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The future is bright!,everything is going great!,Scottish football is booming!,you're all crazy!,the people running Scottish football are proud of the work they are doing for Scottish football....................................................

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I have always thought that an amalgamation of the Dundee Clubs into a Dundee City was obvious but nearly got killed one day by an Arab for having the temerity of making such a suggestion. I have never understood how it is that if Aberdeen can only support one Club (barely) Dundee can support two (it can't).

 

There are far too many so called "senior" football clubs in Scotland. Clubs like Forfar, Brechin, Arbroath & Montrose should be amalgamated and/or become feeder clubs for St Johnstone, Dundee or Aberdeen. Ditto, Motherwell and Hamilton, Morton & Dumbarton, Dunfermline/Cowdenbeath/Raith Rovers/East Fife, Stirling Albion/East Stirling/Falkirk etc

 

Get it down to one or possibly two divisions of 16 or one 16 and 2x12 or even two 10's; something like that. We need to concentrate our megre resources on a smaller number of teams.

Inverness is a merged entity and although it has some success on the field, it doesn't attract significant support. Maybe the wounds of the merger are too recent to have healed.

 

Aberdeen is a merged club too, the product of three clubs, but as this happened a long time ago, it has largely been forgotten.

 

We talk about the Dundee clubs merging, but would it really work? Would thousands of fans be lost to the game when the city derby was lost along with the individual heritage of both clubs?

 

If UEFA offered a huge incentive for Rangers and Celtic to merge so that Glasgow could strut the world stage competing with Madrid and Munich, how many would be in favour? Think about it - sectarianism in the Glasgow football scene reduced or wiped out and the city given an opportunity to participate more equally in England and in Europe.

 

How many would be up for that?

 

The solution for Scottish football - right now - is not mergers. It is to regain a meaningful profile in the glamour zone. Rangers and Celtic give Scottish football stature, but Celtic is struggling and Rangers is lame.

 

Somehow, Scotland must find a way to have Rangers and Celtic competing in the big league. If this doesn't happen, Scottish football will effectively get wiped off the football map - no matter how many mergers there are.

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Agree with all of this but will never happen.Amalgamation should happen but won't unfortunately.

There are also too many senior clubs in Scotland who would be better off joining the junior or even amateur ranks. They are senior clubs in name only who contribute nothing to the professional game

 

Amalgamation seems a cruel way to solve the problem - IMO a better way would be to create a proper Scottish football pyramid incorporating the juniors, so that some of the less well supported clubs can fall away to a more appropriate, lower level. e.g. 2 or 3 out of the 4 clubs you mention (Forfar, Brechin, Arbroath & Montrose) would, over time, inevitably fall down the divisions to a 6th or 7th tier regional division (some form of East of Scotland league). They'd probably prosper with more derbies to play and lower travel expenses - more like the Ayrshire Juniors.

 

I also think there are more realistic options for the top flight - I once wrote up an idea for American style conferences for the less populous nations. Basically it involved clubs playing for their own Scottish / Belgian / Swiss etc. title whilst also playing a set number of matches against teams from other associations. It seems complicated at first, and is a bit alien to football fans, but each team in each conference has the same set of fixtures and can still logically be seen as the best team in their national association. It's hard to summarise - I could dig out the document and post it if anyone's interested.

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Amalgamation seems a cruel way to solve the problem - IMO a better way would be to create a proper Scottish football pyramid incorporating the juniors, so that some of the less well supported clubs can fall away to a more appropriate, lower level. e.g. 2 or 3 out of the 4 clubs you mention (Forfar, Brechin, Arbroath & Montrose) would, over time, inevitably fall down the divisions to a 6th or 7th tier regional division (some form of East of Scotland league). They'd probably prosper with more derbies to play and lower travel expenses - more like the Ayrshire Juniors.

 

I also think there are more realistic options for the top flight - I once wrote up an idea for American style conferences for the less populous nations. Basically it involved clubs playing for their own Scottish / Belgian / Swiss etc. title whilst also playing a set number of matches against teams from other associations. It seems complicated at first, and is a bit alien to football fans, but each team in each conference has the same set of fixtures and can still logically be seen as the best team in their national association. It's hard to summarise - I could dig out the document and post it if anyone's interested.

 

Interesting, sounds like a regionalised CL?

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Interesting, sounds like a regionalised CL?

 

Not really the way I imagine it - it wouldn't change the Champions league.

 

This is utterly hypothetical and the figures can be played with, but Imagine 5 interested national leagues decided to opt in. I'll say Scotland, Holland, Belgium, Denmark and Switzerland, - but it doesn't matter. Each restructures their national top flight to 6 (for example) teams. Each season, each country is drawn against 2 (for example) others and this is rotated so you get different foreign opposition each year. With some clever fixture scheduling it shouldn't matter how many nations are involved.

 

For example in one season:

 

Scottish teams could play against Swiss and Dutch.

Dutch teams against Scottish and Belgian.

Belgian teams against Dutch and Danish.

Danish teams against Belgian and Swiss.

Swiss teams against Danish and Scottish.

 

and this would rotate the next year.

 

In this example, each team would play 10 (5 home, 5 away) games against teams from their own nation plus 24 (12 home, 12 away) against teams from 2 foreign nations.

 

The winner of each national 6-team national "conference" is the one with the highest points total over all 34 games - the top however-many qualify for UEFA competition. The loser of each 6-team conference is relegated and replaced by the winner of that nation's second flight.

 

That's pretty much it. Like I say just and example - the figures can be played with to get a higher proportion of intra-national games if that seems more sensible, or a higher/lower number of games per season. More nations can opt in at any season, and (even) more complexity could be added by organising the conferences into tiers. With a tiered system, it's even possible that some nations could enter more than one conference with each playing in a different tier.

 

P.S. It's entirely possible that I'm not the only person who has ever come up with this idea, and equally possible that I've made a glaring logical error that renders the whole thing unworkable.

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The bottom line is that Scottish football is short of money and needs to get it primarily from better sponsorship deals and TV deals. Getting the right people running the game in Scotland to do this seems to be the biggest stumbling block to this. People such as Rhegan, Dumbcaster, and Liewell are not the answer

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Inverness is a merged entity and although it has some success on the field, it doesn't attract significant support. Maybe the wounds of the merger are too recent to have healed.

 

Aberdeen is a merged club too, the product of three clubs, but as this happened a long time ago, it has largely been forgotten.

 

We talk about the Dundee clubs merging, but would it really work? Would thousands of fans be lost to the game when the city derby was lost along with the individual heritage of both clubs?

 

If UEFA offered a huge incentive for Rangers and Celtic to merge so that Glasgow could strut the world stage competing with Madrid and Munich, how many would be in favour? Think about it - sectarianism in the Glasgow football scene reduced or wiped out and the city given an opportunity to participate more equally in England and in Europe.

 

How many would be up for that?

 

The solution for Scottish football - right now - is not mergers. It is to regain a meaningful profile in the glamour zone. Rangers and Celtic give Scottish football stature, but Celtic is struggling and Rangers is lame.

 

Somehow, Scotland must find a way to have Rangers and Celtic competing in the big league. If this doesn't happen, Scottish football will effectively get wiped off the football map - no matter how many mergers there are.

 

That will NEVER happen; a) where would they play - Hampden? b) what flag would the fans wave- the Union Jack with the tricolour in the middle?

When I grew up the weans used to play anywhere with jerseys as posts while we kicked tennis balls - tanner baws - around. That generation produced Baxter, Henderson, Jimmy Johnstone, Billy McNeill etc.

The first thing we have to do is get the kids involved again, because they want to be involved.

All else will find a way.

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That will NEVER happen; a) where would they play - Hampden? b) what flag would the fans wave- the Union Jack with the tricolour in the middle?

When I grew up the weans used to play anywhere with jerseys as posts while we kicked tennis balls - tanner baws - around. That generation produced Baxter, Henderson, Jimmy Johnstone, Billy McNeill etc.

The first thing we have to do is get the kids involved again, because they want to be involved.

All else will find a way.

I'm not saying that it will happen, but we live in a changing world where the unpredictable and unimagined really does come along.

 

Rangers and Celtic merging is about as far-fetched as it gets, but a few years ago how many Rangers fans would have believed that the club would suffer all the bad things that have happened to it? A relative handful.

 

We are experiencing an era where Rangers is gradually weakening as a football club and as an institution. I don't expect there to be a full recovery unless there is fundamental change to the club, and also to Scottish football.

 

Rangers has to re-invent itself at every level and if I'm honest, I'm not sure that it is capable of doing so.

 

Anyone suggesting in Manchester 2008 that the roof was close to falling in would have been laughed at. I wonder what clued-up soothsayers are predicting now.

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As long as sky and bt keep pumping multi millions into England there will be no decent money into our game. Even if they did we don't have enough footfall for our top 10/12 teams so it's not going to be a good product. I wish I had an idea of a solution but tbh I haven't got a clue

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