Nine of the 12 SPFL Premiership clubs are ready to call a halt to the season and crown Celtic as 2019/20 champions.
Based purely on a basic elimination theory the only clubs against an early declaration would be from Celtic Park, Ibrox and Tynecastle.
Celtic have stated throughout that their preference is to complete the season while the other two have very obvious reasons for not wanting to admit that their seasons have ended in failure.
Since football was suspended on March 13 a number of conference calls have been held with a growing realisation that the resumption of the sport will be closer to the start of the 2020/21 season (August 1) than when play was halted.
Covering the latest developments, the Daily Record reports:
Record Sport reported that as many as nine Premiership clubs are now on the verge of conceding that the current campaign cannot be played to a finish – and asking the SPFL board to officially crown Celtic champions.
Five of the country’s leading 12 clubs declared during Friday’s a conference call that they will not have enough players still under contract to enable them to fulfil their outstanding fixtures if the 2019/20 campaign was to be restarted and played to a finish over the summer.
We can further reveal that those five clubs are, in fact, Kilmarnock, Motherwell, Ross County, Hamilton and St Mirren – and all of them are likely to call for the season to be brought to an end.
The majority of players in the SPFL are on the Furlough scheme and will only resume formal training once there is a sign of income.
The Furlough scheme is in place until June but with six million people on it an extension seems certain.
