Cup replays axed to help ease fixture congestion

SCOTTISH Cup replays were scrapped without a single objection at yesterday’s SFA annual general meeting as clubs agreed to a request for more flexibility in the football calendar.

SFA chief executive Ian Maxwell revealed that members had unanimously agreed to drop the need for replays — an emergency measure already imposed on the Covid-squeezed season just finished — from the fourth round onwards.

And he said the hope of teams going far in the Champions League, Europa League and Europa Conference League made it vital to build in some free midweeks.

‘It’s important from a fixture calendar perspective,’ explained Maxwell.

‘When you get to the latter end of the season, traditionally, you’ve always had one or two games off with the weather, depending on how that goes.

‘If clubs continue to do well in Europe and are in that beyond Christmas, that condenses the calendar.

‘We’ve got five teams in Europe and it would be great if all five are involved beyond Christmas.

‘It gives the league flexibility in scheduling. It might not seem a lot but it’s three midweeks we’d need to keep aside for a replay and it gives them a chance to schedule fixtures. It’s important the game helps each other out.

‘It was unopposed and nobody spoke (against). Rod (Petrie, SFA president) asked if there was anything to say and nobody said anything. It was a straightforward AGM.’

The SFA annual review revealed that Covid had taken a chunk of almost 30 per cent off their annual revenues, year on year, with the latest figures showing the national association taking in £27.7million.

Maxwell admitted that all of football had taken a hit during the past 18 months, with the absence of fans obviously a key factor in plummeting incomes.

But he said the SFA had worked hard to continue its regular distribution of funding to clubs, saying: ‘We’ve tried to mitigate it. We had staff furloughed, we took advantage of business support schemes and tried to make sure we ran as tight a ship as possible.

‘We’ve kept the distributions from a club perspective how we wanted them to be — because the last thing they need is us saying we’re reducing things.’

Explaining how lockdown had affected football across the country, Maxwell said there were already signs of the game bouncing back.

‘It’s not so much from a financial perspective,’ he said. ‘It’s more the fact we couldn’t get on pitches, get people on courses and get people playing. That’s had as big an impact.

‘There was a worry you might lose people from the game and the habit of playing football.

‘The reverse has been true and everyone putting on football now is running out of capacity, which is great to see.’