If you are less than enthralled by the Scottish Premier League, you are unlikely to work up a sweat regarding its proposed second division. Even less so when you discover that such an entity already exists under a different name. It has been a week indeed for quips about a tramp dressed in Prada still being, well, a tramp.
The SPL, a separate body from the Scottish FA and Scottish Football League, has long campaigned for a second franchise; aptly named SPL2. They would invite clubs already in Scotland's First Division to resign from their current governing body – the Scottish Football League – and join the 12 teams who comprise the SPL, albeit in a second tier. There is no suggestion of altering the size and format of either division; it would, in essence, be a re-branding exercise aimed at generating more money for the clubs involved.
Yep, this is a fractious industry, and an arbitration body had to be set up to decide whether this was a legal and viable prospect. The outcome is that it is, hence First Division chairmen rubbing their hands at potential fresh income streams. Those in the Second and Third Divisions have a fear over what attraction the SFL has left to potential backers without their 10 top clubs. Celtic, however, may be on hand to ease worried minds.
That SPL2 was raised amid the prospect of television coverage and new advertising income more than two years ago matters rather significantly to what will happen today. With money tight and the SPL's existing host broadcaster, Setanta, encountering more serious issues, will there be a scramble to screen Clyde v Airdrie United? It is hardly being disrespectful to suggest that anyone with a key interest in such a game would actually attend it.
Similarly, advertisers and sponsors are likely to adopt an altogether more wary approach to such a scheme than they did in the heady days of 2007. Scotland's First Division, while far from a twitching corpse, hardly attracts the sort of attendances that will have national business executives frothing at the mouth.
Such vagaries should not, as has widely been the case, be used as a vicious criticism either of the clubs involved or the SPL itself. In a country where bashing football officialdom has become second nature, it is odd that the men in blazers are being hammered for seeking to raise income streams and retain full-time football where, many would argue, there has long been little sense in it. The same chairmen would surely be berated if they were doing nothing to protect the financial security of their clubs, as would the SPL for not seeking to maximise revenue for anyone outside their existing membership.
Yet this leaves the SFL in something of a state of flux if, when their existing sponsorship deal – with Irn Bru, how stereotypical – runs out, clubs exit for the promised land. Even if it is debatable what St Johnstone, for example, owe Berwick Rangers, regional reconstruction would almost certainly be essential in the remaining two leagues in order that they survive in some form at least.
As it stands, crowds are paltry and some clubs are resigned to a hand-to-mouth existence. Thoughts of inviting those from outside the professional sphere to join have been floated in the past but the most attractive of them, juniors such as Pollok, are successful, profitable and content in their present state. Wages at junior level regularly dwarf those available in the SFL's bottom two tiers.
There is perhaps a cruel irony associated with the fact that a potential feeder division, the Highland League, has been handicapped severely by the loss of Inverness Thistle, Caledonian, Ross County, Elgin City and Peterhead to the SFL in the past 15 years.
Those ever-charitable folks at Celtic could offer a solution. The Parkhead club have privately intimated a desire to field a second-string team in the Third Division, a matter that would, backers say, drive up attendances and interest in the lower leagues. It is also a plan that would have more logistical hurdles than building your average fleet of jumbo jets.
Even taking into account there is no obvious venue for Celtic B to play at, or evidence that a dormant support would come out and watch them – more imaginable, in fact, is that fans would be drawn away from elsewhere – there is a basic, players' issue.
Celtic's reserve team in recent years has regularly comprised players such as Bobo Balde, Massimo Donati, Derek Riordan, Koki Mizuno, Mark Brown, Ben Hutchinson, Thomas Gravesen, Adam Virgo, Evander Sno and Steven Pressley. Would equally high-profile figures, given the imminent decomposition of the SPL Reserve League, be content to spend Saturday afternoons facing Albion Rovers and Cowdenbeath? Transfer window regulations mean members of the playing squad would be consigned to at least half a season at such a level if not in Gordon Strachan's first-team plans. There could be no week-to-week call-ups made, which makes you wonder just how many players Celtic would need in total.
If this is not the plan, and presuming Celtic would then turn to youth players, then their participation in the SPL Under-19 League would seem a waste of time; the club has also never seemed keen to loan promising players to Third Division level in the past. The theory that Celtic would be content to play out time in the lower leagues, with little aspirations of success, is not supported by evidence of the past decade; they appear to take reserve football and youth football far more seriously than their colleagues in the SPL.
One club owner, East Stirlingshire's Spencer Fearn, is similarly unconvinced. "If Celtic were allowed to play a team in the Third Division then what would be the point of someone like me putting money into a club to make them better?" he asked, rather ominously for fans of the 'Shire.
"Celtic would win the league so fair play and a sense of balanced competition would go out the window."
Cynics would suggest to Fearn that such problems emanated in Scottish football many years ago. SPL2 merely represents the latest furlong in the race for survival.
