calscot

Surely they will go into administration and the Duff and Phelps equivalent will drag it out until the end of the season for a big fat fee and then they will liquidate the club and sell to a newco...

Firstly, I thought the Premier League was invented as the league WASN'T competitive enough? Secondly, you're talking about times when no country had TV money and teams shared gates. What do you do when Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Man Utd keep their gate money and have huge TV incomes? Do you really think reducing our own income will help against them? Celtic have had a good run this year and we had one when we got to the final; it does happen now and again as you say. But would those runs would have happened if you removed 30% - 40% of the club's income? They've already done it against big odds so I severely doubt it.

Maybe, but isn't posts like this the reason you've been perpetually pissing into the wind?

I don't see how it makes Scottish football stronger as the total resources would be the same just shared out differently. So where is the strength? And it makes the top teams very much weaker in Europe. Not only that it means our top players will leave to other shores as there will be no clubs able to compete on their wages with bigger clubs from bigger countries and so you get a bigger talent drain than before. You also don't have the benefit of lifting your game due to talented players from abroad like Laudrup, Larsson et al as no-one can afford them. You actually may end up with teams full of foreign journeymen as they are slightly better than the crop of home grown players left and seeing as everyone is scrabbling for the best Scottish players, these foreigners will probably be better value. The only thing you get is a pretty even league where you really don't know who's going to beat whom. However, that may sound good but it is in fact incredibly boring - all games are equal and there are none to look out for - no big games between the big clubs, no big games for the small clubs to look forward to, you don't look at the results and see any shocks or expected wins - it's all just a bit random. It's very hard for humans to be interested in a homogeneous pool of mediocrity. I just can't see how you would be making the game stronger - more like destroying it in my eyes.

So if someone uses an obscure user name instead of their real name, has no personal information in their profile and no photo of their mug as an avatar, are they "obv" hiding something? So what are YOU hiding?

I'd hate to split the money with SPL teams out of principle. Not sharing means that you can give your money to the club you support and not someone you don't want to give a penny to. I can't see how the OF would compete in Europe with that model.

What makes a strong league? It seems to me you need about 50m people who want to pay for expensive TV subscriptions to watch it. We don't have that and never will. I'm not saying Scottish football should give up but there is absolutely no benefit in destroying yourself by trying to compete with the English et al. We actually did that when Advocaat came along and look where we are now. You have to know the reality of where you are and try to make the best of what is readily achievable. Once you've realised that you'll never be a property magnate it's maybe time to make sure your own house is as good as it can be. I can see no way of making Scottish football strong in the current manifestation - as they say, take a load of individual sticks and it's easy to break them, put them together in a bundle and they become too strong to break. We need a revolution of ethos and the only sure way for that to happen is for the current system to have a disaster. That's what makes people realise that they need to pull together. If some clubs go by the wayside so be it - they just weren't strong enough and if you want a strong league you need survival of the fittest. In the business world poorly run companies die all the time and others amalgamate to keep themselves strong. Perhaps that's what's needed in football. But in the end we going to be a lesser pile and so to sit top of it is about as good as it will get with the odd, short European run or result as a bonus. We used to think we could be as big as Barca but now a Scottish team beating them is an amazing feat akin to Berwick Rangers beating us all those years ago. We messed up by not creating a British league about 20 or 30 years ago when the interest in England may have been there and two formerly small Welsh teams who used to kick around the lower divisions have now become pretty big clubs compared to us - from a country where football is their second sport and the population is 60% of ours. I think we even messed up that we didn't attempt to join the English Conference rather than SFL3. Unless there is big change, then Scottish football will never be strong.

I would guess they about commensurable with the equivalent level in other countries - it's just that in other countries that level are not actually in the main leagues, but usually a regional one instead, as part of a pyramid system.

Doesn't seem to work for Denmark or even Belgium and other countries. Scotland thrived in Europe for years by concentrating the wealth on the top teams. Even now we have Celtic doing not too bad but what do the likes of Motherwell achieve? If we shared the wealth equally, we'd have a league of teams about Motherwell's level, maybe a bit better but we wouldn't have the OF who can actually sometimes challenge for the second round of the CL or the latter stages of the Europa league. England now do the same thing - they have a Premiership team for every 2.7m people. That's equivalent to the ratio of OF teams to Scottish population.

Didn't we poach their youth coach?

It might be used by paedophiles but there are many legitimate reasons to use it - avoidance of identity theft, fraud, spam, vriuses etc as well as things like Wikileaks etc. Just because you want privacy doesn't mean you necessarily have something to hide - or should we not be allowed private phonecalls, locked houses, secure files etc?

We have 42 teams in our professional leagues for 5m people, England have 92 teams for 53m people...

I can't see how it can be bad for Rangers - we're in division three, put there by the very teams in financial trouble. We will NEVER be able to compete regularly in the Champions League unless there is a move to a British or Atlantic league, or some other European restructuring so we shouldn't really be worrying about that. What we should be worrying about is how our domestic league is run, especially at the top - and that is so rotten to the core as we've witnessed that it really does need a huge catharsis and meltdown so that we can rebuild it on sensible grounds with co-operatation and collaboration rather than the backstabbing, deceit and nefarious machinations behind the scenes that we currently have. The SPL is diseased and need a huge reality check where they can learn the lessons of their pettiness and destructive self interest. I think Scottish football needs an Armageddon in order to rise from the ashes as a much more healthy prospect. We need a cure, not a band-aid.

PS If he's paid till then he should be banned from taking another job without forfeiting the amount of money in his new wage.

Managers should have performance clauses that affect their payoff on the event of their dismissal.

Two points about that article. 1. The biggest derby in Scotland this season is by a long way Rangers v Queens Park - last attendance was 49,463. Hibs vs Hearts was 12887 which makes it third behind the Dundee derby at 13538. The next Hearts home derby will probably put them back in second place but that will probably even be a long way behind Queens Park's home derby attendance. 2. Hearts would be deducted 18 points - I believe the third of 52pts is rounded up.

Seems to me that football should have a rule that players are paid for fully up front. That would help prevent clubs getting into so much crippling debt and stop clubs from losing money from an insolvency event. I really don't agree with these instalments and in our case have shown what a nightmare they can be.

Previously, I never really wanted to see a Scottish club go to the wall – including Celtic when they were minutes from going under. Although there was the exception where Hearts tried to take over Hibs. I think one team in Edinburgh, if in the future they could garner support from all its citizens, could make a third force in Scottish football which raises the standard of the league. That can only be good for the Old firm in that it increases competition and also the amount of money coming into the game. As a Rangers fan I would welcome a more competitive league with three teams as it has been shown to work in countries such as the Netherlands and Portugal. It means that instead of hoping your one rival slips up to a much smaller side there is real pressure to win big games – and if you slip up, there are two teams who can take advantage and so there is unlikely to be many walkover seasons when one team has a bad year or even just a bad run of results. Celtic fans are of course the opposite where they want to reduce competition to a minimum so that they automatically win every year. It’s the only way they know. Anyway that brings us to Hearts. If they go bust completely that leaves one Edinburgh side. In twenty years they could be drawing the combined crowds of both clubs at round 26k – add on some glory hunters and the prospect of actually be a force to be reckoned with and that could be boosted to £35k, making the gap between them and the Glasgow clubs very bridgeable on a good year. Before I was ambivalent about such things as I never wanted to see a club go to the wall but that sentimentality has been removed by events and I now hope they do a Gretna. It could be good for the game in the long run. This could open the way for a 16 or 18 team league as you would replace 4 big games for the OF to 6 big games with three teams playing each other twice each. That could also be a bigger draw for television which could concentrate on three teams with a big following, instead of only catering for two.

Hearts will be deducted 18 points if they go into administration.

So you're saying our young players aren't good enough for the U21 team?

Surprised at so many Celtic players who are not getting a game compared to one Rangers player when a fair few are getting game time. We may be in the third division but are playing at a higher standard than that as evidenced by being top of the league and already having already put Motherwell, Falkirk, Alloa and East Fife to sword. Whereas Celtic players are playing in an U21 league which is hardly a high level and not particularly competitive.

You mean "break" their rules...

The trouble is that people keep clicking on the links making them the highest read. That justifies Spiers' employment as he looks really popular/controversial and looks good to the advertisers. We need an online campaign to stop Rangers fans clicking on his articles. He'll obviously still be popular with that other lot as they can't get enough of Rangers bashing no matter how pathetic and unsubstantiated it is and they embrace all lies as gospel if it suits their thinking. We need people to black list the Herald on their NewsNow page so that they never even see the headlines and stop all subscriptions to the pay wall. The Herald is just becoming another Celtic View and why would a bear read that?

And our transfer money for Davis etc.

Hearts reputedly spent 8m on wages last year. Despite that they lost 11 times to non-OF SPL teams - and won 13 times. They won, drew and lost to ICT. They won once and lost three times to Motherwell. It shows that that kind of wage bill doesn't guarantee wins against SPL teams.