A Scottish club may go out of business soon. Shame on the SFA for not preventing it.

Today, a Scottish football club, a previous winner of our national cup competition, stands on the brink of complete collapse.

Administration is probably a certainty.

They need £200,000 by Wednesday. They have raised £57,000 so far.

It’s a valiant effort. It may not be enough.

Beyond that, who knows what comes next?

What we know is that this was wholly preventable. Clubs could decide to cut their cloth to suit their circumstances. They could decide to live within their means. Too many still don’t and no regulation compels them to.

As a direct consequence of this, clubs continue to spend what they don’t have, relying on loans from directors and other “investors” to keep the lights on. This ultimately puts them in danger, and the longer it goes on the deeper the danger they are in. If a company is losing £500,000 a year then over the course of five years their debt is £2.5 million; a Scottish club can dig its way out of the first far more readily than the second.

Inverness has debts worth more than that bigger sum; £3.8 million if the estimates are correct. How a Scottish Championship club runs up chits like that I cannot even imagine; how they get out of it is another question again.

One more question; what if they don’t? The question is being faced by their fans. It should be faced by more than just theirs.

The lack of a regulatory framework is appalling when this game has suffered so many liquidation events; Airdrie – which killed another club in Clydebank at the same time; Gretna and then Rangers all within recent memory. There were near misses along the way at top flight clubs; Motherwell, Hibs and Hearts.

Gretna should have been the moment the so-called governing bodies slammed the brakes on hard by introducing domestic FFP. Why didn’t they?

It is hard to escape the idea that there were other priorities besides doing the right thing for the game, and we know what they were likely to have been; one club was committed to spending as much as it could get away with, and to Hell with the consequences because they never believed that there would be any, and that club held one of the two “liberum vetos” which could have blocked any reform that was proposed. The other club to hold that position was us. We had no reason to oppose a domestic version of FFP.

One thing has been apparent from the start; there are clubs and owners who don’t like the idea, don’t support the idea and think that they can benefit from our failure to implement it. But ultimately those clubs are fools to themselves and they cheat the rest of the sport. Regulations should be in place to stop that cheating and to offer safeguards for fans of clubs whose leaders might put them in a dangerous place.

I think of this often in the way I think about seatbelt laws. It is easy to understand drink driving regulations; someone who gets behind the wheel hammered is a risk to everyone on the road, and we cannot permit people to behave that way. But seatbelt laws only restrict the individual … they don’t offer an obvious benefit to the greater good. So why do we bother with them? Let each individual take their chance.

Except that it doesn’t work like that and we know it doesn’t. People not wearing their seat-belts endangers others, just not in the direct way that stopping someone driving drunk does. And this presumes anyway that it is wrong to protect people from the effects of their own stupidity and bravado and I don’t think it is. Rules like that have existed for a long time. In the process, they’ve saved a lot of lives.

But I think of this in the context of seat belt laws primarily because this isn’t one; it only seems to be. The idea that we should let clubs like Inverness, hell like Sevco, take their chances and risk going the way of Rangers has obvious appeal if you’ll permit me to use that word. On their heads be it, right?

Yet it’s not the case. FFP is a drunk driving law.

It’s not something that should be left up to the individual because it affects more than just the club itself. For a start, the fans of that club would, if given the choice, almost certainly prefer still having a club to watch in ten years than insanely following some madcap plan to chase unicorns at such enormous risk and those who wouldn’t probably do need to be protected from themselves and their own daft ideas.

The reputational damage one of these crises does to the game here is enormous too though. Rangers’ reckless spending and their collapse locked us into a terrible TV contract and reduced sponsorship income across the whole sport. It is doubtful that Scottish football has all the way recovered from the damage it did.

It is unconscionable that our so-called governors allowed any club to behave that way in the aftermath of Gretna and in particular when they knew Rangers already faced significant risks, and they must have known – we all certainly did – that those risks were putting a lot of the league’s contracts and deals in heightened jeopardy.

Tens of millions of pounds of players refused to join the Ibrox NewCo; had the league forced Rangers to sell those players in the summer of 2011 they could have paid their bills and existed as a going concern.

All of them walked away for free when Sevco bought the assets of the club. Nobody benefited from any of it but Rangers got to attempt to defend its final title, still posting losses, and the rest is history.

But 2012 represented the last opportunity lost. The whole of Scottish football could, and should, have come to its senses there and then and imposed sanity on all the clubs out there who are still not able to meet their running costs.

And I can’t help but wonder who were the obstacles to that reform?

I can’t help but think of a club which saw some “benefit” in running up debts in order to propel themselves up through the leagues. The Ibrox club, playing in the bottom tier of the game, was operating on the second highest wage bill in the country and outspending every other side in the land bar one. It was nonsensical and it was transparently dangerous for the governing bodies to allow it. Yet they did.

It was the French writer Pascal who wrote that “law without force is impotent.” Drunk driver laws are not just in place; they are enforced. Without that, there’s no point in having them because the same people who would get behind a wheel without them would not hesitate to do so if there was nothing to punish them for it. The SFA and the SPFL are gutless and it might just be that they didn’t put the rules in place out of fear that they might one day need to enforce them … it is absolutely pathetic.

Those of us who have long clamoured for reform have long understood that it was a matter of time before a club got itself into a state like the one Inverness has found itself in, and with no obvious way out of the hole. The only genuine surprise is that it has taken 12 years for us to get here. The risks of it have been screamingly obvious.

Through all of it, the governing bodies have not simply refused to act to protect the game but they have actually further endangered it. Neil Doncaster, last year, openly spoke about his hope that an oligarch would buy a club outside Glasgow to make the game more commercially attractive, apparently in complete ignorance of the fact that such a regime would soon find itself banned from playing in Europe.

He also ignored the obvious risks of opening Scottish clubs up to “investment” under dual ownership models, apparently not realising that a lot of these don’t work terribly well. He and others in the media have applauded “investments” at Hearts and Aberdeen, with one hack virtually begging their money men to consider Ibrox instead.

No-one seems to know what fresh debts these might incur, or what problems these decisions might ultimately create. It’s been rushed through without much pause for thought because these people have promised to put money in, at least in the short term, which is about all his attention span can handle.

So today Inverness stands on the brink and I both feel sympathy for them and I don’t at the same time. Their leaders made conscious decisions which led them to this point, and talk of extenuating circumstances is only valid up to a point.

But I know who I blame for it. I blame the bodies which are supposed to run our game because they haven’t done anything to prevent the scenario Inverness now faces, and which now threatens their future. We could have passed our seat-belt law a decade ago. We should have passed our drunk driving law in 2012.

That failure haunts us. It will kill one of our clubs before long.