Time to end the second chances for teams that fail

WE are slap bang in the middle of play-off season, a time of the year when attention inevitably turns to the structure of the SPFL promotion and relegation system.

Let’s be honest here, it’s too convoluted and all too typical of how we do things in this country.

For a start, there’s the name. The Premiership play-offs, yep, that contains three teams from the Championship, likewise the Championship play-offs have three teams from League One and it is a similar kind of anomaly for the League One play-offs.

Part of the reason for that, of course, seems to be a reluctance to relegate teams which by extension could be construed as a reluctance to promote certain teams.

The theory goes that an influx of too many teams from the division below will weaken the division as a whole, a kind of pulling down by the bootstraps, if you will.

Does that stand up to scrutiny? It’s hard to measure that generally held belief with any great scientific conviction, of course, because, well, because of the system that limits the potential for outliers to achieve promotion when those teams in third and fourth are faced with a play-off schedule of six matches.

Let’s take those recent additions to the top flight who came through the play-off structure as a team finishing outwith the automatic promotion place; it has invariably been the team finishing in second. Hamilton were promoted in the first season of the play-offs after a memorable win over Hibs and remained in the top flight for seven seasons.

Meanwhile, Livingston continue to fight the good fight having been promoted in 2018.

Further down the leagues, Ayr United and Cove Rangers are clubs who have demonstrated that if you are good enough you can survive – and even prosper.

History shows that the team finishing in fourth has never navigated their way to promotion so, that being the case, surely it’s high time the play-offs were either expanded to include a fourth team from the division or shortened to include just two teams and be done with giving second chances to teams in leagues above.

The confirmed relegations of Dunfermline, Dumbarton, and most probably Cowdenbeath only serve to accentuate the point.