Shaping Things to Come

[amms 0]

Not really. You could have 10 teams full of Peles, but if they are ten teams with nothing to play for, you're still going to end up with a league of 18 where most have nothing to play for, for a large part of the season. The idea died a death 30 years ago for a reason. Even back then when football was the only game in town (sic) people were turning off from it in droves. To reinstate an 18 team league would be to simply hasten the demise of the game.

 

Times change RPB. Stadia were a disgrace, violence was rife, indeed it was expected and great players were plentiful. None of those things applies today. Familiarity has bred contempt.

[Zappa 0]

Not really. You could have 10 teams full of Peles, but if they are ten teams with nothing to play for, you're still going to end up with a league of 18 where most have nothing to play for, for a large part of the season. The idea died a death 30 years ago for a reason. Even back then when football was the only game in town (sic) people were turning off from it in droves. To reinstate an 18 team league would be to simply hasten the demise of the game.

 

An 18 team top flight is exactly what we need in this country and surveys which properly polled fans before the SPFL reconstruction took place showed that larger leagues were by far the most popular option.

 

The whole "nothing to play for" concept is a total and utter myth as well because most clubs, most players and most fans simply want to win football matches game by game, get entertained if possible, go home happy and ultimately finish as high up in the league and cup competitions as possible.

 

Come a certain point of the season there will always be teams in the middle of the table who can't get into one of the top spots and who are clear of the relegation zone, but those teams still have several things to play for including prize money for their club and winning games for their fans and themselves as professional sportsmen.

[The Real PapaBear 0]

The top flight in Scotland started the season knowing who had won the league and who was getting relegated, stretching it to February sounds like a dream. Plus that didn't happen every season, often the championship was still being being contested right up until the end.

 

You make my point for me with regard LOI attendances. The standard of their league is on a par with any Scottish side outside Celtic currently, yet interest remains sparse.

 

I'm not sure I fllow you here, Amms. You seem to be suggesting that the LoI is a league to which we should look in terms of quality. Yet, the LoI is a 12 team league, same as ours whereas you'd have us move to an 18 team set up?

[The Real PapaBear 0]

An 18 team top flight is exactly what we need in this country and surveys which properly polled fans before the SPFL reconstruction took place showed that larger leagues were by far the most popular option.

 

The whole "nothing to play for" concept is a total and utter myth as well because most clubs, most players and most fans simply want to win football matches game by game, get entertained if possible, go home happy and ultimately finish as high up in the league and cup competitions as possible.

 

Come a certain point of the season there will always be teams in the middle of the table who can't get into one of the top spots and who are clear of the relegation zone, but those teams still have several things to play for including prize money for their club and winning games for their fans and themselves as professional sportsmen.

 

An 18 team league is exactly what we don't need in this country. We had it before and people were bored rigid before the snow had melted.

You're right that surveys of fans have indeed showed a desire for change, but then as we saw last year, surveys of fans can show nothing more than people bumping their gums and claiming to want one thing but failing to act on what they say they want..

I think if you restricted the surveys to people who remember how dull it all was at the end of the old First Division, you'd get a different answer to that given by people who just want change - any change.

 

"Nothing to play for" is nor only not a myth it's a proven reality. Why do you think we changed it the first time round? Attendances were falling, people were bored and the game was dying a not-so-slow death.

 

Before the advent of the Premier division in the mid 70s attendances were plummeting. Despite the fact that we had a plethora of seriously top quality players playing in this country, fans were losing interest; People no longer wanted the ritual slaughter of an Airdrie or Falkirk or Ayr Utd when that fixture could be taken up by playing a much better Aberdeen or Hearts or Hibs. Ok, we played them four times, but so what? At least the games were more interesting than hammering Clydebank one week and Rbroath the next.

 

And the fans of other 'top' clubs had it worse than us. Hearts, to take an example, instead of having 6 big games a season now had 12 - and this shows in their attendances, which 10 years after the introduction of the Premier league had reached the levels of the 1950s and early 60s.

 

The split into top and bottom halves of a 12 team division is, imho, an excellent solution for a country of our size since it means that in a normal year, you'll have two fighting for the title and four fighting for European places in the top half. The bottom half will see at least 4 and possibly all 6 fighting relegation (given a two up two down with one play-off) scenario. This way every team has something to play for, and something for their fans to care about, for every game of the season - and as the season progresses, things become more interesting for all concerned, players, fans and media.

 

Fans don't care about prize money or whether they finish in 7th or 9th position - that's not going to get them off the sofa, away from the EPl on Sky Sports and into the stadiums. However, they will care about a 6 pointer relagation battle or a game that gets them closer to European football or about a match where they could damage either one of the OF.

[andy steel 0]

What I'm taking from this debate is that neither the 12 team nor the 18 team top league are going to cut the mustard; so, unless we can organise some kind of fresh competition with new opponents (a Euro league of some kind), essentially the game is just dying while trying out a variety of drugs to stave off the fateful day?

[The Real PapaBear 0]

What I'm taking from this debate is that neither the 12 team nor the 18 team top league are going to cut the mustard; so, unless we can organise some kind of fresh competition with new opponents (a Euro league of some kind), essentially the game is just dying while trying out a variety of drugs to stave off the fateful day?

 

Therein lies the nub of the problem. We are too small for a competitive 18 team league and a 12 team league sees us playing the same teams too often, so I think we either have to get creative with what we have, or go down the Euro league route. The big countries wouldn't be interested (at the moment anyway) and would we really care about winning a league with Feyenoord, Brann Bergen and Xamax Neuchatel?

 

The ideal scenario, to my way of thinking, is if we regard Europe as one big country (calm down ukippers) with Supra-national leagues down to division 4 say, and below division 4 you have your national leagues. So, we could find that Rangers are in Euro league 2 or 3 along with Torino, Benfica, Newcastle etc whereas Hearts and Aberdeen would be in the SPL, fighting for promotion to Euroleague 4 - that kind of thing. We could use some form of coefficient to ensure that the Euro leagues were populated fairly.

[calscot 0]

I'm ambivalent about league size as I don't think there is much evidence to support an increase in attendance or interest from abroad in any format. It's all pretty much pure speculation. Looking to the past doesn't always help as there are too many variables and the change since the introduction of the SPL is mixed.

 

According to one website Rangers have increased their average attendance by over 50% compared to the late 60's and first half of the 70's, and Celtic have increased by something like 80% (But then some of that could be due to them under-reporting attendances). And this is despite both clubs winning a European trophy and having huge, half filled stadia with far more standing than seats.

 

The biggest sustained level of OF attendances have been in the SPL with all seated stadia which goes against the somewhat rose tinted spectacles of the past.

 

The likes of Hibs have lost about 25% of their average attendance and if you extrapolate that across the league (due to lack of quickly accessible data), I don't think it comes near to balancing out the increase in the OF attendances. This pretty much explains the far wider gap in financing these days which stops other clubs from even coming close to second almost every season, these days, never mind challenging. It takes a very bad season for one of the top two for this to happen.

 

The OF dominated the championship before the SPL but not so much second place, where Hearts, Hibs, Aberdeen and Kilmarnock had a reasonably big say in the matter.

 

In the first of the 80's it looked like the SPL was working and providing competition to the big two with Aberdeen and Dundee Utd winning four titles between them although this did coincide with them having two of Scotland's best managers of all time and a very badly run Rangers and a complacent Celtic whose journey to stark decline due to nepotism and ineptitude had already left the station. But after that, Rangers brought in a new CEO and manager with a previously unimaginable budget which allowed us to dominate the league for over a decade. Celtic had their cathartic moment of almost going bust and recovered to mount a pretty similar challenge to the leading club in the country, restoring the old duopoly.

 

So the effect of the league structure is very hard to discern when looking at the competitiveness of the competition.

 

We shouldn't forget that the league was changed for good reasons and they are endemic in a small population country that has dreams of grandeur - after all, we pretty much invented the game and could easily have been multiple world Champions had there been a World Cup to enter in the early part of last century, or that we had bothered to attend the first few after it was inaugurated.

 

I think we have the diagnosis of our league but with today's money polluted, toxic environment, it's an inoperable and untreatable disease that is very debilitating, and we can at best vaguely manage some of the symptoms while being unable to fully halt the inevitable decline.

 

The recent, severe self-harm performed by our game, really doesn't help its already poor health, and we now seem to have quacks for doctors and a patient that continues to defy common sense when it comes to its well-being.

 

I think we need a miracle cure in the form of a British, European or Atlantic league and reconstruction is at best a plaster and a couple of aspirin. There could perhaps be the effect that a change is as good as a rest, and positivity always helps, but it will be a short lived remission before the malaise returns.

 

There does not seem to me to be any real internal answers, although I do think summer football would be a shot in the arm - a bit like Dustin Haufman's Ratso moving to Florida for his health had he made it in time, and perhaps we'll mirror that in leaving it too late to save the game from demise.

[The Real PapaBear 0]

^ what he said in a (very big, very comprehensive) nutshell

[amms 0]

I'm not sure I fllow you here, Amms. You seem to be suggesting that the LoI is a league to which we should look in terms of quality. Yet, the LoI is a 12 team league, same as ours whereas you'd have us move to an 18 team set up?

 

Eh? I didn't suggest we should look to the LOI for anything other than what not to do. That the quality in Scotland has fallen to LOI levels is no endorsement of the League of Ireland.

[amms 0]

Well what is it we're trying to achieve here? If you figure out what question you are actually asking it's easier to find an answer.

If we're trying to improve the quality of player and style of play then the answer is a larger league with clubs playing twice a season only. That removes the negativity, the constant threat of relegation for a core of clubs and allows for younger players to be introduced instead of sticking with journeymen.

 

If your focus is on a spectacle for TV then have a league six sides, each playing each other 8 times a season, with a Rangers v Celtic, Hearts v Hibs and Aberdeen v Dundee Utd super sunday/friday evening/monday evening playoff at the end. Make all the other Scottish sides feeders for the 'big six'. It'll be hideous but the TV companies will love it and it'll draw big audiences.

 

Rugby Union in Scotland, Ireland and Wales did away with their clubs and created 'district' sides. Two from Scotland, four from Ireland and Wales and they've added a couple of Italian sides now too. The existing 'clubs' now act as feeders for the district sides. This has proved fairly successful if success is measured by attendances and results on a European tournament basis.

 

Whether we like it or not sport is going that way. The 'franchising' of clubs is already underway in football and we'd be foolish to think it couldn't happen here. It will, eventually. Eventually a club south of the border is going to look at Scotland, see 5 million football daft people and fancy some of that. If we don't become competitive again, and soon, we'll be left behind. This is already happening in other smaller European countries with bigger neighbours. Austrian club football is in a terrible state, Belgium are producing some of the best players in the world just now but their club sides are basket cases, Swiss club sides are also in a very bad way.

 

What is unarguable is that the status quo can't remain. Fans are disinterested, media are disinterested and something will eventually fill that vacuum.