EdTheDuck

Really? How do you see it being resolved?

This I don't understand why clubs are dicking around. It's either end the season now or play behind closed doors with PPV. It might even be the same for a fair bit of next season. Accept it and get fucking on with it. I need fitba NOW!

Everyone else in the known universe* knows what the sevco rangers teeth gnashing is really about but do the sevco rangers fans on here actually believe it's about justice for all of scottish football? *although better than 99% of sentient humans in the known universe could not give a single f**k

Norway & Sweden both play summer football. Both start their season’s at the end of March and finish at the start of December. Both have 30 rounds of games played over 35 weeks, whereas we have 38 played over 41 weeks If we’re going to switch to summer league we therefore need to reduce the number of league games (and income) by almost a quarter or we’d be starting end of Feb/early March and ending mid-December. In World Cup/Euro years everything has to shut down for 6 weeks (unless we don’t qualify or none of our teams have players taking part) so every couple of years any summer benefit is lost…

And it worked retrospectively, because they finished 3rd in the last season of the old 18 team league...

I see another 'out' for Budge courtesy of the Liga MX. FC Veracruz were relegated from the top tier at the end of last season but as the Liga was looking to expand to 20 teams they accepted a $6million offer from Vearcruz' owner to stay in the league (which brought the league up to 19...) How much would the #SPFL accept to keep Hearts in the prem? I reckon a lot less than six million dollars

Pfft Personally I want club football twice a week 52 weeks a year

doing an extra line on the lotto...dear fucken God

Ahh sorry, misunderstood. I think we all know whose fans might turn up in large numbers against government ("they're no mah government") advice. It's a blessing that AR15s are not available in this country... There's a G5 tower going up not far from me and I expect to see a few out and about with silver foil headgear when they go for their daily run.

Football fans who attend games are a tiny minority though, maybe 5% of the population. The numbers that would turn up to stand in groups would be a small percent of that percentage, no?

It's drama. One of the purposes of sport. Seeing Hearts or Hibs or Dundee or Aberdeen coasting along in 12th is not drama. The 3 second tier clubs (or anyone else) are almost incapable of putting a challenge over a 9 month 30-odd game slog because they cannot afford to have the depth of quality required to do so unless both OF clubs appont shite like Ronny Deila and the chances of that are remote. They should be up the top end of the league, right enough, those 5 should really fill spaces 3 through 7 every year. Happily, real life sticks a finger up to "should". You've spoken to 'the majority' of fans, have you? Or are you basing your opinion on the 5,000 or so who regularly vote out of the 250,000 who routinely go to games on a Saturday? When fans start staying away again, as they did in the 60s & 70s then I'll agree 12-10-10-10 is failing.

The idea that people aren't already meeting in groups for parties and the like, displays an astounding naivety by the Scottish government. Behind closed doors fitba on the TV isn't going to see tens of thousands of folks gathering outside grounds, listening to their trannies or watching games on their phones - if it does, then all those Plod that normally show up at games can usher them the f**k away. Fitba may not matter in the great scheme of things but to large amounts of people it matters a lot, it makes a failry tedious existence a little more bearable and if we have to watch it TV and pay the privelege in the short term, that would be better than nothing...just

Because it attracted more fans, created more interest for more teams, gave us more peer to peer games and saw city clubs like Hearts, Hibs, Dundee Utd and Dundee relegated a few times which probably wouldn't have happened in the old 18 (certainly not as often) It's a bizarre post

I think I must be getting a right whooshing here but I cannot see it... Do any other leagues play 4 times per season? In Europe there's a couple of dozen, another dozen maybe play 3 times a season. There are more leagues with X3 & X4 with various splits playing than there are playing X2. In Central and South America there are more.

Indeed. I think this will be their fifth (5) relegation

odd number of games?

f**k all I'm drinking as much on a monday as I ever did on a fitba saturday The local crem better have fucken deluge systems cuz at this rate I'll burn for days

https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/premier-league/coronavirus-3pm-tv-blackout-uefa-behind-closed-doors-a9446886.html

By the way... The 16/18 team league proponents often suggest that the enlarged mid-table full of meaningless games allow for 'blooding youth' but bottom end of of a top six and especially top end of a bottom 8 allows this in fucken spades. The slight advantage a 14/6-8 split offers in some meaningful games in the run-up to the split...

They've also got much better youth development, of course. (that went astray somewhat for a few years judging by the decline of the Dutch national team, although they seem to be on the road back) You're points, however, stand up against similar sized countries (Denmark, Switzerland, Austria)

Yeah... Of course the Netherlands has a population more than 3 times Scotland's, it has a couple of cities bigger than Glasgow, 3 bigger than Edinburgh, 8 bigger than Aberdeen and 18 bigger than Dundee. Y'know

Nail on the heid. Also, regardless of the fact that it is a different world, there are at least 5 clubs who will look at the effect the switch to a 10 team league had on their attendances back in the mid 70s and fear an equal but opposite reaction if we back to the good old days. Below are the 10 clubs who qualified for the first Premier Division and the change in attendances from the previous 18 team league. Rangers -7,874 Celtic 84,909 Hibernian 15,091 Heart Of Midlothian 20,359 Aberdeen 47,483 Motherwell 72,597 Dundee 33,110 Dundee United 24,400 Ayr United 25,505 St Johnstone 14,043 Total 329,623 You can argue all you want about that was then and this is now and the smoke & mirrors season tickets scam all you want but what clubs (especially the city clubs) will see is pick and choose and empty seats more often than now. Throw TV money into the mix and 16 or 18 is a non starter. Incidentally, you'll notice that pre-sevco actually had a slight decrease. This is because the previous season they had an increase of 178,000 from 1973/74 because in 73/74 they finished 3rd and the loyal deserted them in their tens of thousands.

Budge wants to speak to the Mexican club owners. They cancelled promotion/relegation for five years. https://www.goal.com/en/news/liga-mx-promotion-and-relegation-suspended-for-five-years-due-to-/1xyy2w9fd8xqp1nvhddokqik82

You're absolutely right, the real world doesn't pay attention to history. UEFA, of course, are culpable in this with their pandering to the Big Five leagues and the subsequent side show of financial monsters in the smaller nations.

No, p'raps not, but a little bit of correlation.... In the last 10 season of the old 19/20 team first division, 10 different teams won In the first 10 seasons of the old 10 team first division 10 different teams won it In the last 10 season of a 10 team Championship/first division 9 different teams won it (fucken Ross County...) Without the financial advantage it certainly looks like the size of the league doesn't play a huge part in competitiveness