Wings Over Scotland

Dear Chairman,

You are, it appears, being placed under almost intolerable pressure to do Scottish football’s dirty work for it. You’ve been handed the responsibility for dealing with a farcical mess of a situation despite having had no part in creating it. You’ve been threatened, cajoled and bullied into doing what the SFA and SPL didn’t have the guts to do for themselves. Over recent days you’ve been fed a great deal of misinformation, scaremongering and outright abuse designed to intimidate you into going along with a course of action that undermines every principle of sporting integrity.

I understand, however, that as chairman your job is to take hard-headed business decisions in your club’s interests, rather than to uphold lofty ideals even where doing so would lead your club into bankruptcy. So I hope you’ll consider the following facts before you decide how to vote at the SFL’s Special General Meeting on July 13.

1. If you’re the chairman of an SFL Division 2 or SFL Division 3 club, allowing Sevco Scotland to enter the League at Division 1 level will without a doubt cost your club tens of thousands of pounds. The pitiful £1m “bribe” the League is being offered by the SPL as a supposed sweetener for the deal will see your club receive somewhere in the region of £30,000. A single season of Sevco FC participating in your division, however, even if brought just 2000 travelling supporters with it rather than the usual 5000, would generate at least twice as much money for your club in gate receipts and other revenue.

2. That calculation also omits other possible income that might accrue to your club, such as the significant possibility of increased interest in your division from broadcast media. It would be greatly surprising if there was no interest from TV and radio companies in covering the (possible) progress of the former Rangers through the lower leagues, and that interest would be yours to exploit, rather than being signed away for a pittance in advance.

3. If, however, you represent an SFL1 club, it’s difficult to see why you would wish to accept a deal which signs away your TV rights for £1m in return for admitting Sevco Scotland to your division. It seems a miserly sum if, as you’ve been told, “Rangers” represent almost 50% of the value of Scottish football to TV companies, which currently stands at around £16m a season.

If that’s true, and the teams outwith the former “Old Firm” are merely makeweights as far as TV audiences are concerned, it’s hard to understand why an SPL containing (Celtic +11 others) would be worth 15 times as much as an SFL1 comprising (“Rangers” +9 others). Someone’s trying to take you for a mug.

4. Enabling the participation of Sevco FC in SFL1 opens the way to a whole raft of possible legal challenges from other clubs, such as those denied promotion by the “shuffling up” process that would normally result from an extra SFL1 club being invited to join the SPL. There could also be lawsuits from clubs which have previously gone into administration and been compelled to re-enter the game through Division 3, such as Livingston FC.

Any such challenges could result in massive disruption and/or delay to the league season, with obvious catastrophic financial consequences. (Which would be before factoring in any possible action taken by UEFA and FIFA in response to the involvement of civil law courts.)

5. The SFA’s Appellate Tribunal is yet to reconvene with regard to the matter of the former Rangers FC being found guilty of bringing the game into disrepute. The Tribunal could very well impose a suspension or expulsion on Sevco FC (pending the SFA deciding whether or not the new club is in fact a continuation of the old one), which would at very short notice again cast the SFL into chaos.

6. Sevco Scotland does not currently possess sufficient playing staff to field a full team plus substitutes’ bench, and is at present subject to a transfer embargo which severely inhibits the expansion of that squad. Its financial circumstances are also shrouded in uncertainty, particularly in the light of the apparent boycott by its own supporters of the current board of directors, with newspapers reporting season-ticket sales to date of just 250, less than 1% of the normal figure.

(With the vast majority of those supporters having voiced their desire for Sevco FC to start in Division 3 rather than Division 1, it is of course far from certain how many would turn up to support the new club in the latter instance.)

It is well within the bounds of possibility that even if admitted to the league and escaping suspension, Sevco FC will be unable to fulfil a complete fixture list, again casting whichever division it inhabits into chaos and causing a very large revenue shortfall within that division due to many unplayed matches.

 7. You’ve been warned menacingly of non-payment of the “settlement agreement” from the SPL should you not accept Sevco Scotland into Division 1. As an outsider I’m not party to the exact details of the contract in question, but presumably you are, and unless it contains a specific clause which voids the settlement clause in the event of Rangers or Celtic no longer being in the top division there are no legal grounds for the SPL to withhold the payment. Any court case you chose to bring against the SPL would be short and successful.

8. The SPL clubs voted against the admission of Sevco Scotland because their supporters threatened to boycott the league en masse were it to be agreed. From what’s been released to the press so far by various fan groups and club boards, supporters of SFL clubs feel barely any less strongly about the subject. I hope it isn’t presumptuous to assume that any substantial abandonment of your club by its fans would be seriously damaging to its economic viability.

(Conversely, there are already signs that a principled stance might pay significant rewards in terms of encouraging increased attendance, over and above any direct short-term gains your club might gain from the presence of Sevco FC in its division for any period of time.)

In conclusion, then, even before any consideration of your undoubted sense of sporting integrity, I humbly and respectfully ask you to bear in mind the full financial picture when making your decision, rather than only the apocalyptic single-sided version being presented to you by the SFA and SPL. In the personal opinion of this observer, however, the harsh economic reality of the situation appears to be that admitting Sevco Scotland to the SFL is a risk the League and its members simply can’t afford to take.

Yours in sport,
Rev. S. Campbell
In the name of the customers of Scottish football.