THEY CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH
CORONAVIRUS CRISIS Politicians must grasp our game won’t survive without public money
THE biggest problem lies in getting politicians to recognise the truth. Yes, yes, so many punchlines, so little time. Let’s put it another way, then. Scottish football has cried wolf — or screamed blood-curdling warnings of Armageddon, if you want to be more accurate — so often in recent years that those holding the public purse strings aren’t inclined to believe even the most apocalyptic of warnings.
So what’s it going to take? An entire senior competition deciding to simply lock the gates and come back when Covid is but a memory? A club going out of existence after a century of muddling along?
One of those doomsday scenarios is already on the agenda, with the Highland League openly touting the idea of ‘mothballing’ for an entire season. At least.
And, unless we protect our national game from a crisis that keeps on kicking, kicking and kicking without pause or promise of respite, individual teams rooted in Scottish communities will have no option but to call in the administrators.
That applies not merely to the lower leagues, either. Within the Premiership itself, there are clubs no longer barely getting by — but bleeding money on a daily basis. It cannot go on. Without paying fans coming through the turnstiles, the game in Scotland runs at a loss.
If you can force yourself to revisit the Dark Ages that fell upon the country’s most popular sport between lockdown in March and the resumption of domestic competition last month, you’ll recall that Sportsmail quoted more than one football finance expert willing to tell it straight.
Faced with a choice between playing an entire season behind closed doors and simply ‘mothballing’ our elite club competition and returning (hopefully) for the 2021-22 campaign late next summer, the money men could make virtually no case for carrying on regardless.
The new Sky deal that kicked in on August 1 changed that for Premiership clubs, of course. Should they be forced to repay/live without even a portion of the cash pumped into the game by the broadcaster, that would be a genuine extinction-level event for some.
If putting an entire competition into cold storage for a year held more appeal to lowerleague clubs during shutdown, meanwhile, the sheer wrongness of it — what’s a football club if there is no team playing games? — turned them away from the idea of volunteering for an extended nuclear winter.
In which case, the argument goes, they have to find a way to make the model work. Cut your cloth accordingly. That’s the easy answer, especially if your world view holds that all footballers are overpaid, over-indulged and overdue a reckoning.
Honestly? It’s exhausting having to debunk the same old arguments every time some backbencher takes a pop at football.
For starters, the economics of the Scottish game — even the big spenders have to turn a profit in the transfer market — don’t leave a lot of room for cuts. And trimming budgets wouldn’t stop at Celtic not spending £5million on a striker or Rangers sitting on the £3.5m set aside for a playmaker.
In real terms, it means Premiership clubs scrapping their entire academy system, with all the knock-on effects that has on the standard of players coming through.
Imagine the impact that would have not only on the top-end product but, in due course, the national team.
If Steve Clarke guides Scotland into the delayed Euro 2020 finals, every politician in the country will be queuing up for photoshoots at Hampden. Yet ask them to subsidise the production line that makes such glory days possible and, well, suddenly they have an urgent meeting elsewhere.
The case for taxpayer support is being made in discussions between the SPFL-SFA Joint Response Group and the Scottish Government. But it was made clear, early in discussions between sporting bodies and elected ministers, that none of this is a priority at Holyrood. And it quickly became obvious that making public demands would be counter-productive.
Nice exemption you’ve got there, allowing footballers to train and play in a ‘bubble’. Shame if something happened to it.
The footballing authorities did whatever it took to get permission just to play again. But they always believed that, somewhere down the line, fans would return. The Championship, League One and League Two delayed their kick-offs until mid-October specifically in the expectation of having socially-distanced crowds back on match day.
If that’s not going to happen, there must be a case for public money propping up an industry worth £200m a year to the national economy. The one thing working against those making that pitch? Scottish football’s reputation for resilience.
It may not be unsinkable but, goodness, it’s seen off a lot of icebergs in the past couple of decades alone. It’s tough to convince sceptics, then, that a sport so often kept afloat by the fans — including those in boardrooms — will ever go under.
Sure, we’ll just go back to the days of collection buckets outside the ground, asking punters to save the Rovers/Jags/ Dee… Oh, right. There won’t be anyone at the grounds.
The truth? Those with the largest support will always find a way to scrape by. Fans of those clubs will not give a damn about what happens to the minnows.
If you’ve never heard the abstract argument about there being ‘too many clubs’ in Scotland, you’ve not been paying attention. Let some wee teams fall and who’d miss them? Here’s the problem with that thinking. Plenty of elite players have spent time down among those ‘uneconomic’ also-rans.
If it wasn’t for Queen’s Park, Andy Robertson would have been lost to football. The Scotland captain has a book out about Liverpool’s title-winning season that borrows its title from a popular terracing anthem: ‘Now You’re Gonna Believe Us.’
The survival of our national game depends on getting Nicola Sturgeon (above) and the Holyrood elite to believe that even this most durable of industries won’t survive without a little help from on high.