Failing The Richard Scudamore Test

Yesterday, the Scottish Football League voted to accept Servco (Scotland)’s application for Newco Rangers to play in their league next season.  Crucially, the SFL voted that Newco Rangers, like any other new applicant, start in the Third Division – very much against the wishes of the SPL, their chief executive Neil Doncaster and the chief executive of the SFA Stuart Regan.

As I have previously posted, placing Newco Rangers in the Third Divison is not only the best way forward out of this situation for Scottish Football (and also for Newco Rangers – as to be fair to them many of the fans of “old” Rangers realise) but the only credible option available.  The strange thing in all this though is that while the clubs in the SPL voted to refuse Newco Rangers entry, and the SFL voted to treat Newco Rangers as a normal applicant in a dignified fashion, the heads of our game have behaved in an unedifying fashion that at times may have verged on bullying.  In short Neil Doncaster and Stuart Regan have lost their credibility.

The arguments put forward from Doncaster and Regan are that sponsors will walk away from the game if Newco Rangers were to start their new life in the Third Division.  The contract for broadcasting the SPL is up next year and the thought is that BSkyB would not be interested in showing the SPL without “their” quota of Old Firm games.  It’s this doomsday scenario which prompted the season ticket meeting at Greenhill Road where the board of St Mirren outlined why in the whole they supported bending the rules and hoped that Newco Rangers were allowed to skip two divisions to start in the tier below the SPL – or as it was put this was “the least worst option”.  This brings us to the title of this post.

Richard Scudamore as you may well know is the combatative Chief Executive of the English Premier League.  You might be annoyed at him for describing Manchester City’s championship win not as an exiting moment or by esposing some other football fan cliché but as a shining example of “inward investment to our game”.  But he does go and bat for his organisation, and then some.  He managed to see off Blair’s (half hearted – remember this was the late Tony Banks baby) attempts to set up a regulator for football and has managed to negotiate an increase for the next set of television rights.  Say what you like about his achievements and his perennial appearances on television defending sometimes the indefensible, but at least he defends his organisation.  Can you say the same about Regan and Doncaster?

Regan & Doncaster have, since HMRC confirmed what many people knew already and dismissed Green’s CVA proposals, bent over backwards for the corporate sponsors and have constantly put the case for them.  What they have never done is what Scudamore does with aplomb, and go and bat for their members and put the case that essentially things have changed and that they should continue to back a clean version of Scottish Football.  Rather than talk up the game, Regan & Doncaster have constantly talked down the game.  Whether the sponsors will now take flight is another matter & we will see if this is the case.  Interestingly enough with all the (justified) ire directed at Regan & Doncaster, there has been no talk of fan boycotts should there be a mass exodus of sponsors from the Scottish game.

Whether yesterday’s actions now draw a line under the implosion at Ibrox, or this is only the first chapter remains to be seen.  We may even get a hint of what is to come on Monday when the SPL meet to discuss the identity of “Club 12” – with maybe Doncaster and Regan poised to push for discuss SPL 2.  It is now clear that you can include the careers of Stuart Regan and Neil Doncaster to the list of casualties in this episode, given that there were calls for a vote of no confidence in Regan at yesterday’s meeting.  When the dust settles on this crisis and people in Scottish football have retained their clear heads, Doncaster and Regan should announce their intention to leave their posts, any other outcome will exacerbate this crisis.

A High Stakes Game Of Poker

While the “nation” has been involved with Euro 2012, the tennis and the upcoming Olympics, the Rangers situation rumbles on with yesterday’s vote only really confirming Newco Rangers non retention in the SPL – a situation that has evolved over the past couple of weeks.

Where this vote leaves Scottish football remains to be seen.  On Tuesday night, I and another 400 odd St Mirren fans gathered at Greenhill Road to hear the pre-vote thoughts from our Chairman, Stewart Gilmour.  What was discussed was starkly brutal as Gilmour essentially painted a bleak picture for Scottish Football as a picture was painted of the outcome for Scottish Football if Newco Rangers were to be asked to start off at the bottom of the Third division, Gilmour believes that while St Mirren are at their healthiest financial position in 20 years that the club would still be at risk of Administration alongside 5 or 6 other SPL clubs.  The root cause of this bleak picture was outlined as corporate sponsors and broadcasting companies taking flight from the Scottish game.

As Gilmour was speaking about losses in revenue of between £600,000 and £1.1 million (from last season) should Rangers be put into the lowest professional level and about season tickets being 300 down from last season (I suspect that the general economy has a part to play here, the Rangers situation may not be as big a factor), the thought entered my head that this is essentially a very large game of poker, with the future of Scottish Football at stake.

The contenders are thus: the fans (who watch the game week in and week out, who put the squeeze on their clubs in the first place) the SPL teams (who spoke yesterday), the SPL “management” (Neil Doncaster and his staff, who have only succeeded in representing the concerns of his corporate clients and not the clubs), The SFL, the SFA, the broadcasters and the corporate sponsors. Oh, and Newco Rangers.  All have their opinions on the best way forwards and all have their vested interests.

The biggest irony is that the majority of fans (even the Rangers fans) are in agreement, that Newco Rangers should start in Division three.  The roadblock to reform, so to speak, is the administrators, the sponsors and the broadcasters.

As I said at the start of this post, today only confirms what had been on the cards for some time.  The future of Newco Rangers – if it has a future – remains to be seen.  Crucially, that future is becoming more and more tied to the future of Scottish Football.  This game has a long time to go yet.

Setanta: The Last Rite's

It seems that Setanta has been on death row for weeks now, and this is the third re-write of this particular posting, but today the lights finally went out on a company which had only really entered the public consciousness when they won the right to televise the SPL in 2004.

Friday saw the announcement that they had defaulted on their £30 million payment to the Premier League, which lead to the cancellation of the current contract to show 46 league games, and the contract to show 23 league games which was due to start the following term. This news was followed by the announcement that prospective backers were pulling out of a financing package. That was followed on Monday by the news that the SPL would be pulling out of their contract and seeking a new television partner. To add insult to injury, the English Premiership wasted no time in announcing that ESPN would be taking over the remainder of Setanta’s contracts.

TwoHundredPercent has been blogging on the impact that the sinking of Setanta would have on the former Conference, and in many respects the impact there would be much worse than the impact felt in the EssPeeEll (© Bill Leckie 1999). Scottish Football hasn’t really been flush with cash since the first implosion of TV rights fees in 2002, which led to Motherwell going into administration and Clydebank and Airdrieonians going to the wall (only for a reborn Airdrie United taking Clydebank’s place in the League, ironically Gretna were admitted to the Scottish League at this point too). There was a feeling that Scottish Football had left those days behind when the new contract with Setanta was announced just weeks ago, a contract supposedly worth £125 million starting in 2010, and one which according to the Sunday Herald the Old Firm & Aberdeen were against signing. It now looks as if the SPL will go with the option favoured by those three teams, and take the Murdoch shilling once more, even if the offer is substantially less than the original offer.

Theoretically, Scottish football should be in a better position to weather any possible drop in revenues. However there are rumours that there could be 3 SPL clubs in trouble should Setanta go belly up. Kilmarnock are said to be heavily in debt, Falkirk were said to be in a bad position should they have gone down, while it is not clear who the other team could be. Outside of the Old Firm, who has big debts which are “serviceable” thanks to continued participation in european competition, the only teams closest to financial safety are Hibernian (thanks to the sales of promising players), newly promoted St Johnstone and St Mirren (thanks to tax dodgers Tesco). Everyone else will feel the squeeze, which would be exasperated by the poor economic situation.

Many of the “business correspondents” will point to Setanta having a business model which was doomed to failure, especially in poor economic times. This is one of the reasons why pay per view won’t really take off in the same way that it does in the USA. However, one of the key reasons must be the elephant in the room in the shape of BSkyB. Anyone entering the market for broadcasting sport in the UK must have deep pockets, and it is no coincidence that the collapse of Setanta, and earlier on this decade ITV Digital, came after both paid huge money for sports rights (ITV digital shelled out about £330 million for Football league rights, while Setanta paid part of the £425 million for FA Cup and England’s home games) in an attempt to challenge BSkyB’s dominance of the sports market.

Of course, with all the comparison’s with the English Football League’s ill fated broadcast marriage with ITV Digital flying about, with forecasts of a similar meltdown in store for the SPL, there is one similarity. Both the English Football League and the SPL felt that they had to go with small, untried sports broadcasters due to the monopoly which exists within pay-tv sportscasters, shown in the “poor” offer’s submitted for both sets of rights.