Yeah I know all about that. Fell way out of love with football through the Parry years. Barnes was just a joke but at least he wanted to play nice football. Completely naive, but. Parry wanted us to look like a League One Stoke so he could talk about the great job he was doing. I don't enjoy following sports objectively so for me it's whites or bust, don't have that attraction like you with Dortmund so it was soul destroying. Then Ronnie comes back and all of a sudden I feel like watching whatever game of footy is on the telly just because my passion is rejuvenated.
Yeah but sticking Rangers in Division 3 to make the SPL's race for 2nd place more exciting must help surely
It did imo, but you have to ask yourself, how will they look in europe. Ans furball thank god I was always a mccall fan
Well it was that or admitting that you could tax-dodge and cheat your way to success all you want as long as you're bringing enough money into the league. I like that the clubs took the principled option, knowing that it would cost them. I can't see it happening that way in England if United ran themselves into the ground.
Losing United wouldn't hurt the Prem in the same way. Obviously it would be massive but given that there are only two clubs in Scotland that can ever win the title...
True, but that just reinforces my point: it wouldn't hurt the competition as badly, but they still wouldn't do it.
Principles had nothing to do with it. It was the old Scottish chip on the shoulder mentality shining through.
Why should a completely new club be allowed to start in the SPL? They'd be breaking their own rules just to make more money.
And more to the point, the best way to run a club is then to spend as much as possible and, when the club goes bankrupt, create a newco and be reinstated. Rinse and repeat.
Genuine question, not trying to stir anything up here as I'm a genuine outsider, but has there ever been any thought given to combining the EPL and the SPL? There would be teething problems in the first season - trying to figure out exactly where to place each Scottish club within the pyramid as such - but to me it seems like it'd be fine from the second season onwards. It'll probably sound like a bit of an anti-Scotland troll but the SPL seems like a pretty pointless competition to me; do most Scottish fans not follow Celtic or Rangers anyway? Couldn't they follow them just as passionately in the Premier League or the Championship instead of engaging in a two horse race every year?
Worst troll post. I agree that it would have set a fucking horrible precedent; however there was nothing in the SPL's rulebook regarding liquidation (admittedly a bit of an oversight.) It had nothing to do with doing the right thing though and everything to do with kicking us when we were down. No other team would have been treated as draconially. Dunfermline have been banned from signing players in the next transfer window for going into administration and failing to pay taxes. We've been banned for 3 windows. Hearts got a ban in between windows for repeatedly failing to pay their players. The Football League have done everything possible to help Portsmouth in their time of need, the authorities up here have done everything possible to destroy us (including attempting to blackmail us into surrendering titles won legitimately on the field of play in exchange for our license to play this season.)
The biggest obstacle to combining the two is that in football terms, Scotland and England are seperate countries and always have been. It would require Rangers and Celtic resigning their membership of the Scottish FA and becoming members of the FA and working their way up the pyramid to the Premier League; there's absolutely no reason why either club should just parachute into the Premier League, the teams below would rightfully complain. edit: besides that, it would be utterly pointless, combining the SPL and EPL would be like combining Sydney Grade Cricket with Adelaide D Grade Cricket.
It does make a certain amount of sense for Scotland; it makes even more sense for Northern Ireland where the standard of football is painfully dire compared to English cities with equivalent population/interest. The effect of having a separate league for NI is just to drain all talent to England and keep Irish football in the dark ages. In each case I'm pretty sure the reason it doesn't happen (apart from logistical difficulties) is just entrenched interests and nationalism, but that's not to say there isn't a good argument for keeping them separate that hasn't been made. It's worth mentioning that the two biggest Welsh clubs play in the English league and they've both now made it to the Premiership.
Wales is a different example, a full time, professional Welsh league didn't exist until 1992. Teams like Swansea, Cardiff, Wrexham etc had to look to England for competition. Up until 20 years ago, there was no incentive for Scottish teams to look elsewhere.
It's true, but that's kind of my point. Wales has nothing like the top-level footballing tradition of Scotland but their top two clubs are now competing at a far higher level than the Scottish teams are (Celtic's CL adventure aside).
Middlesbrough and Leeds United didnt go back to the start in England when they were formed as new companies. Think Leicester City may have done as well.