Gordon Strachan accused half of SPFL clubs of “pretending to be professional” and holding the rest back as he demanded a radical rethink of Scottish football.
The former Scotland boss - now technical director at Dundee - launched a withering assessment of the structure of the league north of the border and claimed 40-50 per cent of clubs wouldn’t survive in the English National League.
As Ann Budge prepares to put her reconstruction proposals in front of fellow clubs in the coming days, Strachan reckons a serious rethink is needed to breathe money and new life into our game once it has recovered from the covid crisis.
“For maybe 40 per cent of clubs in Scotland would not have the ability to survive in the conference in England,” Strachan told the BBC.
“And we give them this vote that says they are professional. They are not professional. They’re not even good community clubs at times.
“If your players don’t come from that community and the community has no interest in watching them and then you are calling yourself professional then it’s not really professional.
“We are allowing people to have votes and saying they are a professional club.
“I want to see clubs who are professional who want to build and build and build and bring through young kids and prepare to have full-time staff and then be called professional teams - not pretending to be professional teams.
"Don't tell me you're a professional club when you're paying people part-time 80 quid a week and nobody turns up to your football matches.
"If you want to be a professional club, show it.
"Have full-time employees, have full-time players, have an academy, do the whole lot. Just don't play at being a football team and then expect us to look after you.
"When you talk about clubs coming into the league, what are they bringing in? Two hundred people a week to a game, is that really professional football?
"The teams in the bottom two leagues at the moment, in general, how many players have they produced over the last 14 years?"
Strachan insists the product in Scottish football could be “100 per cent better” than it is currently.
Calling for a properly professional league with the biggest club competing against each other on grass surfaces, the former Celtic and Middlesbrough manager added: “There has to be a rethink of what product we are showing the world. When the product is better you will get more sponsors. You will get investors. If you have have more derbies we can say ‘look what you are getting’.
“But they are not going to want to sponsor games that nobody is interested in. If there’s only 200 people turning up then why is the rest of the world going to tune in?
“I don’t want this grey thing appearing on my telly on a Sunday. But we are quite happy with it. We are scared to go ‘we need to change this in a big way’.”
