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Date: 12th April 2025
D-Day.
April 29th, 2025.
League Reconstruction on the table.
Discussions to happen.
Let’s be honest, it’s been a while.
League Reconstruction as it is now, with the SPL and SFL in a 12-10-10-10 SPFL set up along with the pyramid structure allowing Highland and Lowland League teams the opportunity to come into the SPFL, predates the Scottish Football Supporters Association.
We’re only 10 years old.
The current league set up is a dozen years in existence.
This is a debate that comes round every so often, not quite as regularly as Christmas or Easter, but it does happen. And every so often, we hear rumblings and then eventually somebody decides to have a reasonable conversation about it. A bit like Easter Bunny and Santa Claus, I wonder just exactly whether, this is just a smokescreen of mythology, in order to bring deeper and more interesting things to the table.
The current set-up has its detractors and supporters. The supporters suggest that the top flight with the split means that when the split happens, and just before it, we end up with meaningful games. Those teams who want to be in the top six have something to play for. And those who don’t want to be in the bottom six want to avoid being pulled into that relegation mix. The pressure that’s placed upon managers increases people coming through the turnstiles because there is jeopardy.
Jeopardy brings excitement.
Excitement brings people to the games.
For many years now, I have wondered just exactly how many extra fans come through the turnstiles for a six versus seven game. I wonder if you get into the top six and you’re sitting there and look up at the five above you with a huge number of points difference between sixth and fourth and think the only competitive game we’ve got is when we play the team above us.
Or is it a possibility that once the champions are crowned, that when they come down to your club, that you’ve got an opportunity of demonstrating to your fans, what could have been, because you have the opportunity to show you can compete with the best in the land?
Or is it just another opportunity to be whipped five and six nothing with the top scorer in the champion club looking to extend their lead at the top of the scoring charts?
Or is it, as the detractors would suggest, so pressured that clubs are forced into making decisions that destroy any development of the youth programme, sitting comfortably nestled somewhere in the stadium, hoping for an opportunity to just get one of them onto the subs bench.
Is it something that in terms of our national team is actually quashing any kind of ambition? Because instead of free-flowing football, what you get is midfield side to side passing as safety comes first, rather than the cavalier spirit that would allow a new 17-year-old to fly down the wing, chipping in crosses in to allow a long-forgotten striker to actually notch a few on his belt.
I have often thought, still believe and may always believe that a top flight of 16 at least would be the best way to support youth development.
Let’s have a look at when we stopped qualifying for major tournaments. It comes as little surprise that it was in the early part of the 1990s. It comes as little surprise that many of our youth players that are currently playing and managing their development in leagues outside of the UK.
The current expectations on SPFL managers to get into a position of safety is so tightly pressurised that a slip means that the sack is not just round the corner, it’s probably sitting at the end of their desk on a daily basis. What does that lead managers to do? Does it mean that they take risks or are the risks simply in buying a yet another foreign import who might just manage to secure a draw here and an away victory there, rather than giving our own flourishing academies the opportunity to demonstrate why it was in 1967 that we boasted that Glasgow Celtic had such an amazing array of brilliant footballers?
I suggested earlier on that there was perhaps another reason that was going to be on the table: that this headline was a smokescreen.
The suggestion that we go back to a ten-team Premier League is likely to be dead in the water for a variety of different reasons, not least of course the fact that having less games to offer broadcasters is likely to kill it.
Not that of course that anything other than sporting integrity is going to be prevalent when it comes to working out what football should be doing with itself.
What I would love for them to talk about is how we deal with promotion and relegation.
I have long felt that the three types of playoffs that we have in place were wrong. I think that anybody who ends up bottom of the pile should be relegated, and that includes League Two.
I think that the second bottom-placed team should go down to play the fourth-placed team in each of the SPFL leagues, just like they do in the Championship to Premiership play-offs. That would give any club that lands in second place an advantage, as it should do.
Very often what we see are clubs that manage to climb into second place, then having to join the third and fourth place teams in the semi-finals of the play-offs with a disadvantage, insofar as they have been the better side of the three, but they gain no reasonable advantage for being second, apart from having some kind of momentum.
It has long been, in my view, a nonsense that the Lowland League champions play the Highland League champions and then the winner of that gets to play the 10th place League 2 team.
I think if you want a true pyramid structure, really do introduce some kind of jeopardy.
Right now, Forfar Athletic and Bonnyrigg Rose Athletic, as well as Clyde and Stranraer, have benefited from not having to face the possibility of automatic relegation.
Brechin City look once again, along with Brora Rangers, are battling out at the top of the Highland League, whilst East Kilbride seemingly home and hosed (again) for the Lowland League title.
Whoever it is that will go in against the 10th place side will have to battle out between them in order to get that opportunity.
They’ve already won their league.
The opportunity should be there already.
There’s a possibility of a Midlands League to sit alongside the Highland and Lowland League set-ups. It mirrors the debate that was held a few years ago when Brechin City fell into the Lower Leagues, as to whether they would be a Lowland League or a Highland League club.
They have nestled themselves beautifully within the Highland League and have been champions or thereabouts for the last three or four years. Had they been in a Midland League, then perhaps that would have served them better in terms of getting back into League Two.
However, having said that, they’ve done not too badly in the Highland League.
In the Lowland League, of course, not one of those teams that have fallen into it from the SPFL have not managed to get anywhere near the top. Best placed Albion Rovers sit 7th but have off field problems that may see them disappear altogether.
There’s also a possibility that some of the teams that have fallen into the Lowland league, like Berwick Rangers, East Stirlingshire and legacy club, Gretna, are going to end up falling even further down the pyramid.
Whilst it is unfortunate for former league members to face such an ordeal, it is only right, given the investment that has been placed in a number of those lower league clubs, from Kirkintilloch Rob Roy to Pollock to Brora Rangers. There are many teams who deserve the opportunity, having proven year upon year that they are worthy of being considered well above the station to which they find themselves geographically and in terms of football.
Of course, what will happen is that there’s a possibility that the headlines will be grabbed by whether or not we’re going back to 10 teams in the Premiership. What I hope will happen on April 29th is a reasonable discussion about the lower leagues, and perhaps an opportunity to discuss the future of the league pyramid and how to even out the excitement of playoffs.
We have a decent product in Scotland, and if you look at the Championship on a Friday night on the BBC, you’ll see that.
But what is also important is that we sell it. Not just the Hearts and Hibs derbies, or Dundee versus Dundee United, or the four times a year obsession with which team in Glasgow is the best.
But we look at what else is in that product and we start to develop a wider view of Scottish football rather than a narrow focus.
But this is Scotland.
This is Fitba.
I know change at the top will be unlikely to happen. Why? Maths…
There is domination by two in the room. And the likelihood of change, needs one of them to buy into it.
And that is the tragedy of the structure of Scottish football.
11 into 12 will just not go – and that is National 3 maffs, and a national tragedy…
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