BACK IN LIMBO... AND FEARING THE WORST

DISAPPOINTMENT seems to wait until you drop your guard before it sneaks up and kicks you right where it hurts.

That was the feeling this week when it was all but confirmed that we won’t be seeing any football fans in stadiums anytime soon.

As I cast my mind back to the discussions we had a few months ago about restarting football, we all feared that this could be the case. The bleak outlook back in the spring and early summer heavily influenced our thinking and many fellow club directors all agreed it would be unlikely that we’d see our grounds filled with supporters for many months to come.

However, as we made it through July and August, it seemed that the nation was making good progress against this invisible virus. We thought that maybe we would see supporters back in time for the leagues below the Premiership kicking off in mid-October.

We started reassembling our squads and the infrastructure needed to play professional competitive football. We dug into the very generous funding that we had received from James Anderson to ensure our clubs were Covid-ready and as safe an environment as possible.

Test events were scheduled and seemed to pass without issue. Whilst there was always a sense of uncertainty in discussions and planning, there was also a feeling of a limited normality returning. Then we hit September and it all took a turn for the worse.

So in many ways, it was no surprise this week when the First Minister announced a series of new restrictions. However, behind the scenes, where the small print that underpins Government decision making is relayed, we found out that there would be no further test events for football fans in grounds.

This of course means that the timetable for the eventual return of fans in all grounds is being pushed back, too. To make matters even worse, there was no new timetable offered. This is ominous. This all but confirms that there won’t be fans in grounds anytime soon, if at all this year.

As much as we had always known that this was a possibility, now it is real. We are weeks away from the return of competitive football, and we now know we are to fund, host and stage these events effectively for free.

It’s no secret that in Scottish football, around 50 per cent of the income comes through gate receipts and match day income. That’s now gone. It is also widely known that a figure of around 83 per cent of all broadcast and sponsorship income that comes into the SPFL is immediately swallowed up by the 12 Premiership clubs, leaving the remaining 17 per cent to be divided amongst the remaining 30 clubs.

In terms of costs, the single biggest expense unsurprisingly is the players’ wage bill — and the wages need to be paid. In order to stage games, you must continue to have the full operation behind it in terms of training, facilities, personnel, and medical, safety and the administrative function.

In other words, you have lost the overwhelming majority of your income, but you still have all the costs. You don’t need to be a business genius to know that this in unworkable.

At Stenhousemuir, we predict we could lose around £130,000. Whilst we are actively exploring every possible avenue to find new ways of making money, in the current Covid crisis, our options are limited. If you throw regular Covid testing in to the mix, then the losses increase to around £230,000. How can lower league clubs be expected to absorb losses on a scale like this? We simply cannot.

Where do we go from here? In England, there may be some financial support from Government, so the Scottish Government could do likewise and support clubs through the crisis. There are sound economic arguments for doing so. To start with, there are thousands of jobs across clubs in Scottish football that could be saved.

However, there is no love lost between the Scottish Government and Scottish football, so we simply cannot rely on this.

The other option is to give clubs the opportunity to generate income. This would be by allowing fans into grounds in limited numbers. As for the science, the Government has repeatedly told us there is a significantly reduced chance of catching the virus outdoors. They have backed this up by allowing groups of up to 200 fans at live outdoor events, with the exception of football or rugby.

As it stands, clubs are once again in limbo. We are due to start playing competitively in a couple of weeks’ time, but we don’t know what restrictions may be in place. We do know that we won’t have fans for the start of the season, but whether this is permanent remains to be decided.

It doesn’t look good. Whilst we at Stenhousemuir have worked hard to build our club financially over a number of years, we face wiping out every penny we have earned and going into debt on a season that might start, pause, start again, and then eventually be abandoned.

Whilst I’m confident we will survive, I know there will be a great many who won’t.

We face wiping out every penny we have earned