Tannadice’s Empty Seats Were A Testament To The Stupidity Sweeping Scottish Football.

Watching the game yesterday was a sublime pleasure, but I watched it at home.

I love home games and this past year it’s been a proper privilege to watch this side grow and develop, but I’m acutely aware that I’ve missed some classic away performances as well.

It’s hard to get tickets for away games these days, and some clubs are determined to make it harder.

Those who sat in the director’s boss at Dundee Utd yesterday, casting their predatory gaze down on the manager Jack Ross, really should be assuming some degree of personal responsibility for what, for me, was the real outrage; all those empty seats.

Watching that, you would never think that this is Scottish football, with our clubs living in the long shadow of that English television deal and others all around Europe.

You would think that there is so much money sloshing around the game that we don’t need to have fans inside grounds.

Remember during COVID when all we heard was that clubs couldn’t cope with fans being locked out?

The game is still recovering from that period, and yet a lot of the clubs in Scotland’s top flight have taken the utterly absurd decision to deny paying customers the chance to watch matches.

I have never seen, or heard, of anything so stupid in my life.

That was ridiculous yesterday, seeing all those empty seats.

It made you wonder at the sanity of some of those running teams in the top flight.

St Mirren are already asking their own fans to find extra money to off-set locking us out … based on the response to the article I wrote about it, many of them are happy to do so.

But that one-off payment isn’t going to fill the hole in the accounts that even one game of restricting us will create, and they want to do this every time we visit … and the same when the club at Ibrox comes calling.

This is the only business where it is seen as a virtue to turn people’s money down.

It would be incomprehensible in any other industry.

Football in this country is run by parochial small-minded men. It’s even worse at those clubs where the fans have a say in this stuff. Talk about cutting your nose off to spite your face.

They would rather see their teams weakened than have rival fans in the stands their own fellow fans refuse to fill?

What is wrong with this picture, except everything?