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.

Excluding the anomaly of Rangers (RIP) being in the lower leagues, the OF haven’t finished outside the top 4 of Scottish football since the 1980s. And the financial disparity between those two and the rest of the league is far bigger now than it was back then. Any split would get 4x OF games, whether it was a top 4 or top 6, so I’m not buying that as a reason TV companies wouldn’t back a larger league. There are unwelcome elements in any split, including the setup we currently have. More unwelcome for me is the nonsense scenario in Scottish football right now where you can play the same team 6, 7 or even more than that times per season. It’s just very dull. The bolded at the end is ultimately why league expansion won’t happen any time soon, though. Because of the pathetic self-serving mentality of clubs in Scottish football who are so dependent on a couple more home games where they can cram a few thousand bigots into their ground and make some extra cash. I thought this kind of outlook might have changed after our clubs (correctly) voted not to allow Rangers back into the top flight following their liquidation, and where it was proven that we didn’t need the OF to have a strong, successful Scottish football. But unfortunately there are still clubs in the top tier who will refuse to change the current setup out of pure selfishness and greed.

You can have 4 OF games in a 14 team league, or indeed a 16 team league. It all depends on how you structure the split(s).

Unreal save, that.

The PFA team just announced. Not drastically different to many of the (sensible) team selections in this thread.

Rant might have been a harsh word. "I'm not suggesting anything really." - fair enough, that's kind of all I was clarifying. Because it feels like this whole thing was going round in circles, and I didn't know if you had an actual suggestion as to how we could make better use of our resources, or if you were just... saying things to say them. One thing I would argue is that I'm not sure the injury situation is anything other than bad luck. You get injury crises at all levels of football. Dunfermline in our division being a particular example of one this year, but even as far up the food chain as Liverpool. That's a club who I'd assume has a pretty state of the art setup in terms of training, sports science, etc and have still had to field plenty of youth players this season due to injuries. It's not like they have a lack of squad depth either. So to suggest that Lawless got injured because he was overplayed and Graham is putting in graft in his own time because the club can't afford to train him properly is speculative at best. If we spent an extra £30k or whatever on a sports scientist this season, would it really have changed much? I doubt it.

I had an idea along these lines ago a few years back when I was more into my gambling; to back teams who 'had to' win (eg. a win would secure a title, survival, European place, whatever) and to bet against teams who were already set in a position (champions, relegated), under the the same assumption above that they would have downed tools. I was comfortably in profit doing this in continental leagues (Spain, Italy, France, etc) and significantly down in Scotland & England over a period of a few years before I gave it up. This might have been a case of complete luck in the way things fell for me, but I'd suggest that teams with nothing to play for don't take their foot off the gas as much in the UK as they do in other countries. There might be actual studies done which contain data that disproves this over time (I would guess that there's a decent chance it would all balance out given enough variance), but just my take from betting on a roughly similar proposal to the post in question over a few years.

I'm not sure what the overall point to this prolonged rant is. Do you want us to start outspending Dundee United, Dundee or Kilmarnock to try and get out of the division? You're talking about having a lack of squad depth due to resources, but also appear to also be suggesting that we should be sacrificing the size of squad to sign more coaches and sport scientists so that the players we do have will develop into better players or be less susceptible to injury. This seems a bit of a contradiction. Now you're saying Lawless got injured due to overuse, but a few posts back you complimented Brian Graham for featuring so much at such a high level this season. Brian Graham is older than Lawless and has played just as many minutes, so what's your point there? What are you actually suggesting? It feels like you're just howling into the abyss.

Going for a bold 4-2-3-2 formation, I see.

I'll be very disappointed if we don't go full overhaul at the goalkeeper position. I've had enough of rotating bang average keepers every time they make a mistake, which we've been doing for years now.

The fans, players and everyone associated with Barca are in a perpetual heads gone here. A very OF-esque “everyone is against us” meltdown, you love to see it.