Today, the Raith Rovers chairman announced manager of the year John McGlynn will face severe cuts to his player budget as a result of the current climate in Scottish football.
As he points out, his club are certainly not going to be the last. Fellow First Division outfits like Queen of the South have prepared their following for similar, while newly promoted Livingston has already announced the departure of several first team players as they attempt to move away from reliance on the financial support of the club's directors. Falkirk's budget, while remaining large, say their board, will also be reduced. More will surely follow.
It is the latest indicator that Scottish football is struggling badly. Many people have many theories as to how the game revives it's fortunes: part time football is the way forward for many, SPL 2 the saviour for others. Yet this season should have witnessed the elevation of one particular suggestion. It was in December this year, when just about the entire Scottish Football League card had been postponed for the third week running along with the majority of SPL games, that the argument for summer football should have come of age.
Granted, the last two winters have been extreme in terms of the weather we've been lumped with. But this is Scotland, and it's always cold and wet in December; which means we'll always be battling frozen pitches and waterlogged goalmouths. Snow, in fact, felt in some ways like light relief. Until it melted. Then we had more cold and wet.
Scottish football tried to battle on. And failed miserably. Again.
As call off after call off cost clubs thousands in income from gate receipts, SPL clubs lost out on Sky and ESPN TV money, and a number of sides battled even to keep paying their players. Fortunes have been spent on trying to protect pitches from the winter conditions, with money shelled out - when games are on - to keep floodlights and electricity running in the dark, depths of winter.
Some might laugh at the triviality of having to think about the cost of lighting the pitch, not a problem for Scotland's bigger teams - but I'd bet most SFL boardrooms cursed the cost at some point in the last ten months, and for years before that.
And as we come to the end of the season, faced with months of warmer, drier weather and lighter nights, almost inexplicably we're packing up.
On the majority of sunny summer Saturday afternoons, not a single competitive match will be played on lush, green pitches across Scotland; then it will get cold, wet and dark again, and we'll all trudge into the gloom to attempt to watch football on a lightly plowed field.
Maybe a selective image if ever there was one, but it tells a story. Admittedly, it will not always be that warm. It will not always be dry. But it will be warmer and drier than from December to February, and it will always be light. Pitches might need occasionally drained or forked: they won't need covers and undersoil heating. Paying supporters quite frankly are more likely to turn out in even mild July conditions than on sub-zero December evenings; especially the families with younger children who are the supporters of the future.
Equally, Sky, ESPN and other broadcasters are desperate for live football in the summer months; so much so they've started funding friendly tournaments in Europe. While the SPL cannot match the English Premier League in the attention it deservedly grabs, it still makes a good fist of getting games broadcast at the weekend during the season. In the summer, with nothing else on, that cause can only be enhanced.
Summer football is absolutely not a silver bullet. There are problems with major championships, coherence with other domestic leagues, and, to be blunt, people like to go on holiday in the summer, too. Further, as one of my own Twitter followers pointed out recently, any revival in Scottish football's fortunes requires a broad strategy that looks at the pricing, marketing and quality of the product alongside simply when we play.
But summer football can be the starting point for that change. It can be the radical shift needed to haul Scottish football out of the doldrums it has inhabited for approaching a decade. It can provide increased revenue streams for clubs in a number of ways - the likes of which I have only touched on above. In particular, the benefit for lower league clubs could be even greater than to those at the top of the tree.
Any change will have to overcome the entrenched traditionalism that infects the Scottish game, but done right, in a considered and strategically coherent fashion, a move to summer football has the potential to breathe life into our flagging domestic and national game.
And when we're faced with the sort of announcements we've seen today from the man in charge of one of Scotland's biggest and most influential SFL clubs, the argument for not doing so cannot continue to win the debate.
0 comments:
Post a Comment