John Nelms has confirmed that he held talks with Celtic and others before casting his vote in favour of ending the SPFL season based on average points per game.
For the last three weeks there has been an intense focus on the Dundee chief Executive who was handed the decisive vote after the SPFL announced that they were waiting on one vote to come through from a Championship club.
Dundee were quickly identified as that club with Inverness Caley Thistle chief Scot Gardiner seething over the vote, racing to share details of his WhatsApp chats with Radio Scotland.
After five days of lobbying Dundee voted for the proposal which promoted their city rivals United and left the SPFL board with authority to rubber-stamp Celtic as the Premiership champions.
Social media has been awash with completely unfounded conspiracy theories about how Dundee came to make their decision with Nelms breaking his silence to speak to The Sun:
I’ve had several conversations with Rangers, Celtic and Hearts. I’ve had conversations with quite a few people. You could tell early on there would be promotion/relegation, and there was simply no way around it because over 80 per cent of clubs wanted that to happen.
Whether or not we wanted that to happen, it was going to happen. Obviously, at Dundee we don’t want to hand United anything, but it was inevitable that was going to happen too.
We were in the worst position possible, we were in third place, there’s not much benefit we could get out of this. When people ask me about it, I reply: ‘What do you think we could have got out of this’?
So the best thing we could get is a proper conversation about reconstruction. That might not benefit us in the short-term, but in the long-term, it would benefit Dundee and all of Scottish football.
That, for me, was the best thing we could get out of all this. Does that do anything for us right now? No but we need to look at it in a much bigger, picture as opposed to: ‘What does it do for me right now’?”
The SPFL has to come up with a proposal agreeable to UEFA which resolves the season based on sporting merit.
Average pints per game satisfies that demand with the French title settled yesterday with PSG declared as champions. UEFA expects to hear from each league by May 25 as they plan next season’s Champions League and Europa League competitions.
