More and more clubs in Scottish football are choosing to shoot themselves in the foot, and if that’s what they want to do then honestly, why should any of us stop them? What we should do is point out the utter folly of it so that they get it.
St Mirren has become the latest club to restrict the number of Celtic fans who will be in attendance next season, by effectively limiting our support to one stand. In this, they’ve done what several other sides in the league have already with one outcome … those clubs lose money. Money that few clubs in this country can afford to lose.
That limits their transfer budgets. It impacts on their wage bill. It means live games on the telly will be played with highly visible empty stands and that does the image and reputation of the game here no favours at all. That impacts on sponsorship. Advertising. It affects future TV deals … which further impacts on those clubs and their budgets.
At St Mirren this has been voted for by the fans, who obviously have taken all this into consideration and have decided that they are prepared for their club to live with the impacts both short and long term. Fair enough. If they stood a chance of filling those stands with their own supporters that would be one thing, but they don’t because they never do.
But hey, they are perfectly able to face the reality of what they are doing. It’s an inconvenience to our supporters, but a bigger one to their own directors who have to find a way to plug the finance gap. Slap a few quid on the price of a season ticket; that should spread the responsibility for taking on this burden to the people who voted for it.
Or cut your cloth accordingly. Either way, it’s an act of self-harm. It shows you what happens when emotion over-rides reason, which is the biggest danger with fan-led football clubs … they do stupid shit sometimes and take decisions which are frankly nonsensical.
And this one is absolutely ridiculous.
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It’s a football decision rather than a financial one. I can sort of understand it. It’s basically them saying we want to limit your advantage by restricting fans you out-number us by on our home turf.
As you have already pointed out when it comes to huns going on about how much they should be able to sell their best players for, we don’t do that because it should never be about the money.
Same applies here.
As more clubs go down this route it undermines one of the main tenets of the argument against reorganisation of the SPFL. Until now too many clubs have been unwilling to consider reorganisation as they want to preserve their cash cow of up to four home games against the big boys from Glasgow. If however they don’t get that much extra cash and they have to fork out extra costs for police and security, they might be willing to consider some kind of reorganisation which could end the farce of the split and the annual furore over the balance of home and away fixtures. Might sanity and credibility be discovered at the SPFL? Don’t hold your breath. Knowing them, they would create something equally arcane and call it progress.
I believe Scotlands top flight atm would be best served with 14 teams; we have at least that number of decent enough teams to make it work.
It’d still mean having a split, but after 26 games when every teams played each other home and away, which seems fair!
After the split we’d have two groups of 7; the top tier playing each other home and away for the title and European places, totalling another 12 games, and likewise the bottom tier for survival.
It’d mean all teams play an equal number of home and away matches, 19 home, 19 away, 38 total games, and would make the league a bit more competitive and exciting.
We could do likewise with the lower divisions, and reduce the total number of Scottish divisions from the 4 at present (Premiership, Championship, League 1, League 2), to 3 divisions of 14 teams each.
I’m not sure but believe its because we have so many part time clubs that any reforming of the leagues system meets resistance, clubs with inadequate stadiums to meet top flight standards should they pull off promotion, which itself seems a little bit like handicapping!?
Said this months ago!! Plagiarism alive and well I see! Almost wird fir word to! No shame some folks ????
Word for word even!
Didnt mean the ? Was meant to be !!
What did you say exactly? …you talking about my league proposal? ?
If aye, I’ve been banging on about this for years, compared to your months, i even contacted the leagues governing body about it a good few years back, but all they said was that they had no immediate plans to restructure the league! … plagiarism! ?
I suppose we could form a closed system Premier league of all the full time professional clubs; we have about 22, i believe?
Do away with relegation, play 42 games a season; its only 4 more games a season than at present, and the extra income from those 4 games could help a lot of clubs.
Let the part time/amateur clubs do their own thing.
No idea if this would work though, if it’d help or be a hindrance, or if it’d get UEFA approval?
You can understand their decision; it must be weird for them playing home games but being outnumbered in the stands by visiting support.
Maybe a more sensible approach for them would be to split the ticket allocation 50/50, or even 60/40 in their favour, or a similar system that gives them a balanced or favourable supporters presence and still guarantees they fill their stadium’s?
Its their hoose and their baw. Good luck tae them. If their stands arnt full for games against us then they should fill the seats for free from local schools. Shouldnt do the same against the Orcs though. The compensation claims for psychiatric treatment from parents to aide the recovery of psychologically damaged weans would put The Buddies out of business.
Paisley huns. Nuff said.
They hate them as much as they hate us
If I was their chairman I’d acquiesce to the fans, then when they start raging at player budgets being slashed I’d remind them of their choice here. As mentioned above a 60/40 split would make more sense but this is St. Mirren we’re talking about here so nae chance of any of that…
I’d be interested to see the financial impact over several seasons. Revenue may drop initially but would it recover? I actually don’t have any issue with this. I know a lot of entitled fans who expect the lion’s share of tickets at all away games. They’re away games, that’s the point. If it works for these clubs great! If not, at least we know that and can use it to barter for less unreasonable price hikes for our visits.
Tell all teams in the league, we don’t want ANY tickets. And we’ll not give ANY tickets for away fans at Celtic Park. HH
Home teams keep ALL gate money, after all. HH
Sky should tell teams like St Mirren if the Stadium is half Empty the Fee for coverage will be the same percentage of the Stadium Capacity lol
So silly, they get a full stadium so seldom wake up
Aberdeen are the worst , couldn’t fill their stadium with free tickets hibs not much better ….these clubs haven’t a clue how to make money off the Glasgow teams – embarrassing.
We should just all stay at home and watch it on Celtic TV.
They won’t be long rethinking their grand plan.
Regardless if the fans got their decision right or not, I still find it very refreshing that their board let them vote and were prepared to hear their voices and give them their place. Jock Stein said that without fans football is nothing and I wish that more football hierarchies would show their own fans the respect that they deserve. Well done St Mirren.
They didn’t just block Celtic they opted to take back what’s rightfully theirs and not give an “additional stand” to both Celtic and Rangers. Celtic and Rangers both originally only had one stand and they are simply reverting back to this so this article is completely biased and portraying that it’s aimed at Celtic when it’s not.