Budge hits out at SPFL and SFA as she finally discovers the Five Way realities

After commissioning a far reaching report by Deloitte, five leading Scottish clubs have discovered that the national game is padlocked into a pre-historic ‘business model’.

Innovative sponsorship, marketing and broadcasting ideas have to take a distant second place behind ensuring that a club from Ibrox can challenge the power of Celtic.

It is an unwritten law that everyone in the game supports to some extent from the absence of any form of Financial Accountability through to Crawford Allan’s power to appoint Nick Walsh for 50% of SPFL Premiership matches at Ibrox. Between those pay-days Walsh trains Murray Park starlets in his day job at Boclair Academy in Bearsden.

Everything about Scottish football is about getting the honours shared between two Glasgow clubs, one that operates in the same way as other clubs but with a far larger financial base and another which does whatever it likes without allowing laws or rules to impact on them.

During the summer 11 Premiership clubs took on additional visibility for cinch while the lot from Ibrox negotiated their own sleeve sponsor, pitchside and backing board sponsorship deals. Having voted through that compromise the other clubs are in an even weaker position now than they were in the panic struck summer of 2012.

In an interview with the Hearts chief covering the Cinch stand off, The Herald reports:

Budge believes all the top flight clubs need to work together to maximise the financial opportunities available to them and admitted she was exasperated at the inability of the Premiership clubs to even hold a joint discussion on the stand-off.  

“I do think it’s important the clubs stand together,” she said. “It’s a symptom of what’s wrong with Scottish football that this has been going on for how long? And we still can’t have a meeting where all the clubs can discuss the issue. How do you solve that?”

Once the 11-1 voting structure of the SPFL is reformed Budge will discover that a club founded in 2012 have their own set of rules and can opt out of any collective decision that they don’t like the look of. Every sponsor now knows that there is no guarantee that their message will be carried at Ibrox with the SFA powerless to apply any sanction.

While the Hearts chief pushes for a better landscape for Scottish football the SFA and SPFL are 100% geared to supporting the O** F*** in order to generate greater commercial and broadcasting deals, any other issue is largely irrelevant. You don’t need to commission Deloitte to come to that conclusion.

Until the documentation that was passed in 2012 is published and everyone involved in rubber-stamping it is removed from power Scottish football will be all about protecting and covering things up.

Sacking Neil Doncaster and SFA President Rod Petrie would be a good start.