Until clubs realise self-interest is a form of self-harm for the game, only one group is going to profit from the row: The lawyers
Right now, it’s every man and woman for themselves
No one really expects this to be a Eureka moment
THE rulebook of the SFA contains a line guaranteed to prompt stifled laughter.
Article 5.1 (f) warns all clubs and officials to ‘behave towards the Scottish FA and other members with the utmost good faith’.
Good faith? Right now you wouldn’t leave your phone on the Hampden boardroom table to take a toilet break. There’s more good faith in the room at the Satanists’ annual conference.
Coronavirus has got teams across Europe looking out for No 1 while cursing rivals for doing exactly the same. But here in Scotland, the self-interest reduces France and Belgium to the status of Andorra.
The relegation of Hearts and Partick Thistle by committee is clearly unfair. In Thistle’s case, it’s an affront to decency.
During a world pandemic, no club should suffer unnecessary hardship if a season can’t be finished. Morally, the Premiership
should have expanded to 14 teams to prevent a needless, bitter legal spat.
But Covid-19 has shattered the illusion of Jock Tamson’s bairns. Right now, it’s every man and woman for themselves.
One minute, Hearts and Thistle are occupying the moral high ground to the sound of violins. The next, they’re grappling around in a mud bath to the din of thrash metal guitars.
Serving legal papers on three clubs in a quest to quash their promotions. Suing the league for £10million as if they think they’ve actually missed out on this season’s Champions League.
Muttering dark threats about holding up the kick-off of the new season and wrecking that new £125m broadcasting deal with Sky Sports.
So much for cuddly, houmousdipping, wouldn’t-hurt-a-fly Partick Thistle. So much for Ann Budge accepting relegation if that’s what the football community wanted.
Hearts and Thistle, it turns out, can be just as vindictive as the clubs who sent them down in the first place. Just as motivated by self-interest as the rivals they spent weeks painting as rapacious, blood-thirsty vampires.
At least by turning their guns on Dundee United, Raith Rovers and Cove Rangers, the duo have dropped the pretence that their self-interest ever stemmed from a kinder, better place.
They’re no longer fighting to prevent the hardship of distressed clubs. They’re adding to it by trying to deny three teams promotion. But criticising football clubs for acting in their own selfinterest is like querying the urge to eat, sleep and breathe. It’s a basic survival instinct. A tribal urge.
And who doubts that, placed in the same sinking boat, every other club would act precisely the same way?
Premiership teams rejected reconstruction because they calculated that it might help Hearts, Inverness Caley Thistle and Partick plenty, but wouldn’t do much for them.
After furloughing staff and deferring the wages of players, they crunched the numbers and found that the potential cost of falling into the bottom eight after the split could be £250,000 to £300,000 a year.
In a 14-team league, struggling sides would get just two games against Celtic and Rangers.
Under the current format, they’re guaranteed three and might even get two at home if they play their cards right. And 6,000 away fans paying £30 a pop is £180k in the bank.
Teams finishing in positions seven to nine would suffer a drop in home crowds and hospitality from unappealing, meaningless games. And Inverness coming up? For teams in the central belt, the £5k cost of another trip to the Highlands is one they can live without.
Two months ago, Hibs CEO Leeann Dempster warned of a financial ‘meteor’ heading for Scottish football if fans couldn’t return to grounds quickly. Right now, it’s crashing through the atmosphere and the burning shrapnel is heading for a stadium near you.
Aberdeen and Hibs want to cut player wages. The Easter Road side are also ready to mothball their youth academy and pay off the coaches. Motherwell have asked the SFA if all that expenditure needed to maintain a youth system is still strictly necessary to retain their ‘elite’ status in Club Academy Scotland.
With all this coming down the tracks, the men in charge of Premiership clubs asked themselves a blunt question.
Why should they risk losing even more money rearranging the deckchairs to bail out a Hearts hierarchy who squandered a small fortune on the hopeless Daniel Stendel and a set of players who won four league games out of 30?
If you’re Roy MacGregor at Ross County, or Steven Brown at St Johnstone, it might suit fine to have a club with a bigger budget out of the league next season. It’s less competition.
Does kicking one of the biggest and best supported clubs down into the Championship do much to improve the spectacle of the game? Of course not.
Clubs suing the backside off each other at huge expense only adds to the air of fiasco. With any luck, a messy court battle can still be avoided if clubs accept that enhanced parachute payments to Hearts, Partick Thistle and Stranraer are only fair.
But the ill feeling and rows? Unless the self-interest can be neutered and nullified, the next one will be along any minute.
No one seriously expects this to be a Eureka moment. No one thinks club chairmen will suddenly realise they’re blowing the game to smithereens and agree to let independent executives come in and run things as they see fit.
But they must see that a governance system which allows a private gang of clubs to make decisions based on what’s best for them rather than the game as a whole is a recipe for mediocrity.
When Ernie Walker or Jim Farry used to denounce sinners from a pulpit in Park Gardens, it drove football directors nuts. They eventually seized the reins of power in 1998 and haven’t let go since.
For 20-odd years, the greater good has been secondary to the prevailing mantra of ‘I’m all right Jack’.
And until clubs acknowledge that self-interest is actually a form of self-harm for the game at large, then there’s only one group who stand to profit from the rows it creates. The lawyers.