THE basic and decent principle that Scottish Football needs to follow is that no club should lose out or suffer from whatever solution that is brought forward to allow football to resume when this dreadful coronavirus pandemic recedes. Below I have outlined a few ideas which may be useful for those who are going to have to make tough decisions in the weeks ahead.
Any club shouting about this or that ‘creative’ solution simply to deny their rivals should be ignored completely.
Hearts, if the season ends with no further play, and the places stand – as is in the rules – would be relegated. That is both unfair and self-defeating for the overall good of the Scottish game, and please put to one side any dislike that you may have for Hearts.
This crisis, as it affects Scottish football, is NOT like the 2012 crisis in one crucial regard. This time none of the clubs are responsible for the crisis. Then it was tax cheating, spending money that they did not have, trading with insolvent for years and throwing someone else’s kitchen sink at their own particular problem of trying to stop Celtic.
This time Hearts are not to blame and should not be relegated in the event – as is 99% likely – that there can be no games played before 30 June.
The only viable options – that are fair and reasonable and do not impose any penalty or deny any advantage – would be re-structure the game or to declare Celtic Provisional Champions and confirm the UEFA places for the relevant tournaments, pay out the league placings as they stand at the moment (the clubs need the money) and then finish the season in August before starting the new season in September.
This will give Motherwell the chance to catch the Rangers and finish second (unlikely but possible), it will give Celtic the chance to shed the Provisional tag by winning the title with all fixtures having been fulfilled and it will allow the relegation issues to be settled on the park.
If the clubs want to alter the sums due to changes in the league then that can be done too. For instance if Hearts get the immediate payment due to the club that finishes bottom then they finish 10th then they are due some extra money at the next pay-out date while other clubs could be due slightly less because they dropped down the league in August as the season 2019/20 is completed.
No-one loses in that situation. It’s fair, reasonable and just and if the games are crammed into the month of August it is going to be a very exciting way to kick things off again.
Indeed the only argument that could be presented would be if the Rangers were to catch Celtic – who are 13 points clear at this stage – and win the league then they would have been denied a Champions League option as Celtic would have this as Provisional Champions, as informed to UEFA on 30 June – before any more football can be played.
But Celtic have failed to make it through the group stage qualifiers for the past two season so that isn’t easy. And Neil Doncaster could perhaps earn his extremely large salary to lobby for two places in the Champions League qualifiers round-one, for all the teams that could have won the league (however unlikely). This could be accommodated by UEFA by the seeded teams in the draw for the early round of qualifiers playing a one-off game at home ie the same as UEFA are doing in the Euro play-offs eg Scotland v Israel was not a home and away situation, it was to be decided by one game at Hampden.
Celtic would be seeded as league leaders / Provisional Champions and the Rangers unseeded as runners-up. This negates even the smallest of potential losses that the Rangers could suffer. Them trying to deny Celtic a title to deny 9IAR is of no real relevance to any of the other clubs who are all looking at their own survival prospects and couldn’t really care less which Glasgow side wins the league.
That UEFA solution is a decent idea and is worth consideration but surely league re-structuring is too?
One of the problems with Scottish football is those plastic pitches and it has to be acknowledged that the teams who have them have NOT been getting relegated and you could argue that the surface they place their home games on has a bearing on that.
Livingston denied Celtic of 5 points this season – in their two home games – and that is the most any side, including the Rangers, have taken off the run-away league leaders this season. Similarly Kilmarnock have caused the Rangers all sorts of problems down at Rugby Park – so this is not a pro-Celtic point.
Look at the top for sides in the Championship as things stand. Dundee Utd, Inverness Caley Thistle, Dundee and Ayr Utd – all play on grass.
If these four were promoted to join a 16 team league, playing each other twice that gives 30 games. The league could split at that stage into the top 8 and bottom 8 and that would give us another 7 games. Taking us 37. I have suggest before playing a fourth Glasgow Derby (maybe the one at New Year) as a Glasgow Cup Final or we could introduce a Charity Cup concept as they do down south. The criteria to play in this match would be the Champions from the previous season plays the Runners-up.
Those four Championship teams would add to the league, reduce the percentage of plastic pitches in the league and would benefit Scottish football in the longer term.
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