The Premier Sports extension stinks. Will Celtic ever lead this game out of this mess?

Yesterday the news broke that Scottish football has extended its contract with Premier Sports until 2030. Much of the media greeted this as brilliant news.

As someone who’s been paying for Premier Sports for four years and still doesn’t really know why, I can’t see a single positive in it. Celtic don’t see anything positive either — we pulled out of the last Premier Sports arrangement when they wanted to show games from Celtic Park, and we unilaterally exercised the clause that allowed us to opt out.

That should have been a red-letter day for Scottish football. It should have set alarm bells ringing — not just at Premier Sports, but within the SPFL itself. The fact we chose to withdraw told you everything.

We knew the deal wasn’t worth much to us. Anything that makes the matchday experience harder, that disrupts ticket sales or lowers attendances, simply isn’t worth it. The risk-to-reward calculation just doesn’t favour it.

The truth is, we’ve known for some time that the Premier Sports deal is a dud. It’s bad for Celtic. It’s bad for the Scottish football fanbase, who are now expected to pay three separate subscriptions to follow their team — one for league games, one for Europe, and now another for domestic cup competitions. And the tragedy is, we’re locked into this arrangement for another five years.

That means Sky or TNT can’t even put a new offer on the table. There’s no route out. We’re locked into this garbage until 2030, with no upside — not for the customer, not for the clubs. Premier Sports, meanwhile, gets a guaranteed monthly subscription income, far into the future, for delivering next to nothing in return. And folk wonder why some fans turn to piracy — the famous little black boxes, the chipped PlayStations, the Fire Sticks and other ways to circumvent this paywall hellscape.

The more low-value content we’re expected to pay for, the more people will stop paying altogether. And nobody wins. Premier Sports probably aren’t even making money on this. BT Sport — before they rebranded as TNT — had so few subscribers after taking the Champions League rights from Sky that they resorted to showing the biggest games free on YouTube and terrestrial TV.

There’s nothing to celebrate here.

This was a bad deal when it was first signed, and it’s still a bad deal now. It’s disgraceful that we’ve extended it. The original expiry date was 2027 — that should have been our chance to renegotiate, to bring Scottish Cup and League Cup coverage back under the same roof as the Premiership or the European fixtures.

Either of those options would have been better than this.

And not for the first time, I find myself asking: where is our club’s leadership in all this? What is the position of the Americans who’ve just bought the club across the city? These are supposed to be sharp operators — marketing and commercial experts, with their people now sitting at SPFL and SFA board level.

If they’re the visionaries we’ve been told they are, what do they make of this contract? If this is what they’re signing off on, then Ibrox fans shouldn’t expect miracles from them in times to come. They’ve locked themselves into a suicide pact here.

I still don’t really understand what those people are doing at Ibrox. Unless they’ve got some secret plan to recoup their money that has nothing to do with the club’s actual wellbeing, I can’t see a path to profit in this environment, not when the club remains addicted to spending money it doesn’t have.

I hoped these new owners would bring professional management, that they’d tighten the ship and make it run better than it ever has. That would have suited Celtic too, because an austerity programme over there weakens them and strengthens us.

But more than that, I hoped they might see an opportunity to change the revenue model altogether — that they’d push for reform at the top of the game, work with other clubs like Hearts and Aberdeen (who also have American ownership) to inject a bit of entrepreneurial spirit into Scottish football, to promote its value properly.

Because what we’ve got instead are leaders who are still happy to let Neil Doncaster sit at the top table, dragging this game in circles and licking up the crumbs dropped by the bigger leagues.

Celtic should have spent years building alliances with other clubs to pursue genuine reform. Our failure to do that has left a gap — and if we won’t lead, someone else will. I don’t particularly like the idea of Ibrox having influence over Scottish football’s direction, but if their self-interest drags the rest of us upwards, I’m prepared to tolerate it. Because a better TV deal benefits every club. And it’s a scandal that this extension was nodded through while owners of clubs were sitting at the table.

I’ll grant that some of them are new to the game and might not yet understand the full landscape — but how long does it take to read a contract and realise it’s garbage? At the very least, someone should have demanded a strategic pause. There was no need to extend this deal now. It had two years left to run.

Something is badly, badly wrong in our game.

But with the influx of American interests, I reckon there is also an opportunity — a real opportunity — to change it. To do something transformative. And we all know that ought to start with clearing out the dead wood at the top. Doncaster’s continued role in Scottish football is an insult to everyone who lived through 2012 and knows exactly what his brand of “leadership” amounts to.

This game needs a revolution. If it must be an American one, so be it. It should have been led from Celtic Park, but our leadership lacks strategic vision, it lacks backbone, and it’s never had the drive to lead the charge. So, if someone else takes up the banner and we get dragged toward progress whether we like it or not, then fine. Because something must change.

Things cannot go on like this.