Beginning from Year Zero could be the only way out of this pit
WHAT an unholy, dispiriting mess. This is Scottish football in 2017. Trapped in the nine circles of hell, the row that shalt never end. And it’s embarrassing. This is a crippled, broken game, short on cash, low on quality, devoid of long-term thinking and struggling to stay relevant in the modern world.
And where are we? With civil war breaking out at the top and the kind of joint leadership, consensus between stakeholders, demanded in that last review by Henry McLeish seemingly discarded in a ditch somewhere.
Forget the matter of stripping titles from Rangers. It’s not going to happen.
There’s a wider issue. As mentioned in Celtic’s statement yesterday, it is about ‘a failure of leadership’.
Not just into EBTs alone, though. It’s about the way our national game is being governed and run from top to bottom. The way we have been allowed to descend to this sorry state. And why the whole organisation of Scottish football needs razed to the ground to let us start from scratch.
Beginning from Year Zero really looks like the only way we are going to get out of the pit.
‘Closure’, as Celtic put it, is a nonstarter.
The Scottish FA ripping off punters to watch a national team that hasn’t been near a major finals in nearly 20 years can be part of the discussion. This is no time for its chief executive Stewart Regan to be bickering with people on Twitter about it, though.
He has a far more pressing fight on his hands. One to keep his job.
And one to keep the SFA above water amid assaults from many angles.
When he is admitting himself in letters to Peter Lawwell — a new form of remote warfare — that there is ‘a lack of trust among many of the stakeholders in the game in Scotland’, you really do have a problem.
An independent review in those circumstances would be a good idea, all right. And you can make it as wideranging as you like. Far wider than Celtic are demanding.
EBTs, UEFA licences, Five-Way Agreements and tax cases can all be part of it. The more you hear of what went on inside Rangers in the decade or so before administration and liquidation, the more you wince.
The failed prosecution against Craig Whyte did a pretty good job of identifying the villains. With the right terms of reference, maybe even some Rangers fans would welcome a forensic look into how their club’s fate was decided. They certainly had plenty of complaints at the time.
This doesn’t have to end at the gates of Ibrox, though. It shouldn’t be about nailing Rangers to the ground.
We can talk about how some ropey Russian-born geezer from Lithuania was allowed to destroy an institution the size of Hearts. We can talk about Dundee. And Motherwell. And Livingston. And Airdrieonians. And Dunfermline. And all the other clubs who went bust. Sometimes, more than once.
We can talk about how Club Academy Scotland has chewed up and spat out our children and created nothing good. How Brian McClair was given the job of kickstarting ‘Project Brave’ (yes, all a little quiet on that front, isn’t it?) and left 17 months later with everyone conceding he should never have been given the job in the first place.
We can talk about why we still have two separate organisations running the game in this country and why they now appear to be at each other’s throats. Former SPFL chairman Ralph Topping’s remarks in March about the SFA containing ‘blazers and bowling club committee men’ now starts to look like something of an early salvo.
He was right about the modern-day lunacy of a body in which simply hanging around for a number of years will see you rise, unchallenged, to the role of president. Topping, of course, was on the SFA board. So was Lawwell until recently. He still serves on the Professional Game Board. There are divided loyalties everywhere, a tangled web of hidden agendas. Former St Mirren chairman Stewart Gilmour went as far, earlier this year, as to state that it is Lawwell who is really running the game in this country. Has Lawwell simply decided that Regan has outlived his usefulness? Do those ‘secret’ letters between them being published, a most unusual move, point at something else? What is the realpolitik here?
Maybe Gilmour should give evidence to this review, too, even though it would make The Chilcot Inquiry seem short and to the point.
You see, it is sometimes hard to know who thinks what about whom. The board of the SPFL claims to be demanding an independent review into Rangers on behalf of all 42 clubs. Yet, Aberdeen chairman Stewart Milne and Kilmarnock majority shareholder Billy Bowie seem to want to consign it to the past.
It can look at how the Scottish Cup final can descend into a riot with players being attacked on the pitch and little happens within the game itself because of self-interest and a refusal to take responsibility.
It’s about the clubs, say Regan and his SPFL counterpart Neil Doncaster (left). These two must earn upwards of £500,000 between them, but bat everything back to the clubs as their get-out. Why do we need them, then? Certainly, why do we need to pay them that money?
To bring in revenue? The Scottish Premier went without a sponsor for years.
Barry Hearn, a man with a background in revitalising dying sports, turned up at Hampden and insisted he’d sack the lot of them.
Doncaster should not hide in the shadows as Regan burns under the spotlight.
Sadly, this must all go back to the Rangers saga and the words of the late Raith chairman Turnbull Hutton.
‘We are being bullied, rail-roaded and lied to by the Scottish FA and the SPL,’ he said, following attempts to have newco Rangers placed into the old First Division. ‘What kind of a game are we running? Corrupt.’
Maybe we should have started over back then. There are understood to be private discussions ongoing within the game to that effect now with talk of one new organisation being formed.
It sounds good, in principle. The same faces remain at the top of the chain, though.
They have to go. More independent people must be brought in. And a watchful eye must be cast by all of us on those who would attempt to grab power in the vacuum.