harry94

They may be able to argue that the SPFL are liable for additional costs in terms of player contracts which have relegation clauses in them which the clubs struggle to activate in these circumstances (and may see other legal battles with some players and staff emerge if they try to take it up), I could maybe see some compensation for that sort of issue. I broadly agree though. If Hearts are theoretically down £8 million in income from being in the top flight, that's fundamentally linked to a cost model that also sees increased spending from playing at that level. The SPFL can't be held responsible for losses, especially when there's a level of control clubs have to approach financial restructuring. Hearts could make drastic cuts and still have a side that would be considerably better financed than Dundee next term.

Where is the talk re missing votes? If it was a case of 9-3 and other leagues being on board or close, that would seem to me strong enough to advance onto the formal vote at the EGM.

Two automatic relegation places from a 14 team division is very reasonable IMO.

Well they were relegated before the end of the season in a situation where it's reasonably conceivable that they could have worked out. Of course they are going to moan about that. It doesn't necessarily mean that there was a better overall solution that could have been achieved but they've very blatantly been shafted.

How can that happen? Does a court have the power to actually do that?

That's what I thought when I just clicked through Wikipedia. I don't see any obvious links and I assumed teams would be under some sort of controls to limit squad sizes etc and trialists.

Ooft, that's mental. Always thought Rogers was ridiculously overhyped when he had a few good games on loan at Falkirk but he's reasonably experienced at this level now and not far off his prime years. Probably needs a two year deal somewhere, not really got a chance to settle. I wouldn't mind Nicky Cadden from Morton, reasonable goal and assist record for a winger this term with 5 goals and 9 assists in 21 starts (missed around a month injured). He seems to be really well liked there and come on a fair bit. We've relied way too much on McDaid in games this season, pre the defensive changes near the end, there were too many games where he was just our only flair player.

Well, they were being accused of murder? If they are genuine, they should be using every tool at their disposal to resist a police investigation going down a route that they'd know themselves to be false.

Just taking Rangers reserve squad in the most recent term and going through wikipedia quickly, it's compiled of 22 players who are in that bracket of being above that u17 level. Of them, 8 spent some time on loan. Of these loans, a few were very short term. At Celtic, they have 29 and about 10 who I could see had loan spells. Both teams could clearly have retained a similar no of loans and fielded b teams with their numbers this term, I don't think it would have massively altered the dynamics (and re the point re loaning being a failure, this just isn't the case anywhere this is done - you're more promising players may still go a tier above). The loans are a good route for teams to source cheap players receiving full time training but it is still a level of risk in terms of taking players on who are maybe a bit of an unknown quantity and may leave in the windows. As a result of that, you are easily looking at least 50 top flight players who simply will just not find suitable loans and then those numbers aren't sufficient enough to create a competitive reserve league. That's before considering that many of the loans are very short term rather than season long deals etc. Regardless of what has driven it, there is a bit of a vacuum there. I was just talking here re this providing another financial stream to further monopolise their grip on youth, they aren't really extracting cash from this venture. I don't think I explained my point well re the comparison piece. I was actually passing comment that our geography and make up of national set-up is unique and quite different from other set-ups so implementing the Colts concept is probably near impossible. I wasn't calling for any massive reorganisation (though it may eventually happen organically). Re the point of extending this to other clubs, you have about 5 sides in the top flight who could field a squad of that sort of 18-21 year old bracket today who are not on long term loans. It would maybe be a push but I am pretty certain Hearts, Hibs and Aberdeen would follow through and possibly a wildcard or two. I think those are potentially good steps, I like the squad limits. I half wonder as well if maybe actually imposing a limit on loans out per club (as Fifa are trying to force) might actually be helpful for the smaller full time sides as well in getting more development opportunities for their players. Ideally, I'd just force the excess 18-21 type players into made up teams and play a competition that way but how you force clubs to loan them into that, I don't know.

I could see Hazard coming back, Celtic may let him go on similar terms as Rangers have done with a couple of youngsters recently with a sell on + first option clause. He's not really been close enough to first team football there for his age and time he's been there so you'd think they'd be thinking about his future. He's had two or three moments where he's made mistakes but I think his sort of issues are fixable rather than that worrying aspect of being a bag of nerves (which is hard to train for) or having a horrific weakness taking high balls. I'm maybe been watching a different 'keeper but I was a bit surprised at some of the stick he was getting when he re-joined, the defence has consistently been much calmer around him than Hamilton. It's looking like there will be a ton of free agents though with plenty down south and further afield as well so I think we could do OK in this position if we do have finance behind us to recruit.

It's mentalist but you just had the Stemhousemuir chairman come out and basically endorse that a couple of days ago.

Basically my following point re the difficulties of enough teams being able to support sufficient reserve teams to make competitive football at that level worthwhile.

In all honesty, I don't really think it would change the market dynamics that much. The OF have a large number of players in their reserves, it's really not as easy to sort out loans for all of them . I guess you could argue it may be a tad more attractive for the prestige of playing for Celtic B or whatever to influence their pulling power but that's already near infinite already, as much as we get the 'gid young player learning his trade' talk whenever a player thrives elsewhere away from the OF, it's very rarely the case that they've actively picked a non OF club intentionally. You aren't increasing their income by anything that couldn't be considered a rounding error either so I also don't see that sparking a huge recruitment drive. Don't get me wrong, throwing this OF exclusive arrangement into the current small national set-up right now is lunacy and a really terrible idea at a terrible time which has been well covered but I think if we actually had a set-up that could support the full-time clubs fielding sides further down the set-up without completely destroying teams fixture calendars (i.e. a firm limit on no of colt teams v relative league size), there could be reasonable benefits reaped from it. In Spain, they have a third tier of 100 teams (as of next season) and well defined geographical territories. We've had this fragmentation with the juniors in this country which is finally eroding but as much as people scream the mantra 'too many teams in Scotland', we don't actually have that big of a national pyramid (Norway for example have 144 teams down to level 4). I don't know if we can ever get to a system where this can be done in a way that people can live with but we do know that renaming the u20 league back to being a reserve league (and a couple of practically minor rule changes) hasn't dramatically changed the competitive element of second string football and unless we're going to rewrite the loan system to fundamentally change how part-time teams recruit (making Celtic B = Stenhousemuir), I'm not really sure where we go. Maybe another path is to require ringfenced funding for reserve football and some further incentives to compete more seriously but obviously now is not a good time for that either!

I don't think it's a question of really being 'water tight' or not, there's a bit of a grey area in the science when it comes to assessing their capabilities and at times, they've proven to have made themselves very useful in directing where an investigation should go. If you're deploying them with no appreciation of that limit though (or indeed the lack of a limit with sometimes their abilities being so good to pick up on things from hundreds of years ago), it's not a good usage. Re the Gilroy case, I didn't actually know a lot about that apart from the mentions in the Margaret Fleming case. From reading the appeal here and section 63, it looks like the court ruled that the dogs were 1 of 7 bits of evidence used and there was another point about statements he made that could have possibly been inadmissible (but the appeal court didn't feel the need to rule on that). It looks like him being caught going on long trips away with his car (CCTV) to Argyll and subsequent cover ups etc were probably the most compelling parts of the story.

This is just an expedited summary of the NPIA report a few years ago that led to Yorkshire Police abandoning their usage . Soon after this, the same dogs were used in Jersey to investigate a sex abuse case. Their indications led to a coconut shell being identified as a human skull. Other dogs were used in the Shannon Matthews case and indicated the death scent as well which took the police down that route. The same report also goes into a bit of depth on handler procedures etc and gives examples of the McCann case and points where there were ripe conditions of false positives (i.e. the calling back to the same particularly spot). They are possibly picking up what they are trained for but they can't distinguish different scents from humans and there's just very little understanding on quality control, you've had cases where the dogs are picking up on burial sites from thousands of years ago and material transfer, you can't really define a well understood envronmenta limit. This is even in the handlers own admission and he's even very clear that he would not overstate his findings without corroborating evidence.

There's a massive difference between using them as a policing tool with robust procedures (not followed in this case) and what is being suggested here. False positives are very common and hard to quantify, unlike maybe a piece of dna where we can easily determine the possibility of perhaps two people sharing characteristics etc, we are presenting these sorts of tools in different environments and sometimes biased procedures. There have been some remarkably impressive outcomes as well but those are corroborated so there is a bit more attention to those cases rather than the many leads that turn out to be irrelevant. Re their PR stuff and defence prep and overall conduct generally, that's obviously a matter of debate but what you can say for it is that they picked a strategy to keep the case in the public consciousness (as was advised to them as giving best prospects of return) and rigorously defended themselves (and keep investigationthe right direction if they are truthful). I don't think that in itself is unusual or sinister tbh but it does leave a bitter pill that they've managed to do it so well whereas others have been offered f**k all (like that other case nearby where the police, working with Amaral, beat the shit out of one of the suspects and come up with an absurd theory involving a fridge which they successfully prosecuted).

This cadaver stuff has been debunked extensively! It wasn't some rare instance of a false positive back in the day etc that the McCann's were using to muddy the water. There's an extensive history of false negatives and positives, even with the exact same dogs in other cases! The procedure used was also hammered by the agency that provides oversight on this type of evidence collection in the UK, the dogs were repeatedly flagged back to the same spots of interest multiple times after no initial response to anything. It's just really bad science. You simply can't pin anything to it unless it is accompanied with forensics.

Re talk of the streaming, has there been any indication what it costs for the actual broadcasters? I wouldn't have thought it would be a lot, you see BBC sometimes put youth matches online. Even if it was a case of something like ALBA quality, that's still really decent. Surely if you could lease the hardware (I would have thought the stuff used for BBC Scotland is specialist to sport which they don't have a lot of), staffing and online hosting to one or two locations, you could blow out of the water anything being offered by the clubs themselves - you could also create an additional 'top-up' type service for access to other league games which could go in a shared pot. It certainly would make life a lot easier than the current amatuerish set-ups. Unless I've missed something and this 'virtual season ticket' isn't just the normal club services?

A lot of clubs have already pledged money in contracts for next terms. They would need substantial financial backing to resolve that or be looking at calling in the administrators to try and save the business.

Just stalling to reduce no of questions.

If Dunfermline aren't competing in any organised football next season, there's 10 players signed up who the club are responsible for. You may be able to shift one or two but there are going to be so many out of contract players in the market. Hibernation would suspend future prize money completely, a few part timers in would likely be far less of a loss if it kept the club going, even if it was to get humped every week. I'm half wondering if the whole of Scottish Football might newco.

That's what I was thinking, am I missing something here? Obviously it would be limited at that 80% and a lot would breach the threshold but I didn't think it would oblige Dunfermline to pay anything apart from the manhours to put it all together.

If we were looking at a contingent of clubs at this level who were not able to find any way to make up that best case >50% shortfall in income, I'm wondering if an alternative could be to try and set-up a one-off temp league that is set up with bare minimum costs and contract out of work players in to the set-up (and ideally represent their existing club but be flexible and contract to league body so everyone has numbers). We could then maybe look at subscription models with that (or even looking at doing this as a joint venture with broadcasters - there is some shared interest there to protect their contract the best they can) and seeing how we can cost accordingly leasing one or two facilities. A bit batshit and American but could the a newco league body 'loans' the identity of the clubs for a year (or would that incur their liabilities)? I wouldn't have thought that was ever possible but we all saw Rangers etc. The complete hibernation of some clubs would be toxic if it come to that, you really wouldn't be able to assess how much it'll damage your future income.

Surely the ticket office are furloughed? Don't imagine we'll have the staff ready to even attempt processing things until they are back. I wouldn't think insurance would pay out right now though - the scale of the damage isn't final and these things can take a long time.

We simply don't know how good his advice is or what his influence is, McPake is the man. I think looking into body language and analysing small comments is just projection tbh (if we were flying high there would be posts here about how his 'calm' manner is indicative of a cool elder statesman in control etc), it doesn't mean anything as we just don't have the context.