested, hoped and often gambled.
Now, the way in which the Scottish professional football league is structured, the money that goes into the club that wins the Premiership as opposed to those that are down in the lower leagues is clearly given out by the SPFL on a sliding scale.
Where you have two very strong clubs competing for the title, whilst the others within the top division, struggle over third spot then every year, year on year the amount of money that’s going into those huge clubs, if it is managed correctly, is going to continue to provide financial advantage to keep their club at the top of that division.
Scotland is not alone by having strong teams at the top and although the English Premiership has a number of teams like Manchester City, Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool who have the ability to win a Premiership title each year. Over the last few years Manchester City have been the one to topple, though previously it was Manchester United plus Chelsea plus Arsenal. Back when I was going through secondary school you had a choice of English teams between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest. There’s always been a fairly strong grouping at the top of their league.
When you go into Europe Real Madrid, Barcelona, PSG, Bayern Munich or Juventus are always named at the top of their leagues though Napoli at Serie A bucked that trend! And when I was in Croatia, years ago, Dynamo Zagreb had won I think 18 out of our previous 19 titles so again dominance at the top of a league structure seems the norm.
But how does that change?
How do we get a little bit more democratization within the game to allow us to share the spoils more evenly?
Is it right or is it wrong that the likes of Hearts and Hibs, or Dundee United or even Aberdeen are not getting the opportunity that they should have to challenge Rangers and Celtic?
Should we always wait until the problems emerge at Govan or Parkhead to hinder their dominance? Do we have to believe that is only when the two biggest clubs and Scottish football are run badly enough that we might have a chance of catching up and even challenging for the cash that is doled out every year?
Hearts being top of the Premiership is fantastic. Neutrals – that is supporters of every club apart from Hearts, Rangers, Celtic and Hibs, are going into after Christmas with hope that the Jambos can finally break the duopoly.
But once the season is over, we then head into the Scottish elections.
That is why it is so important to get involved in the FaniFesto campaign by the Scottish Football Supporters Association.
If you want the model to change, the only way to change it is to put pressure on people who have leverage to make that change.
It is useless campaigning through your local club singly to just get them to change their vote in something that’s coming up.
It needs mass participation like football itself, and it requires everybody to lend a shoulder to the wheel.
So down below, there is an opportunity to take the time in the survey and start to build a real momentum to try and effect change for people.
And that change could be a new model for the finances in Scottish football.
I don’t believe for a second it is right to make the people at the bottom get more than the people at the top, but I do think that we should perhaps look at how that funding is allocated.
Perhaps it should be about more than league standing, and should include things like community benefit, or the way in which youth football is distributed, or whether or not there is a youth academy which has some form of status within the structure of Scottish football that allows you to invest heavily within it. Or perhaps it should be about more investment in an area where football is not so strongly represented with infrastructure or coaches or personnel or work in schools.
These are ideas that can be put forward, but they can’t be put forward if we’re just sitting in pubs talking about it.
They have to be put forward in a reasonable manner and that is where our campaign comes into play. So do us a favour, click on the link, make your voice known, join with us and start to effect change.
Scotland’s national independent fans organisation, the Scottish Football Supporters’ Association (SFSA), is reaching out to all football stakeholders to contribute to form a National Football Manifesto
Posted in: Fan's Blog, Latest News
Tags: Manifesto, oor Donald