League reconstruction . Is the answer staring us in the face

[Rupert Pupkin]

I got the idea from another poster that thought Hibs and Hearts should merge.

Do you understand humour? Sarcasm? Which part did you think was an actual proposal? The suggestion to build crack dens to facilitate the drug use of the local residents?

 

[LOL 133]

Do you under humour? Sarcasm? Which part did you think was an actual proposal? The suggestion to build crack dens to facilitate drug use of the local residents?

I got it. I was just following you with an even more extreme version.

Its good to have a laugh. Sometimes it gets a bit intense on here.

 

[Mustang mad]

No amount of restructuring will solve the problem of lack of competition. Our top league is embarrassing. Its one of the least competitive in the world and its all down to the way the money is distributed.

Money.
The only way to fix that is to split the gate money, like they used to. No club will vote for that though, especially us and them.
Just like no clubs will vote for a 32 game season, so reduced income.

We could at least attempt to even things up by having an even split of all sponsorship money and prize money. Try to give the smaller clubs a leg up.
Again that will never happen.

We really need to stop moaning about the product as we will never swallow the bitter pills required to make it better.

 

[bearbear1]

Loads of ideas about reconstruction etc, but The fact is there’s very little competition and the league is boring. 10/12//24 teams doesn’t matter, where 90% of matches are teams trying to get lucky hitting on the break. The problem is the quality of the product being served up. Nobody is interested in watching matches outside old firm games unless they are a fan.

So the question for me is not how to rearrange the league, but how to improve the product? Amalgamate smaller teams to pull their finances and play as ‘regions’ seems a good idea in theory, but fans don’t stand for it.

Perhaps the key is in youth development. The SFA itself takes over youth development nationally up to a certain age (no laughing, I know their current set up is shite, but with proper investment in top class coaching and facilities/academies that could change). Similar to the nba draft, the lowest spl clubs get first pick of players each summer. They can then use those players, or even sell them if one is an absolute superstar with 80 to them 20 reinvested in academy. If one player is an absolute star leaving early (such as a Gilmour situation), the lowest spl club gets 80% of the fee. It would take a lot of refining as an idea… but we badly need more competition to make our league attractive. If it worked, we could take on youth development and start academies in other countries such as India where football isn’t historically a priority to feee into the system.

I agree this doesn’t directly benefit us, and I don’t know where independent youth teams would actually factor in. But we need to do something new.

 

[LOL 133]

Money.
The only way to fix that is to split the gate money, like they used to. No club will vote for that though, especially us and them.
Just like no clubs will vote for a 32 game season, so reduced income.

We could at least attempt to even things up by having an even split of all sponsorship money and prize money. Try to give the smaller clubs a leg up.
Again that will never happen.

We really need to stop moaning about the product as we will never swallow the bitter pills required to make it better.

We had a golden opportunity to change things when we were kicked down the leagues. We should have proposed a gate share then and got the others to back us. Celtic had a massive wage bill and it would have crippled them. I think the ideal time was when we got back into the top division. It needed 11 out of 12 to vote to change things.

 

[Rupert Pupkin]

I got it. I was just following you with an even more extreme version.

Its good to have a laugh. Sometimes it gets a bit tense.

Egg on face moment....

Sorry it appears that it was me who has made an arse of myself here by missing the humour. My only defence is that I'm knackered and I thought you where genuinely raging at such a suggestion. I'm a tit basically.

 

[LOL 133]

Loads of ideas about reconstruction etc, but The fact is there’s very little competition and the league is boring. 10/12//24 teams doesn’t matter, where 90% of matches are teams trying to get lucky hitting on the break. The problem is the quality of the product being served up. Nobody is interested in watching matches outside old firm games unless they are a fan.

So the question for me is not how to rearrange the league, but how to improve the product? Amalgamate smaller teams to pull their finances and play as ‘regions’ seems a good idea in theory, but fans don’t stand for it.

Perhaps the key is in youth development. The SFA itself takes over youth development nationally up to a certain age (no laughing, I know their current set up is shite, but with proper investment in top class coaching and facilities/academies that could change). Similar to the nba draft, the lowest spl clubs get first pick of players each summer. They can then use those players, or even sell them if one is an absolute superstar with 80 to them 20 reinvested in academy. If one player is an absolute star leaving early (such as a Gilmour situation), the lowest spl club gets 80% of the fee. It would take a lot of refining as an idea… but we badly need more competition to make our league attractive. If it worked, we could take on youth development and start academies in other countries such as India where football isn’t historically a priority to feee into the system.

I agree this doesn’t directly benefit us, and I don’t know where independent youth teams would actually factor in. But we need to do something new.

Two things needed.

1 Share the income more evenly

2 Introduce an affordable pay scale for all players so that "diddy" teams can keep their best players and can compete.

 

[LOL 133]

Egg on face moment....

Sorry it appears that it was me who has made an arse of myself here by missing the humour. My only defence is that I'm knackered and I thought you where genuinely raging at such a suggestion. I'm a tit basically.

Not at all mate. I actually think the crack den idea is a good one.

Anyway. Happy days again now that Gio has come to the rescue. I say that as a big fan of Gerrard or I used to be.

 

[Mustang mad]

We had a golden opportunity to change things when we were kicked down the leagues. We should have proposed a gate share then and got the others to back us. Celtic had a massive wage bill and it would have crippled them. I think the ideal time was when we got back into the top division. It needed 11 out of 12 to vote to change things.

Self interest will always rule though. No one would have backed us back then, and very few even now. We are hated across the country, with few exceptions.

You can mess with the league structure , but as long as two teams generate and keep about 90 percent of the income, we will not have a healthy competition

 

[TheDerryend]

No amount of league reconstruction is going to change the massive financial disparity between the two Glasgow sides and the rest of the league.

We are too small a country to support a 18/20 team top flight. Look around you at similar sized nations across Europe and they all have 10/12/14 league setups.

A 18/20 top flight would result in a high amount of meaningless fixtures for teams throughout the league. It's already a bit of an issue with the current setup. Don't buy the argument that it'll lead to a better generation of Scottish players coming through either.

There is no perfect solution to this.

Going back to an 18,20 league set up is the worst idea of the lot. Just a league full of meaningless games with 2 teams competing at the top.

The most competitive I've ever seen our league was the first half of the 80's. No coincidence that Aberdeen and dundee utd were doing well in Europe.

It would have been even better if we weren't so far out of it at the time. Now we have 2 teams so far ahead that we now have a competition between us and them to have a better goal difference.

All that matters now is making money. All I hear this season is we must win the league for the cl money, even though we will be the whpping boys.

 

[Rupert Pupkin]

Not at all mate. I actually think the crack den idea is a good one.

Anyway. Happy days again now that Gio has come to the rescue. I say that as a big fan of Gerrard or I used to be.

Aw aye, now you've made me look like a bigger bellend by being so cool about it .

Anyhow onwards to 56.

 

[AndythephotoDr]

Going back to an 18,20 league set up is the worst idea of the lot. Just a league full of meaningless games with 2 teams competing at the top.

The most competitive I've ever seen our league was the first half of the 80's. No coincidence that Aberdeen and dundee utd were doing well in Europe.

It would have been even better if we weren't so far out of it at the time. Now we have 2 teams so far ahead that we now have a competition between us and them to have a better goal difference.

All that matters now is making money. All I hear this season is we must win the league for the cl money, even though we will be the whpping boys.

Not sure that had anything to do with the league structure to be fair. Could go back further in history when Scottish clubs were actually winning things in Europe when we had a bigger league.

It’s all opinions and for saying a small league is best there is another saying a bigger league is better.

 

[tottie beck]

18 team league, home and away, everyone else plays junior football.

 

[papacrobertson]

18 team league, home and away, everyone else plays junior football.

Junior football no longer exists in West of Scotland. So many of our fans really don't have a clue that there now is a pyramid below league two with ambitious and well run clubs particularly in tier 6 of West of Scotland League but some amount of shite in tier 5 but that's a long long story.

 

[LOL 133]

Going back to an 18,20 league set up is the worst idea of the lot. Just a league full of meaningless games with 2 teams competing at the top.

The most competitive I've ever seen our league was the first half of the 80's. No coincidence that Aberdeen and dundee utd were doing well in Europe.

It would have been even better if we weren't so far out of it at the time. Now we have 2 teams so far ahead that we now have a competition between us and them to have a better goal difference.

All that matters now is making money. All I hear this season is we must win the league for the cl money, even though we will be the whpping boys.

Exactly. The balance sheet is more important than its ever been and it decides who wins the trophies. Its not just wrong its self defeating in the long run.

CL money isnt such a big deal in the top leagues as its a fraction of the income. Here in Scotland its enough to buy most clubs. Worse still there's only 2 teams here that can access it. In other leagues it gets shared around a bit more though over time they'll have the same problem.

 

[LOL 133]

18 team league, home and away, everyone else plays junior football.

That's about the best formula available to us.

 

[Johnny Fontane]

No amount of restructuring will solve the problem of lack of competition. Our top league is embarrassing. Its one of the least competitive in the world and its all down to the way the money is distributed.

It's largely to do with us and them being too big. If the old firm left the league of would be a much better competition albeit with nobody watching. We draw too many fans from across Scotland that don't go to watch their local teams so the money's coming to us and we them perpetuate the problem by buying up the best prospects in the league. Bayern Munich do the same in Germany, Real and Barca do the same in Spain. The only way to create a competitive league is to either introduce a salary cap or introduce a draft system for recruitment.

 

[cairngorm]

Sky money (which I pay and have done for 25yrs) has allowed the English game to grow exponentially
For our game to really improve then we need major investment from sky, uefa, our government (don’t laugh)
Enough money so that all our senior clubs or at least a majority can go full time and most importantly have a full time football academy

 

[baselbear]

22 initial games where every team plays each other home and away.

The top 6 then plays the bottom 6 away from home (6 more games).

The top 6 and bottom 6 then play each other home and away (10 more games).

38 games in total, every team is guaranteed 2 home games agains the Old Firm, and every team plays the same teams the same number of times (no instances where we can go away to Livi 3 times and they're at home to them for example).

Sorted.

They don't play the same teams though do they? Absolutely every team gets one match that no other gets.
We could also still play Livi away 3 times say if they were 7th/8th when we played them in that middle section and then by a good result in that match , which might even be a narrow loss if the middle of the league was tight , they move into 6th.

How would you do that middle section?

By a fixed rota , 12th plays 1st , 11th plays 2nd , etc or by a draw?

Either way there would be huge amount of moaning from the Yahoos when they got Pittodrie and we were away in Dingwall.

 

[CooperBlu11]

In an ideal world us and the bheggars would just go and join another league and just let the rest of the pointless Scottish clubs and their corrupt shitty leagues rot away.

 

[jackstar]

League reconstruction has to start at the very top,getting rid of those in charge of the game and done nothing but sell our game short. Time to get some football people in with a genuine love for the game.

 

[Luca Stroppi]

It doesn’t matter what way you slice or dice it, the SPfL is a dog shit league and will remain so. We have to accept it, there’s no improving it as there’s no appetite to make significant improvements due to too many people involved in the game blocking meaningful change. I mean they were talking about getting junior teams into the professional pyramid on Super Snorebored because Auchinleck knocked Hamilton out the SC...yeah we need more senior teams in Scotland, let’s do that...absolute joke but that’s the type of thinking there is. Maybe we should have mixed sex teams...6 men and 5 women...that would be really different?

 

[papacrobertson]

It doesn’t matter what way you slice or dice it, the SPfL is a dog shit league and will remain so. We have to accept it, there’s no improving it as there’s no appetite to make significant improvements due to too many people involved in the game blocking meaningful change. I mean they were talking about getting junior teams into the professional pyramid on Super Snorebored because Auchinleck knocked Hamilton out the SC...yeah we need more senior teams in Scotland, let’s do that...absolute joke but that’s the type of thinking there is. Maybe we should have mixed sex teams...6 men and 5 women...that would be really different?

Auchinleck Talbot are now a senior team and will be in League Two in the next few years I have no doubts. Hardly same as mixed sex teams. Just try tell any of the Talbot boys that and see what they say to you!

Replace some of the pish at bottom of league two and in the disgrace that is the Lowland League with Talbot, Pollok, Clydebank, Kilwinning Rangers, Cumnock, Irvine Meadow, Tranent, Linlithgow Rose etc will certainly help but not even 1 up and 1 down doesn't help from tier 5 and tier 4 is a complete shambles.

 

[Govan_Guy]

Two things needed.

1 Share the income more evenly

2 Introduce an affordable pay scale for all players so that "diddy" teams can keep their best players and can compete.

That's goodbye to group stage European football for us and them then ......

 

[aldojack]

Summer start for the league would be high on my list for league reconstruction

 

[Truffle Shuffle]

Splits are a load of shite designed for extra games of us vs the filth just so the cunts can milk extra money, I'd do away with the split all together. 2 18 team leagues, home and away. %^*& playing teams 4 times a season.