SPFL CHAOS
All eyes on Scottish football as former FA chief Palios watches the Hearts-Partick legal battle with interest
WHEN Hearts and Partick Thistle were lodging a petition at the Court of Session on Wednesday afternoon, the English Premier League was just a couple of hours away from returning to television screens across the planet.
The contrast between two footballing neighbours appeared stark. In Scotland, lawyers were readying to argue a case that could threaten the start of next season or carry a £10million compensation bill.
In England, the debate was over goal-line technology and the eyepopping defending of David Luiz. Happy days for the world’s richest league.
Dig down beneath the hyperinflated finances, however, and issues very familiar to Scottish ears can be heard south of the border. A raw sense of injustice persists there, too.
Very close attention is being paid to how Hearts and Partick Thistle will progress at court.
While the English Premier League and Championship will play to a finish, Leagues One and Two will not. Tranmere Rovers were third from bottom of League One when coronavirus halted the campaign. Having won their last three games — all away — they were three points behind AFC Wimbledon with a game in hand.
Momentum was clearly with them. But a vote to end the season on a points-per-game basis meant relegation to League Two.
The acute unfairness carries strong echoes of the fate inflicted at Firhill.
Tranmere chairman Mark Palios — a former chief executive of the English FA — lobbied against his club’s treatment to no avail.
In a statement earlier this week, Palios confirmed legal action remained open as an option.
Alongside Hearts and Thistle, they are now part of an international kinship of clubs who feel wronged by the way various leagues have responded to the pandemic.
In France, the relegations of Toulouse and Amiens have been suspended by the country’s highest administrative court. Those in charge of Ligue 1 have been told to look again at their structures.
Neighbouring Belgium has seen its own legal action. WaaslandBeveren achieved a victory against their relegation when they consulted the country’s competition authority.
The Brussels Court of First Instance has now been asked to annul the decision.
In each case, clubs may take heart from the blows struck by others in their shoes. Positions are monitored for precedent.
Speaking to Sportsmail yesterday, Palios (below) revealed there had already been contact between Prenton Park and Tynecastle as he assesses what to do next.
News of events in an Edinburgh courtroom will quickly travel the 200-or-so miles to Birkenhead.
‘I have huge sympathy for Hearts and Partick Thistle, to be quite honest, and we are watching what they do with interest,’ said Palios. ‘We have actually already spoken with Hearts to co-ordinate some thoughts with them. ‘I can also see the close parallels with the situations confronting Partick Thistle and my club, given they had a game in hand when the league was ended. The unfairness is obvious. ‘You look at what is happening in Scotland, but also the developments in Belgium and France. ‘I have said before that we are keeping an open mind in terms of our own position.’ Palios has estimated relegation will cost Tranmere around £1million, with redundancies already announced. That sympathy from fellow clubs was not translated into any action may well strike a chord with Hearts and Thistle. A number of amendments and proposals were put forward — including by Palios — but none were accepted.
In the end, and amid complaints of a lack of leadership from the EFL, a majority voted to curtail the season on a points-per-game basis, with promotion, relegation and play-offs still active.
Tranmere were relegated by 0.04pt. Palios has spoken of ‘unreturned calls’ from other chairmen as he sought to make his case.
‘I have great difficulty with the fable of the football family,’ added the one-time Tranmere midfielder. ‘This has shown it doesn’t exist.
‘I said that clubs were voting for the marginal risk of being adversely affected next season because there could be an extra spot for relegation — against the racing certainty of what has already been acknowledged as an injustice for us.
‘You are doing it on the basis of the league being shut down for financial reasons. And we get stuck in severe financial jeopardy because of that.
‘All that stuff I would imagine is very much four-square with Partick Thistle and Hearts.’
Palios argues that the straight points-per-game (PPG) method used to demote his club and their Scottish counterparts is flawed.
Having initially sought no relegations — as has happened at some non-league levels in England and would have been the outcome of league reconstruction in the SPFL — he put forward a variant.
Crunching numbers, the chartered accountant found an average margin of error of roughly five per cent between calculating PPG at this point in a season and how it looked at the end of a campaign.
Tranmere argued only teams who would definitely stay in relegation positions when that margin was applied should even be considered for the drop, believing it would be ‘fairer, have more sporting integrity, and would inflict the least financial damage on clubs at a time of extraordinary difficulty’.
Reflecting on the campaign being called, Palios said: ‘I don’t know the regulations in Scotland but in our case there were no regulations to allow for this. So you have to change them mid-season, which is a pretty serious thing to do.
‘Every football person understands you can have runs of matches. We husbanded our resources, adjusted in the window and were having a great second half of the season. We had won our last three games, all away.
‘I suggested looking at performance at this stage of the season against actual outcomes. It was to cover all the things that could happen towards the end of the season.
‘If you did it in our league as a bar chart, you would see Coventry were away and no one could touch them. You would see that Rotherham could be overhauled by seven or eight clubs, that we could probably overhaul five clubs and that the two at the bottom couldn’t get close.
‘It was a visual representation of what football people could see.’
Football people are no longer in charge of the situation in Scotland. How their legal counterparts now proceed will be noticed far beyond the confines of the SPFL.