The SPFL just told Rod Petrie where to go.
He wanted to reschedule league fixtures to help out the national team, and the clubs just told him to bolt.
Elected by nobody and answerable to nobody, this is a President without a mandate, without a plan, without popular support and without a clue.
The whiff of incompetence follows wherever he goes.
Look at the state his club side is in, after a series of bad decisions. The one they’ve gotten right is appointing Jack Ross, although I cannot fathom what he is doing taking on that basket case of a club with such bad leadership at the top of the house.
Yet for Petrie’s acknowledged uselessness, he is going to cling to the job like a tic up a cat’s backside. Getting rid of Donald Trump is easier than deposing an SFA President. It has happened once, and that took a court case, when Fergus brought down Farry.
The SFA is like a fading monarchy where power is handed down instead of earned.
They don’t have proper elections nor any accountability at all and the clubs seem perfect content to less this continue to be the case. Seats around the top table are traded too; Celtic and Sevco seem to have a dreadful little joint scheme going where they swap them with each other.
I’ll get to that another day; it’s a rancid and corrupt arrangement and it appals me that our club has anything to do with it. It’s just another in a long line of threads which suggest that Resolution 12 was buried by our own directors.
This will be seen as a minor issue for some people, but it’s actually not. This is Petrie’s first major initiative in a while, and he has failed miserably.
His entire tenure at the SFA is going to be shrouded in these kind of failures, and it’s worse because the average fan has no idea at all what this guy stands for.
He never had to make a case for his succession. He never had to canvas for votes or face any real scrutiny as to his plans. Hell, we don’t even know if Petrie has plans, far less what they might be. This is a total system failure. This is a joke.
How much longer can Scottish football continue like this?
How much longer will we remain locked into these archaic conventions, which do nothing to move the game forward and guarantee mediocrity?
Petrie is the triumph of a system which rewards conformity and lack of colour. His ascension to the SFA Presidency is a joke, and that the SPFL wasn’t even prepared to subject his idea to a proper debate reveals him to be a lame duck without the respect of the clubs.
Yet the systems for getting rid of him … it would take a coup from within and it’s not even clear if it could be done.
Even if the rest of the Executive had the bottle for it, they’d have to show cause, and just losing out on something like this doesn’t count. Being clueless or incompetence isn’t a legitimate reason either; if it were, no President in my living memory would have been in post longer than it took people to realise how stupid he was.
In any event, the SFA constitution would simply elevate one of his VP’s to the job … no scrutiny, no plan, no campaign, no votes … another scandal.
Trump can be kicked out of office in 12 months’ time; even the crazy American system allows for that.
What recourse do we have? None whatsoever.
Petrie will be in office until his term expires and there is nothing we can do about it except hold our noses.
What a disgrace that is.
Please share these articles widely, and join our Facebook Group for discussions about the pieces and other issues.
If you have trouble finding the articles you can subscribe, follow us on Twitter and get every piece on Celtic News Now. And you can, of course, bookmark the site itself and check it for updates throughout the day.