Nightmare

No idea what's going on there, but hoping Doig has a relegation release clause to get out of it.

In terms of Scottish football, it's a wild fall which is probably unlikely to be replicated barring a team getting into financial difficulty which renders them uncompetitive over numerous seasons. The case of Paderborn in Germany in the past decade is the most extreme example of the antithesis of this thread: 13/14 - 2nd in 2.Bundesliga, promoted 14/15 - 18th in Bundesliga, relegated 15/16 - 18th in 2.Bundesliga, relegated 16/17 - 18th in 3.Liga - should have been relegated but saved on a technicality because 1860 Munich lost their license and were demoted 17/18 - 2nd in 3.Liga, promoted 18/19 - 2nd in 2.Bundesliga, promoted 19/20 - 18th in Bundesliga, relegated So not only a mad fall from grace between 13/14 and 16/17, but then back to back promotions to follow it (and then another relegation). They've finally calmed the f**k down and settled in the 2nd tier for the last 4 seasons.

Fans would go to games whatever the setup is, imo. Attendances in the second tier have remained broadly similar* in the SPFL era (since the playoffs were introduced) to what they were in the 00s when the First Division had 'one up, one down' and where there were far more so-called meaningless games for teams in the top-half/middle of the table. *notable exceptions to the rule being when various combinations of Rangers, Hearts and Hibs were playing at this level

At the core of it, this is my main problem with our current setup. The fact that it's technically possible for a Championship club to play another Championship club 10 (TEN) times in the space of a season is absurd. The problem isn't quite so extreme for the Premiership where teams can't meet in the playoffs or the Challenge Cup, and so where the maximum is only 7 - which is still far too high a number, but anyway. The suggestion mentioned above of 12-18-18 would be fine. Just like all the other proposals mentioned, it's never going to get past the voting structure because it would mean there are more league clubs needing a split of the SPFL cash, but I would much rather an 18-team league where my club gets a wee bit less cash and plays some "meaningless" (they're never really meaningless, though, as covered previously) games than I have to watch Thistle play Airdrie, Queen's Park or whoever 7 times a season.

Not sure if you're just being deliberately obtuse at this point or are too thick to understand something that's really, really not that difficult. Either way, cba. Congratulations, you've bored someone else into submission.

The irony considering you've spent the last hour or so flailing around failing to comprehend a relatively basic suggestion.

Another swing and a miss from P&B's resident bore. I've already said in a previous league reconstruction thread that I wouldn't expect the top flight to change any time soon for a variety of self-serving reasons, but if we could at least expand the lower tiers then I would be happy with that. What league my team is in is completely irrelevant to any of this, which has been my stance for as long as I can remember (including our years in the Premiership).

Yep, it's all just hypothetical (and yes I'll admit, very unlikely) but I genuinely don't think the meaningless games argument holds as much weight as people often suggest in these conversations. Crowds in our game haven't changed too much since the years before the lower league playoffs were introduced. The old First Division used to see one club promoted to the top flight, and if a team ran away with the league there were often teams with nothing to play for for large parts of the season. People still attended, you still got good games and bad games, ultimately I don't think too much changed suddenly when all the games started "meaning something". Regardless, I'm not exclusively stuck on 16 teams with a 4x4x4x4 split system anyway - it wasn't even my suggestion originally. I just feel like the leagues need to be bigger because I'm sick of playing teams 6+ times a season.

Mentioned in the second paragraph.

Nice deflection from your 'teams playing each other too much' comment before. The only section that would potentially have "nothing to play for" would be the 9-12 portion of the league. Which is a flaw, yes, but I've already indicated that no split system is without flaws, including in the current Scottish football setup. The section with teams 1-4 would be involved in the title race, 5-8 would battle for a European place in the top flight/for a potential promotion playoff opportunity in the lower leagues, and 13-16 are battling relegation. So to suggest that the majority of the league would have nothing to play for after the first 30 games is, yet again, nonsense.

What would make you think any part of that post is sarcastic? Please explain why you think that option proposed is a bigger issue in terms of playing opponents too many times than our current setup. Because there's absolutely zero logic in what you said in your previous post.

In that type of setup, the majority of the 16 teams in the league would only play each other twice over the course of the season. Only in each section of 4 would you play three opponents 4 times. That suggestion is clearly an improvement on the 'playing sides too much' argument that we have in our current league setup.

Aye, if it’s a 16 team division you need 2 down automatically. And possibly 14th going into a playoff with 3rd place in the tier below as well. 16 would definitely be my preferred size of division, though. Not too fussed about which one of the many potential split structures is selected, but just getting a wider variety of opponents each season and greater movement between the tiers would be a big improvement in our game imo.

Lawless is out for the best part of a year with a ruptured achilles.

Our title winning team at this level in 2012/13 had plenty of players who we signed from way down the pyramid. From memory I can think of Doolan, Erskine, Craigen, Muirhead and Taylor-Sinclair who had all been signed from League Two or below. There might be others I’m forgetting as well. I also have no idea about Armstrong, but seems the exact sort of market we should be shopping in for cheap squad depth. Especially given that we seem to have a pretty good record of finding gems at these types of level.