As everyone will already know, the SPFL has secured its latest contract with Sky Sports to broadcast up to sixty games a season on their network until 2029.
The latest deal guarantees the league £30 million per season. This, in my opinion, is an incredibly poor return for our league. It would not be unreasonable to assume that with our league being represented so well on the European stage over the last few years that Neil Doncaster could name his price, to a certain degree, anyway.
Celtic performed reasonably well in the Champions League last season. They may only have picked up two points, but there’s no shame in that. Having won the league, they’ve gained automatic access to the Champions League again. The suggestions and hints that they intend to spend big this summer, with Brendan Rodgers as their new manager, the club will go into the groups with a vibrancy and optimism.
Last season, Hearts gained qualification for the Conference League and kept their chances alive for most of their campaign. Again, they performed admirably but just failed to make it to the play offs. They have the opportunity to qualify for group stage football yet again this season, too.
Over the last few years, Rangers have gained respectability on the European stage having reached the Europa League final, losing only on penalties. They also qualified for the Champions League last season. They’ve done admirably, getting through the group stages of the Europa League a number of times and managing to compete at that level for a few years now. Michael Beale will be chomping at the bit to test himself in the Champions League qualifiers, with the failsafe of Europa League group stages (as a pot 1 top seed) to fall back on if they fail to make it.
Aberdeen have guaranteed access to the group stages this coming season, and hopefully, they’ll do pretty well with full houses at Pittodrie. At home, I’d expect the Dons to be competitive and cause a few teams problems.
Hibs qualified for Europe as well. We all know that Easter Road, with a full house under the floodlights, is a difficult place to go. There’ll be no team going there expecting an easy night of it
This is the first season in years that I can recall the ‘big five’ in Scottish football representing the country at the same time.
That gives me huge cause for optimism. Our league may not be among the best in the world, but it still manages to overachieve on the European stage.
Time and time again, our clubs have managed to gain unexpected results against clubs from bigger, richer leagues. That may or may not happen this season but it is exciting to have our five biggest clubs competing in European football nonetheless.
Yes, we’ve seen our clubs lose to teams they really shouldn’t. Such as Motherwell last season or Kilmarnock losing to a team from Wales. These results are difficult to comprehensive at times, and most would say they really shouldn’t happen.
There’s reasons for that, though. Our league can be cut throat. With so many clubs of similar standing regarding attendances and finances, it becomes staid with teams cancelling each other out. Familiarity breeds contempt at times.
Playing each team three times, then splitting into a top and bottom six makes the game in this country more predicable with each passing year. The familiarity of playing so few teams so often can’t help. Such a little amount of money coming into our game is a problem, too. We need to maximise our potential in Scotland, yet that is something that, from the outside, looking in doesn’t appear to be the case at all.
One team relegated, one team promoted, with a play off system that hugely favours the Premiership side, while making it incredibly difficult for Championship clubs to ever gain promotion, says to me that we are playing with loaded dice here.
So… where am I going with this? Well, I feel that the professional game in this country needs a root and branch clear out.
Our governing bodies are not fit for purpose. We have the latest fiasco regarding tv contracts about to smack us right between the eyes.
Viaplay, who both the SPFL and the SFA have deals with, are in major financial trouble. Apparently, the League Cup is secured for this season, but the national teams games and the Scottish Cup are now in danger being thrown under a bus.
Yes, I’m aware that it was UEFA that sold the rights to show national teams on Viaplay, but I’d ask how many times over the last decade or so our governing bodies have managed to find themselves in bed with companies that can’t fulfill on what they’ve promised?
From NTL to Setanta and now this latest turn of events with Viaplay. Add those to the lack of sponsorship, or the miserly money being invested by companies into our game, then I would suggest that those responsible for bringing money into our game just aren’t up to the job.
Back in 2010, Setanta gave the SPL a £32 million per season deal. That is less than SkySports are have offered and has been accepted, until the end of this decade. That’s where we are in Scotland. Offered less than we were over a decade ago and meekly accepted by our clubs. It’s a pathetic deal and I’d presume our clubs know that to be the case.
Now we all know what happened with Setanta, and we certainly understand that Roger Mitchell was an incompetent buffoon that was there to do one clubs bidding while embarrassing himself and the Scottish game on a daily basis, but what have we learned over the last ten or so years?
Absolutely nothing. That’s what we’ve learned. We’ve replaced Roger Mitchell with an even bigger incompetent person. Neil Doncaster has got to be the worst CEO of any major organisation, in any business, anywhere on the planet. Yet still, he sits in office, making a complete balls up of the professional game in Scotland.
When Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Poland, and Greece all have far more tv money than is coming into our game, then why are our clubs not prepared to ask serious questions in regard to the governance of our game? Our game is worth more than any of those leagues, and I’ll argue the case with anyone who suggests otherwise.
We in Scotland, whether people choose to believe it or not, have one of the biggest derby games on earth right on our doorstep. We have five major clubs in our domestic game, all capable of playing to twenty thousand or more, right up to fifty and sixty thousand attendances on a weekly basis.
It doesn’t help when we have a parochial, insular mindset, right enough. We have one of the biggest games in world football that we could showcase four times a season, but instead of doing so we have one of those clubs involved in this game that refuse to call it by its actual name, all the while complaining about the other club that participates in the fixture for not giving them eight thousand tickets to their rivals stadium, suggesting that the other club is taking away and diminishing the famous derby.
All of this nonsense is being done with the approval of the governing body and the media in Scotland. It’s laughable in every way, and it is a genuinely deliberate act of self sabotage by many who are in charge of running the game in this county.
Here’s a suggestion for the SPFL. Allow Rangers and Celtic to be shown on a weekly basis on our TV screens, home and away. The same with Hearts, Hibs and Aberdeen. The best and most obvious way to showcase our game is to highlight the best of it. Pretending that our game gets x or y pounds per game is an insult to our intelligence. Particularly when SkySports can’t even be bothered taking up their full allocation of games every season.
There’s so many games in Scotland that could be promoted so much better than Sky currently does, and we all need to think about why that is.
Another suggestion is to take their tongues out of Sky Sports backsides and, over the next few years, be proactive in respect to selling our game to a company that will actually showcase the positives within our game.
We need a tv or streaming company that’s prepared to help generate interest in Scottish football. We certainly do not need a company such as Sky Sports who deliberately undermine our clubs by throwing the games out on their channels at ridiculous times and nights where it’s clearly obvious they’re using it as nothing more than fillers when there’s no English football to take priority.
I went down to Wembley a few weeks ago for the League 2 play-off final. Carlisle United v Stockport Country. In truth, it was awful. Honestly. It was a horrendous game of football between two poor teams, with very little ability or talent on show.
But here’s the thing.. SkySports highlighted and promoted that game for days upon days. Going out of their way to advertise it. SkyBet were the sponsors, as they are with all the play offs in the EFL.
Sitting at Wembley, all around the stadium, SkySports and SkyBet were advertised. That’s up to those companies, of course, but as a SkySports subscriber, it was blatantly obvious that even League 2 in England has way more significance and importance to Sky than Scottish football.
There’s a reason why Stockport County’s players’ average wage is almost £2500 per week, and Carlisle United’s players is over £100,000 a year. That reason is so obvious, Sky are ploughing fortunes into English football. Their clubs are being ably funded by a proper TV deal that humiliates Scottish clubs by comparison.
Again, I can understand this with the EPL or even to an extent the Championship in England but when clubs in League 2 down there can outbid or offer more than even Aberdeen, Hibs or Hearts when it comes to signing players or offering their own young professionals contracts then there’s something seriously wrong with continuing the SPFL’s relationship with Sky.
We’re being treated as no more than an irrelevance. This is not a partnership with SkySports, and there’s no commitment to the Scottish game, while, at the same time they are openly going out of their way to promote and establish English football from the top down.
There lies the problem for the SPFL. They’ve jumped into bed, yet again, with SkySports. This is a TV company that quite brazenly throws a Scottish game off one channel mid game to put an English game on in place of it.
Neil Doncaster has thrown our league under a bus. Refusing to put the new contract out to tender with two years of the current deal still to run is tantamount to neglect, and fans of all clubs should be demanding answers as to why he would do just that.
Why did he suggest there might be less money on the table for the SPFL just a month or so before SkySports increased the EFL deal by over 50%?
Why did other clubs not insist on hanging off just for a few months? Why did they point bank refuse to at least take a look at what might be available from companies such as TNT, Channel 4, Amazon Prime, DZone, AppleTV or Discovery+ who are all actively trying to establish themselves with live sporting events?
The biggest elephant in the room with respect to that question is why Celtic accepted the decision to not put the contract out to tender and just accept the pittance SkySports offered? Why was the deal done so early, and why was there so much fear put into the minds of club owners on refusing to do a deal so early?
I’ll never understand why Celtic want less money coming into our game. If that isn’t the case then there should be an obvious explanation, but I genuinely can’t see one.
I’ve heard people say that it might be because they have a financial advantage due to the fact they have the biggest stadium and access to European football every year, but I don’t buy that as an explanation. The simple truth is they would still have that anyway, so it remains inexplicable to me.
Rangers CEO James Bisgrove will be on the SPFL board next season. How much influence he can have remains to be seen, but with his track record of bringing record amounts of commercial revenue into Rangers, along with his influence within UEFA, if he can’t get owners and chairmen of clubs to see the failings of the SPFL board over the last few years then I genuinely fear for the game in this country.
We need change within Scottish football. We need innovators, young, bright minds that can see the way forward. People prepared to take chances and to see what our game lacks or what it needs to be successful.
What we don’t need is a guy running our game that forces our governing body into paying legal costs, damages, and issuing apologies to a member club because he quite deliberately broke their own statutes.
We’ve had so many controversial decisions made by the SPFL over the years that defy explanation, all of them to the benefit of one individual member, so now, perhaps, is the time for all clubs to look at the bigger picture and what could possibly be done for the betterment of the game as a whole. I won’t hold my breath on that, but it would be great to know that there’s a level playing field in Scottish football.
At some point in time, our governing body will be acting on behalf of all of its members and not seemingly going out of their way to undermine them. As I say, some of the decision-making is mind-boggling, and it has been for years.
That’s before I even mention the pathetic sponsorship deal that Rangers need have no part of or the two year notice period that would cost just shy of eight hundred thousand pounds a year to get rid of him.
Scottish football needs wholesale change. Our game is a mess. That those who have been trusted to look after its well being have acted in the self interest of certain clubs or individuals that have no interest in the greater good but only for the betterment of themselves or their clubs self interests, should not be lost on anyone.
Here’s a suggestion to James Bisgrove when it comes to politicking the other member clubs when he takes up his role within the SPFL board.
Understand that the board you’re part of a cabal. The interests of a few are far more important than the overall well-being of the game as a whole.
I’d like to see Bisgrove showing the rest of the clubs what’s out there and potentially available to our game in the foreseeable future. Revenue potential, tv deals that would blow the current deal(s) out of the water, sponsorship opportunities, and commercial changes that can and should be made to bring our game into the twenty-first century.
I hope the Rangers CEO uses his time in office to influence those around him. To rekindle old allegiances, to be an innovator, to lead the way and take the fear and hatred out of the game.
One way he can do that, and I would like him to do so, would be suggest that from the moment tv deals will expire or sponsorship deals will be due to be replaced then all twelve Premiership clubs will get an equal share of everything that’s on offer.
The game has been under the influence of one man for far too long. The easiest way to break a cabal is to incentivise. Money talks. Offer the knowledge that the status quo will continue to see the likes of Carlisle United being able to offer your twenty year old potential star in the making more money than you can due in massive part to a TV company that isn’t interested in what’s best for Scottish football at all. Its marquee product is English football and our game is no more than an afterthought.
A league where all clubs get the same amount of money from all commercial revenue generated is the only way for our game to flourish. Prize money should be equal, sponsorship income should be split equally, and we need someone to take on Doncaster and his crazy decision-making head-on.
We now have until 2029 to restructure Scottish football, where all clubs are equal and have the chance to prosper instead of living in fear of where the next tranche of revenue is going to come from due to an incompetent board that appear incapable of acting in its members best interests.
Do Aberdeen, Hibs, and Hearts fans want to see their clubs challenge for the title? Do Livingston, St Mirren or Motherwell supporters want to be part of a league where attractive football is a given, instead of knowing their managers will play with a low block in order to get a low scoring defeat against two teams that simply crush them financially?
In order to have that opportunity, the people running these clubs will have to make difficult decisions, stop entrusting the decision making to those that have proven to be failures at every turn.
When the time comes to replace the incoming TV deal, be innovative, be brave, and do what’s best for the future of our game. Look at the way the MLS has grown or the way the Scandinavians have impressively looked at the way football is going and have succeeded in getting better deals than the SPFL have, when they have no right to.
The MLS has one of the greatest offerings available to football fans, anywhere. It’s an amazing package for both season ticket holders or non season ticket holders. Scottish football should be looking at the way they’ve grown their game and imitating it as best they can.
We should be looking at other sports and the way they sell their game, too. Some of the innovations on show are so clever, while we sit here in this country with a guy in charge of our game, who can’t even read his own rules. It’s a dire and desperate product according to the people in charge of making it better. The decisions being made and the fear mongering show us that’s what they think. Enough is enough. It is time for a change.
Why we continue to undervalue, undersell, and undermine our game remains a mystery. Until we embrace change and stop looking inwards, nothing good is going to happen to Scottish football.
It’s time to look to the future of our game instead of living day to day. If we don’t, then the future paints a bleak picture. Scottish football has to face reality. We are being left behind. Not by the big five leagues, but by leagues that sit way below us in the rankings. That’s where the SPFL hierarchy should be held to account.
For the life of me, I have no idea how such an inept board is put in place to protect its member clubs, and work in its supposed best interests, yet keep getting away with such abandon in regard to its duty of care.
If the clubs at the top level fail to act over the next two or three years and move forward into the future then I fear what our game will look like by the end of the decade and beyond.
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