WE’RE HEADING FOR EXTRA TIME
Dundee keep Scottish football guessing as Thistle insist original ballot should stand
IT TOOK six days for John Nelms to clarify that Dundee’s indecision was final. Be it by luck or cynical calculation, the Dens Park club hold the fate of SPFL season 2019/20 in their hands. And, in a bland statement at 5pm last night, they dragged the suspense out a little longer.
‘Over the past few days, we have entered into various positive discussions with reconstruction at the forefront of these,’ read a few sparse lines on the club website.
‘Given our discussions and considering all aspects, we don’t feel we are in a position to comment further on the resolution that was put forward.’
The clubs who voted ‘no’ to an SPFL recommendation to call the Scottish Championship, League One and League Two now — and the Premiership later — complained of being asked to offer their answer within 48 hours.
In contrast, Dundee have been given four days to change their mind, indulged by a league keen that they should come to the ‘right’ decision.
Not everyone agrees that it is the right decision, of course, and there’s a growing suspicion among clubs who oppose the resolution that Nelms is being offered more than just time to vote ‘yes’.
In response to that, the SPFL say, ‘prove it’. And, as yet, nobody has. Nevertheless, the resolution has begun to look discredited.
The expectation that the Dark Blues would perform a U-turn and vote ‘yes’ yesterday afternoon came to nothing when Partick Thistle’s threat of legal action threw a spanner in the works.
One of the clubs who stand to lose most if the resolution passes, the Firhill side employed a QC to look at the process and concluded that: ‘the original vote by Dundee FC was cast in line with the SPFL’s own rules and must stand, meaning that the resolution falls.’
There’s a body of opinion that Dundee voted ‘no’ and should now be held to that.
The reasons the SPFL wanted the Championship club to park their original reservations and vote ‘yes’ are a matter of record.
The league wanted to distribute end-of-season prize money early this week. They wanted to stop clubs going bust. But the way in which the SPFL have gone about delivering a botched vote with a moveable deadline has done nothing to appease their critics and opponents. The polar opposite is the case.
If Dundee turn around now and vote ‘yes’, the recriminations and accusations will run for years. Trust in the governance of Scottish football is already low. If the conclusion of this season is seen as a discredited stitch-up to hand Celtic the title and relegate Hearts and Partick Thistle the bitterness will linger on and on.
Partick Thistle are already threatening legal action before a Nelms decision. Hearts have threatened likewise if they are relegated while Rangers seem certain to follow if he eventually comes out and says ‘yes’.
Whatever the legal rights and wrongs, there’s a moral case now for putting the resolution out of its misery and admitting defeat. The problem with that is the lack of a palatable plan B.
Right now, the Scottish game has no good options. The task is to find the least bad option for a group of clubs who plainly can’t stand one another. While the SPFL resolution is imperfect, the alternatives also come with issues.
A Rangers request to the league to make loans available to struggling clubs without linking the matter to final-season placings has backing from Hearts, Inverness and Partick. The truth is that the SPFL have always considered requests for loans set against end-of-season payments to struggling clubs.
But when they loaned cash to Gretna in 2008, they lost every penny when the former Scottish Cup finalists went bust. Understandably, there’s a reluctance to repeat the experience.
The risk to the SPFL of loaning £9.3million to 42 clubs would be substantial and fall on the shoulders of directors.
The fear is that lending money without proper credit checks to potless football clubs could lead to another Gretna — and then some. While the SPFL could deal with the loss of cash advanced to one club 12 years ago, there’s a far greater risk in lending to many at the beginning of a lockdown recession.
Hearts owner Ann Budge wants a form of temporary league reconstruction incorporating a 14-team Premiership to bring clubs together. The thinking is that ‘no club should be worse off, either financially or in a sporting sense, as a result of any resolution’.
A sound idea but convincing clubs to agree on a reconstruction plan is notoriously difficult.
Adding two teams to the top tier means the Premiership increasing its share of the prize money from 83 per cent now to 86 per cent next season. Stenhousemuir chairman McMenemy is a strong advocate of trickling more money down to struggling teams and believes that any plan which took £1m away from the Championship, League One and League Two would be soundly rejected by the lower leagues.
‘I think quite a few people would have an issue with that,’ he told
Sportsmail. ‘At the minute, everyone is thinking of the simple number of teams. No one is thinking of how that actually works in terms of the distribution model.
‘If they are going to add two more teams to the Premiership, the main way they could do it is by drawing the line two places down the distribution network.
‘If that’s the case, it’s £530,000 for winning the Championship and £480k for finishing second. So, that’s an extra £1million to the Premiership straight away from the lower leagues.’
Premiership clubs could agree to spread the cash of 12 teams among 14. McMenemy sees issues with that as well.
‘The obvious thing to do is to spread the money given to the top 12 now to 14 teams,’ he said.
‘But that might mean a voluntary agreement amongst the 12 clubs to give up money and I can’t see them agreeing that at all.’
A 14-team Premiership might win over current ‘no’ voters such as Hearts, Inverness and Partick Thistle. But the words and actions of recent days have strained relations to breaking point.
And Sportsmail understands a band of seven ‘yes’ voting teams in the Championship are unlikely to do anything which rewards Inverness or Partick Thistle for the role both teams have played in seeing off a resolution now becoming increasingly hard to justify or support.
If Dundee turn around now and vote ‘yes’, recriminations will run for years