Wright for a Reason By Donald C Stewart

Date: 2nd July 2026

Wright for a Reason

By Donald C Stewart

With the end looming of the Scottish Tourist Board’s recent campaign in America for 2026, during which a major sporting event erupted, we have witnessed the Tartan Army limping back home. They may still be dancing in the aisles, no doubt, of the planes returning them to our shores, glad that they had the experience, and they return having made their own bit of history whilst their team could not grasp that thistle.

Scotland’s players, once again went to a major tournament, played some decent football now and again, but not enough for 90 minutes, as Lewis Ferguson said in a recent interview. They returned, not before the postcards, but before the knockout stages.

The optimism we went to the World Cup was a little misplaced, wasn’t it?

Whilst being caught up in the euphoria of getting to The World Cup by winning our group, we seemed to forget we shared the group with two top 10 teams; that was the only group of the 12 in the World Cup that had such pedigreed teams. New anthems were written, recorded, sung on the terraces, taught to our American hosts, now with traffic cone hats, having experienced bagpipes at dawn, as lists go on as a promised tale of fortune was not within our reach.

We know that our best shot was not good enough, and the joy of November, when we played Denmark and beat them off the park 4-2, was not wholly replaced by a scudding Haiti, 1-0, losing narrowly to the sixth best team in the world, and then gifting Brazil, an opportunity to begin an absolute drubbing.

It never seemed fanciful, but it was, to expect we were going to achieve something we’d never achieved before – getting out of the group stages. The opposition was of a quality that was well beyond us.

The post-mortems have begun.

Perhaps again we’re going to see the old arguments about the goalposts being taken down during the summer and no ball games in this park signs being put up in their place. Perhaps again we’re going to hear about the infrastructure not being there, and that Iceland and others have a better sense of how to develop young players: though it’s noticeable that Iceland weren’t at the World Cup. Their only appearance was on those bizarre half-and-half England-Scotland shirts that the frozen food company decided was a good idea, whilst nobody else did.

Perhaps we’re going to get another lecture on the possibilities that the Netherlands have the best teams because they have a culture and infrastructure that is better than ours. Easy to forget they are in a country with the type of transport infrastructure that means you’re never that far away from a football club, whilst in Scotland, you’re often far away from a football club that is noticed by the powers that be if you don’t live in the central belt.

Perhaps we shall hear we need the tippy-tappy philosophy of the likes of Barcelona to be adopted by the Largs Mafia to ensure success.

Then I read the BBC report about what Ian Wright said about Scotland and their lack of progress. It reminded me of what Barry Hearn said when he came up to deliver a state of your nation lecture and some, not all, scoffed at him.

Ian Wright talked sense. Barry Hearn, in retrospect did too.

We don’t value Scottish football enough. We have just come out of a season where the hottest run-in to the title in European football was lauded and applauded across the whole of the continent. We have just seen the fans take over the whole of America and in essence, right from the very beginning, as people said, The Tartan Army won the World Cup.

To be fair to the rest of the fans at the World Cup, we did have some competition. The Norwegian rode, the Dutch bounced, and the Japanese tidied up.

But nobody could sport a traffic cone like we can.

As evidence for his view Wright suggested, that the deal that has been done for our television rights for football in Scotland undervalues it.

He’s right.

And it’s an interesting comparison in the BBC report of this that seeks to look at Norway, a similar size to Scotland, and a similar history in terms of their relationship with the World Cup.

They too were out it for 28 years, except this is the third time they have got out the group stages.

Norway, though, have on average 6 to 7,000 fans per topflight game. We have, thanks to the Old Firm, over 15,000. It would appear sponsors prefer to be associated with the Norwegian brand because they have a better television deal. But, Scotland has significantly more attending people per capita of population at our game than anywhere else in Europe. The Norwegian FA have got a deal with £50 million per annum going to their top-flight clubs. We are working towards one.

Why are we not currently looking at massive amounts of money coming into our game through television deals?

Why has the SPFL settled?

Why have we settled?

If there was more money would Steve Clarke have stayed and seen our next phase into the next round of tournaments and build into the future a team that can manage us past the knockout phase?

Well, no, because the change and shift in finance is future proofing and not short-term change.

For me, it’s always been about the infrastructure. It’s always been about the support for grassroots football. It’s always about getting pathways right. We have a mass participation sport that is so popular that as you walk around towns and cities in Scotland, you cannot avoid the Saltires that were displayed with such pride in June 2026. You cannot visit a shop without the commercial pride and encouragement of our team. It was infectious. It made the disappointment hurtful, not on a 1978 scale, but the hope continued to feel terminal.

We can’t escape the fact that we’ve not managed once again with an incredible crop of players, who are lighting up the continent, nominated for top awards, but can’t get us out of the group stages. I’m not suggesting that Haaland and Odegaard of Norway have their equivalents in the Scotland squad, but when you look at the effect that Ferguson, McTominay, Gilmour have made in Italy, or that Scott McKenna is coming back after having won a cup and league double in Croatia, Europa League winner McGinn playing with players like Champions League winner Andy Robertson, English Premier League seasoned Kieran Tierney … names begin to trip easily off your tongue. It reminds me of the teams of yore where we had Souness, Dalglish, Jordan, all with similar pedigrees but also international failure.

And still we don’t have a team that has gelled enough under anyone in a major competition to get through. In the last two competitions we struggled because we were naïve and new to it. We now have to debate who we think is going to be the right person to take us forward. We now have the habit of getting to major competitions and hope we’re going to continue to enjoy.

Debates will rage with rebuilds underway at both Rangers and Celtic. How successful have their youth pathways been in bringing players into their first teams? How has our youth setup brought players into the Scottish game that are playing at the top level in Scotland, keeping the investment in the game or are we losing players because opportunities are not there as teams draft in foreign players who are as good as or marginally better than our own. Is that because the pressure of playing in a 12-team league means managers with a short-term shelf-life want to keep their jobs.

But is Ian Wright correct?

Should we be looking at how we fund this thrusting opportunity by making sure that we value our game by getting the infrastructure and the funding correct by signing a major deal with the television people? Do we need a “bolder, braver vision?”

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Tags: Fan Led Review, fans, oor Donald, Scottish football, SFA, SPFL, Tartan Army, World Cup