Sixteen thousand football fans in Scotland have taken part in a survey which exposes the distrust which exists between those who govern the game here and those who follow it. The Scottish Football Fans Association will publish the full details of its findings later, and they are devastating for those in the governing bodies who have ignored fans for too long.
The associations are not respected or trusted. A majority of the respondents believe the two are less trustworthy than the scandal hit European and world bodies at UEFA and FIFA, and people have been arrested in association with those.
More than 93% want the SFA itself regulated, and the most incredible thing about that statistic is that 90% would approve of the Scottish government in the oversight role. This is an unprecedented event; most fans have traditionally bristled at the very idea, and if attitudes on that have changed then trust has not simply collapsed but is now nearly non-existent.
Yet even those stats pale into insignificance next to the most deadly one; that 60% of fans surveyed said they could walk away from football in Scotland altogether unless changes are made and trust is restored. There seems little appetite for the kind of change people desperately want. The clubs themselves did not support Celtic when we called for an independent inquiry into the way the game here is run; that subject will almost certainly come up again in the next few days.
The governing bodies cannot escape from this damning report. There does not need to be a 60% drop-off before the consequences would be devastating; many clubs lead a hand to mouth existence at the moment and even a quarter of those fans – just 15% of the total across the game – walking away would put some clubs on the brink.
The irony of it is that Scottish football is in the best place it’s been for years; attendances have been climbing steadily since 2012, and this season many clubs are in better health than they’ve been in since the days before the gravitational pull of the EPL started sucking everything towards it. It has long been the view of this writer that these numbers glossed over widespread disenchantment and boiling anger; this report spells it out in graphic detail.
Fans trust their own clubs to a higher degree than I would have thought; more than 70% believe their clubs are committed to the good of football. But that was never where the hammer was going to fall anyway; it was always going to drop on those clubs and organisations which they believe are less than trustworthy.
It will fall in away match boycotts and fans no longer attending the national stadium.
Trust is at the heart of this survey.
There are big problems with football governance in Scotland; the SFA might have thought its self-interested response to a review would see them through this phase of the crisis; they are wrong. I expect the pressure to ramp up now.
Big things need to happen, and they are happening behind the scenes.