Supporters of Partick Thistle are familiar with being patronised. Saturday afternoons in Maryhill are not a soft option. Following a Glasgow team for whom success is rare means regular pats on the head. It would be blissfully easy to swap Firhill for Celtic Park or Ibrox.
Thistle – the club and support – are now deserving of genuine sympathy. The cards dealt to them represent a sporting scandal. As the Scottish Professional Football League hurtled through an infamous vote aimed at abandoning season 2019-20, they were by far the biggest victims. The fact that debate over a now-aborted league reconstruction rumbled on for weeks prolonged the agony. Hearts have the resource to say they will see the SPFL in court; so, too, it has now been announced will Thistle after a benefactor offered to underwrite legal costs. “We have agreed that we will launch a joint legal challenge to resolve what others have failed to do since April,” said the Thistle chair, Jacqui Low.
Football fans who won’t recognise the gross unfairness of Thistle’s situation are not worthy of the label. Ian McCall’s team trailed the Championship’s second-bottom team, Queen of the South, by two points with a fixture in hand – they had nine to play – and have been bounced into League One under this new phenomenon of points per game.
The trouble is, with many clubs doubtful whether it is practical to play behind closed doors, the SPFL has no start date for Leagues One and Two. Hence Thistle, a business with last reported turnover of £3m and 83 employees, have seen their viable full-time operation shunted into cold storage by a league body supposedly built for members. In the midst of a pandemic, 0.04 of a point sealed their fate. No wonder the club admit to being “sickened”.
Thistle’s loyal following have cause to wonder why they should bother to subsidise fellow clubs with their gate money. Not so fans of Brechin City, a team who ‘finished’ bottom of the bottom tier but were miraculously spared a play-off against clubs from lower down the Scottish pyramid. A pyramid that has been fatally undermined. Pieced together, from a Dundee vote entering Scottish football’s version of the Bermuda Triangle to the announcement of an incomplete outcome and the burden shunted on to Hearts and Thistle, the national sport has been hauled into disrepute. And all, it must be emphasised, completely unnecessarily.
Hearts’ relegation to an abbreviated Championship when denied scope to avoid that ignominy on the field was wrong. Raging and subsequent debate as to whether a club of smaller standing would have been spared was handy for the SPFL executive. This shifted the narrative. That Ann Budge, the Hearts owner, was the one put forward to lead attempt after attempt at reconstruction was another useful diversion. Meanwhile the SPFL pays a chief executive, Neil Doncaster, £400,000 a year; more than every player at 40 of 42 member clubs.
Incredibly, the SPFL has allowed the theory to permeate that confirming Celtic’s ninth title in succession was uppermost in its thoughts. Consequences? They can wait. Social media is awash with Celtic supporters – who have The Hague on speed dial for refereeing controversies – pontificating about the validity of this SPFL outcome. The fear, one assumes, is that their latest championship – about which the wider resonance is questionable – could somehow be affected by the noise. If that tribalism is easy to comprehend, the general lack of criticism of the SPFL’s coronavirus approach is bewildering.
Had the league drawn breath, ensuring clubs were not meaningfully hurt by unfair relegations would have been at the forefront of its original resolution. But still, it is quite something to set out a plan that needlessly wounds the innocent and another entirely not to row back when alternative options are available. A 14-team top flight would have cost lower Premiership teams around 0.1% of commercial revenues and the bottom two in the Championship 0.005%. Instead, a structure so ineffective it cannot command a title sponsor is maintained, even before associated damage is considered.
Budge may have been naive in accepting the SPFL’s challenge of doing its executive’s work but some of the language fired towards her, including in a newspaper column that branded her as Hyacinth Bucket, has been vicious and misogynistic. Scottish football does not seem to much like a female self-made multimillionaire putting stake in the game, working without salary for six years and trying to highlight failing systems.
Roy MacGregor, the chairman of Ross County, has insisted Hearts must “take their medicine”. The trouble for MacGregor, and clubs throughout Scotland, is supporters of Hearts and Partick Thistle – the ones who have not lost faith entirely – will not forget. Neither should they. There will be no inclination to hand over cash at the turnstiles to clubs who inflicted harm. When Scottish football needs support, wilful punishment has been meted out. It should be possible to acknowledge this shameful situation and simultaneously point out Hearts and Thistle should have been nowhere near the nether regions of their respective leagues.
Some £300,000 a year has been wiped from a new television deal with Sky as the league compensates for missing 2019-20 fixtures. Similar claims from BT, the BBC and overseas-rights holders are in the mix. The Scottish FA’s chief executive, Ian Maxwell, countersigned a letter to Uefa which asserted a line should be drawn under 2019-20. Maxwell still insists the season’s Scottish Cup will finish; somewhere, sometime, somehow.
Hearts, one of the semi-finalists, have in the meantime been jettisoned into another division – which does not start until mid-October – and told they cannot begin training at the same time as Premiership opponents. If this whole affair was not so serious it would be downright hysterical. Nobody at Firhill is laughing either. If there is justice, that will change before too long.
