When Stewart Robertson made the decision not to run for the SPFL board this site learned that it was because there was no support for his election. He knew he would have to go head to head with other candidates, and so it was an easy decision for him to make.
He would have been thoroughly embarrassed had he decided to seek that route.
Unfortunately, the fix was in.
Certain people were determined to make sure that, election or not, support or not, that he would get a seat at one of the top tables in the game. Now we’ve found out that he’ll end up on the SFA Professional Game Board without the need for such complexities and difficulties as an election.
He takes Peter Lawwell’s place.
You might be forgiven for wondering why Celtic didn’t nominate someone else. You might be forgiven for asking if Robertson is, in fact, Celtic’s nominee. If we’d wanted someone to run against him, preventing his taking a seat, I’m sure we could have made sure of it.
As far as I’m concerned, this is a stain on Scottish football.
This guy should be nowhere near the levers of power, and if it was left up to the clubs he wouldn’t be.
This one reeks of a sneaky backdoor deal, and it’s all the worse that it’s a national association committee and not simply the league body that Robertson will find himself sitting on.
This is a guy who made excuses for sectarian singing at a time when Regan is trying to force clubs to accept strict liability. He made excuses for the thuggish, neddish, and criminal behaviour of those reprobate elements of his support who ran onto the pitch to fight with rival fans.
His comments were more akin to that which you’d find on one of the more lunatic sections of the internet than those you’d expect to hear from a club official.
That he now wants to be a senior administrator for the game itself is unbelievable, and that he’s actually going to be is scandalous.
I notice too that in the media reports which announced this not one person bothered to challenge his previous statement that he wouldn’t seek a post on the SPFL board because he wanted to devote his time fully to working for the club. That’s been shown up as the utter nonsense this website said that it was at the time. But small things like that, that this is a club that lies to journalists and fans as a matter of routine, aren’t deemed worthy of comment.
But the wider issue here is that this makes Scottish football look like shit, at a time when good people have just been elected to the SPFL board, people who are committed to reform and to getting the right things done. This undercuts it all, by elevating this guy to a national role. He should have been the subject of an immediate SFA investigation, and sanctions for bringing the game into disrepute for his comments. He represents a club that is still to pay an official levied fine from four years ago and which shows no interest in doing so.
Is this a joke? Are we supposed to find it funny? Because it’s not.
There are people at other clubs who will be outraged at this, and although I sympathise I think a lot of them only have themselves to blame.
Four years on from the scandalous events that almost destroyed our national sport we still have Doncaster, Regan and others in their jobs and key areas of reform haven’t even been looked at let alone tackled.
It’s their failure to propose their own nominees and their own solutions which has allowed this to happen, and this is only the start unless they wake up and start trying to put this house in order.
What comes across most in the limited (so far) media coverage of this story is the way it’s been painted as some kind of entitlement; an Ibrox board member at the top table “where they belong.” Like so much else in Scottish football, the meritocracy doesn’t exist here.
They don’t belong on that board. That position has to be earned, and Stewart Robertson expressed the kind of views that belong in football’s dark ages, and he represents a board who’s own public communiques in the aftermath read like one of those paranoid “manifestos” spree killers leave behind before they go on the rampage.
Now those people have a key vote in every big decision affecting our sport.
That is an absolute disgrace.