Haughty Petrie needs more than a Trinny and Susannah makeover to alter his image
THE SFA don’t need a PR guru to make a new man of president Rod Petrie. They need Trinny and Susannah.
Back in the noughties, the blunt-talking, moob-groping presenters of the BBC’S
What Not To Wear shamed the wardrobes — and bodies — of middle-aged lost causes up and down the country.
And it wouldn’t take much to transform the image of the great unloved enigma of Scottish football.
The famous ’tache would go right away. A pair of skinny jeans, a designer shirt and one of Liam Gallagher’s parkas would make all the difference.
It would never happen, of course. Petrie is most comfortable in buttoned up grey suits. And that’s kind of the problem.
It feels like years since the Hibs chairman loosened his tie. Years since he stopped caring that people find him so unapproachable and distant he should have his own postcode in the Gobi Desert.
Four years ago, the Easter Road chief ran for a place on the board of the SPFL and barely won a vote.
Since hiring Leanne Dempster as chief executive, he no longer has to engage with Hibs fans. He certainly doesn’t talk to journalists.
People think they have an idea of what kind of man he is. Yet the truth is that few of us actually do.
SFA chief executive Ian Maxwell says the new president is actually ‘one of the most misunderstood men in Scottish football’. Petrie, he insists, has a great sense of humour. He’s the smartest man in any room he occupies.
A former managing director of an investment bank, there’s clearly some truth in that.
Yet saying he hides it well is like saying Boris Johnson has an unruly barnet.
The SFA’s plan is to give Petrie a makeover. To ‘humanise’ him.
The fact they have to do that might suggest he’s not really the man for the job in the first place.
If they have to change anything, it should be the ridiculous system that shoehorned him into office in the first place. To become president of the SFA there’s no need to be charismatic. No need to win friends and influence people. No requirement at all to be remotely in touch with what fans think or bring a vision to the table.
Hang around the lounges of Hampden shaking hands and eating vol-au-vents long enough and the big chair comes around eventually.
And a second term? That’s a racing certainty. Someone else
can stand, of course, but no one ever does.
There can’t be anyone outside Hampden who thinks that’s an acceptable state of affairs.
Scottish football is supposed to be a multi-million-pound modern business; not an anachronistic bowling club.
The president who shows no willingness to engage with or talk to his own paying customers seems unlikely to deliver the radical thinking the SFA need.
Others on the board might, of course. But right now everything the new president does is viewed through a prism of suspicion and negativity.
For the SFA to have one commander they couldn’t stick in front of a microphone was human. Two just looks careless.
Alan McRae was more influential at UEFA than anyone gave him credit for. Yet he was so prone to public gaffes, every press conference he did finished with a bucket and mop.
Petrie is a good deal smarter than that. Yet here we are again; back in another silent movie.
If ever there was a time to address the media, it was day one of the new man’s presidency.
It shouldn’t have been Maxwell addressing journalists in midweek — it should have been Petrie.
Mercifully, there are people advising the SFA who see that the situation has to change. It’s not enough for colleagues to
say how witty, intelligent and humble El Presidente is. He has to show he’s a people person.
The SFA won’t soften his image with a sharp haircut, a shiny suit or a pair of Gap chinos.
They need to lever him in a chair beside Tam Cowan and Stuart Cosgrove on BBC Scotland’s Off The Ball.
They need to get him round a table with journalists in a new spirit of perestroika.
It’s bad enough that none of us had a say in the election of President Petrie.
If we’re stuck with him for the next four years, the very least he can do is talk to the oiks from time to time.