Wishaw Juniors back new league structure
Clubs can benefit, believes Beltane Park secretary
Wishaw Juniors secretary Robert Watson believes new changes to the Junior league set-up will benefit the Beltane Park side.
It was announced last week at the Scottish Junior Football Association ( SJFA) AGM, that the league structure would be changing.
Clubs voted in favour of the proposed changes which will begin next season – the 2018/19 campaign.
The current Super League structure of a 12-team Premier Division, 14-team First Division and regionalised feeder leagues will be scrapped in favour of four divisions of 16.
Clubs voted four to one in favour of the changes and taking a leaf out of the professional leagues, the new divisions will be called the Premiership, Championship, League One and League Two.
Of the 12 teams in the Premier Division this season, 10 will be guaranteed a spot in the new Premiership with the bottom two facing a play-off.
The top four teams in the First Division will be automatically promoted with fifth and sixth playing-off against the bottom two Premier Division sides.
There will be no automatic relegation from the First Divison either, with the top three in the Ayrshire District League and the Central District First – Wishaw’s division – promoted to the new Championship.
The bottom two in the First Division will play off against the teams finishing fourth in the Ayrshire District League and the Central District First Division.
Fifth, sixth and seventh in the Ayrshire District League will join the two play- off losers and 11 Central District sides in the new League One with the rest being placed in League Two.
Wishaw secretary Robert Watson believes the changes were a long time coming and welcomes them.
He said: “The proposals have been discussed for a while and a group of clubs were working on different types of changes.
“We very much support the new set- up because it will help stabilise a lot of clubs and hopefully allow teams to plan ahead when the changes come in next season.
“It also consolidates the different divisons and makes things a lot fairer now.
“In past years, Ayrshire teams may have benefitted from the promotion and relegation but now everyone is on the same playing field and it’s a much fairer system.
“We’ll now have more league games going from 26 to 30 but this is something we welcome.”
Speculation has been raised that one of the Junior cup competitions may be scrapped in the wake of these proposals but a decision will be made by the SJFA in due course.
However, Robert believes the most important thing is that the Junior game is showing forward thinking with the announcement of the new divisions.
He said: “This is a big step forward for everyone at Junior level.
“Because of the size of Wishaw we believe we have a lot to benefit from this as hopefully some of the games will be able to bring in more people.”
Wishaw Juniors returned to pre-season training at the end of last month, for more from the club follow @WishawJuniorsFC on Twitter.