SPFL Governance Is A Joke And Yet Ibrox Has Failed To Lay A Glove On Its Leadership.

The SPFL board is congratulating itself tonight after an “independent report” basically said they do a decent job. The independent report was commissioned after the Ibrox club demanded it; more of Scottish football’s valuable time and money pissed away in trying to satisfy them.

You have to wonder how independent a report it was if it suggested that these guys are doing just fine, and whilst there are recommendations – and I want to see the full details of what those are – they are briefing the media that they have been vindicated.

What an embarrassment Ibrox are that they cannot lay a glove on this pitiful band who do not actually lead and do not seem to want to.

As I write this, the Scottish Football Supporters Association has released an excoriating letter to Ian Maxwell at the SFA. It is one of the most devastating critiques of football governance you will read anywhere and I will do a full article on it later.

Whilst the SFA and the SPFL are separate bodies, they work hand in glove so closely that it is almost impossible to separate them on many issues … and neither is fit for purpose.

The SFSA are an outstanding group and the one organisation in this whole country which cares enough about the reform agenda to organise around the principle. The media doesn’t care. The clubs don’t seem to care. It was always going to be the job of the fans to push for real changes in the game and that’s one of the things the SFSA exists to do.

Ibrox is not interested in affecting real change. They want to purge the governing bodies of pro-Celtic influence, that’s their intent. And they are so hell-bent on doing so that they’ve botched the job and strengthened the leadership at Hampden instead, which as far as I’m concerned should be enough to get you flogged in George Square.

A major club which wants reform should be pushing on an open door. The moment one emerges which looks like it is willing to lead a change agenda, they should be able to rally support and get it done in a way a fan organisation can only dream about. The Ibrox club talks about being the biggest club in the land – we know it’s nonsense, but that’s their self-image. How do they account for the fact that their efforts against these people have flopped?

The only clubs which followed them over the famous Dundee email case were those which got relegated, and so they weren’t actually backing Ibrox as they were looking out for their own interests. Nobody credible – I don’t include the hacks like Jackson and English who slabbered all over it – supported their dodgy dossier. When it came to the sponsorship row, the clubs allowed the ruling bodies to work on it when Ibrox clearly wanted to lead a revolution. At every turn they have gone so far over the top in their tactics – as with the Collum thing – that most of the other stakeholders have walked the other way in disgust.

Tonight’s news confirms that the SPFL have not taken a stunning blow far less a fatal one. Yes, they probably picked their own “independent” scrutineer, but that they were able to do that is damning in itself and nobody prevented them doing it, which goes to show how little respect the Ibrox club has amongst their peers.

And whilst I would not have wished to see them succeed in their spiteful campaign, they should have done real harm to this band of jokers and pushed our reform cause a little further up the mountain.

Their failure costs all of us and that is a mark of how amateurish they’ve been.