‘My conscience is clear’, former Scottish football chief tells SPL
A CHIEF executive of the former Scottish Premier League has warned that football clubs in Scotland are on the edge of a financial precipice.
Roger Mitchell, who was in charge of the SPL during one of the most turbulent times in Scottish football and later wanted to buy Celtic, says in his new book that key funding streams are under threat, fans are changing their habits and there will be “winners and losers” in the coming years.
In Sport’s Perfect Storm, Mr Mitchell lifts the lid on what happened in 2002 when he led a bid to create a go-it-alone SPL TV model to challenge Sky, and he delves into the “murky world of finance” as he unpicks the various funding relationships that previously worked for football and potentially catastrophic challenges ahead such as piracy.
He said that while sport and the world of finance are increasingly crossing paths, there is often a “mismatch”.
The chartered accountant from Glasgow, who operates a consultancy based in Italy, said his “conscience is clear” when he looks back to his SPL days, that he no longer plans to buy his favourite club Celtic, and that he has “made his peace with Scottish football”.
In the book, Mr Mitchell also talks about his time with Virgin Music in the “last great days of the music industry” before digitalisation, which he likens to the “waterfall” many sports clubs are now looking over.
He said Scottish football has “continued to get very angry about its local little problems and missed the fact it has become marginalised”.
He also said: “Working in the sports industry you see more and more connection with the world of finance and that is a mismatch of understanding in many ways.
“Finance looks at sport as another asset to be investing into and I don’t think sport is that necessarily. It is a community asset, a society asset.
“It is about the difficulty of the sports industry just now and how we get out of it. That is very, very complex, because we are facing as an industry three or four big macro changes.
“One is that younger audiences want something different, not the sport that we grew up with. Secondly, the governance of sport is probably no longer fit for purpose and needs to get out of the way it was 150 years ago, because it still operates the same way.
“The media sector that has financed sport for 30 years is changing, because the old subscription model just doesn’t work any more, people go direct to streaming or worse, piracy. That is really going to hurt us as an industry. You have got Saudi Arabia coming in that wants to do with sport what its own agenda is.
“All these things are what I believe is the end of a 30-year bull market.”
Mr Mitchell also said: “As far as Scotland is concerned and Scottish football is concerned, they need to look beyond the end of their nose and see what is happening in the world and understand how they want to play in it.”
He said so far the response to the book has been positive. “I have been overwhelmed. We have had two or three different audiences for the book. One of them is the young people coming into the world of business maybe from a financial background, and I wanted to give them an idea of a finance book that was more easily digestible.
“The second one is the people in sport who maybe the book sometimes is rather unkind to. Privately they have come to me and said that the book has been an eye-opener, it has been what’s needed.
“Big finance, private equity and investment banks, there’s a couple of chapters in there about the murky world of finance and it is uncovering a little bit about how they operate in the shadows and even there, I’ve had big private equity companies coming on and saying we would love to work with you, you have let us understand what is happening in sport.”
He added: “There’s a lot of insight. My story at the Scottish Premier League.
“The chapter on SPL television in the book – there was 12 teams in my league at the time, 10 were very behind that idea, which was a risky idea, it was a radical idea, it has been proven to be correct. Celtic and Rangers for their own reasons said no to that.
“My conscience is clear. I think a lot of what has happened in sport and the media industry and direct to consumer thinking has all proven to be true. So I think people will find that an interesting read, to see what happened back in 2002.
“And compare it to where they are today with their Netflix or
Apple TV and Disney Plus, I think they’ll find it very interesting.”
Mr Mitchell, who also runs the sports business podcast Are You Not Entertained?, continued: “So that is why I would recommend the book to people. It’s an agent provocateur a little bit, to start thinking beyond what happens with the referees on a Saturday.”
He also said he would like to see “more ambition” from Celtic.
Sport’s Perfect Storm, Amazon, £22.73.