The Scottish Football Wasteland: Revolution come and gone.

Last updated : 07 October 2010 By Earl of Leven.

Revolution Come and Gone

The early 1980s were not kind to Rangers but in 1986 owner Lawrence Marlborough decided to sell up. He knew the club’s stock was low and he tasked David Holmes with changing the club’s fortunes. Mr Holmes had to make the famous old team a sellable asset. He did just that and ushered in an era which, in terms of its impact on the national game, is still reverberating today.

Two things occurred: Graeme Souness was brought in as player-manager and the purse strings were loosened. Rangers bought international stars, paid them well and began to win. However the success – maintained when club was sold to Edinburgh-based businessman David Murray – also sowed the seeds which eventually led to the slow poisoning of the Scottish game. The success of Rangers was, for the most part, based not on youth football, scouting, coaching, or tactics but on buying better players, paying them well and letting them loose on the rest of the SPL. English clubs were banned from Europe and so we could poach players from their league.

Celtic were in disarray: caught unawares and engulfed in a cash crisis. The clubs who tried to stop Rangers were Aberdeen and Motherwell - but both were on a shoestring budget. The rest of the league had to dip its toes in the murky waters of trying to speculate to accumulate. This is not to blame Rangers alone, for across Europe clubs saw themselves as a business, as entertainment, as an industry. The flight to distance themselves from the working class origins of the game was common. Goodbye flat caps and pies, and hello to silk scarves and pre match champagne and canapés.

With a smaller player pool of kids, coaching tactics based on the physical side of the game, less school football, less street football....the clubs found it harder to close the gap on Rangers using the usual stream of talent produced in Scotland. If talent could not be reared as easily it might have to be bought. Add to this mix was the ‘drip drip’ effect of Lord Justice Taylor’s report into Hillsborough. Soon Scottish Premier League clubs would need all seated stadiums, and this would cost money - a lot of money. Rangers already had their stadium in place and were free to spend, spend, spend. But too little of the money spent by all the clubs, by the SPL and by the SFA was ploughed into grassroots football and too much was lost to the game in wages and fees, agents, cars, jets and PR.

The proponents of radical modernisation of the game were delighted: shiny stadiums, top dollar tickets, imported talent, rising standards, better football, more lucrative TV deals, more money to spend....a virtuous cycle. The seal was set on this approach with the foundation of the SPL.

With millions on offer from television deals after the creation of the SPL that summer, clubs began spending beyond their means in pursuit of European football and trying to break the Old Firm monopoly. Having seen the riches on offer in England following the creation of the Premier League six years previously, the Scottish clubs decided it was their turn to follow suit. The SPL was born and, together with the monster TV deal, clubs couldn’t wait to spend their new found riches in the pursuit of success.

Rangers emerged from their nine league titles in a row in debt but soon found more investors, spent more money and saw debts rise again. But this was offset by the cost of ‘bread and circuses’ as a fan-base grew accustomed to star names and glamour.

A section of the Celtic support infamously booed chairman Fergus McCann as he unfurled the championship flag at Parkhead on the opening day, in response to his failure to match Rangers' free-spending ways. He responded with the £3.5 million signing of Australian striker Mark Viduka, before selling his 51% stake in the club a year later having saved the club from the brink of extinction five years earlier.

In response, the SPL’s smaller clubs tried to respond in kind by flooding their teams with foreign imports. Motherwell and Dundee were pushed to the precipice by free-spending chairman as the combined debts of the clubs soared to breaking point.

1998/99 was also the season that the football-loving population of Dundee ground to a halt as a merger between the cities two clubs came frighteningly close to happening. Only an incident in a city nightclub persuaded the Marrs to abandon their plans, meaning Dundee United City never came into being.

But where did it all leave the national game?

 

Rosstheger:

 The domestic game in Scotland has struggled in the last decade. The Scottish Premier League has suffered as a consequence of Old Firm domination and no team outside has won the Premier Division in over 20 years.

It's a telling statistic that pretty much sums up the demise of the Scottish game. The days of four teams chasing a league title are long gone and already this season after four matches the Old Firm have a lead on the rest of the clubs.

The lack of competition has a huge effect on other aspects of Scottish Football. Fans aren't interested in paying money to watch a product which is highly predictable. It didn't surprise me to see Aberdeen fans fill their full allocation at McDiarmid Park on the second weekend of the season after their side romped to a 4-0 victory on the opening day. Granted, it was against Hamilton but the signing of Paul Hartley, a well-known face in Scottish football, was enough to get bums on seats. Even in 2005/2006, Hearts split the Old Firm and qualified for the Champions League and were regularly playing in front of sell-out crowds at Tynecastle.”

By the early 2000s more flaws with the SPL model were becoming apparent every day:

  • TV deals did not increase every year regardless of product – viewers around globe decided on the attractiveness of the product and not SPL clubs or their CEOs
  • Huge all seated stadiums were hard to fill when you had no success, and genuine competition was thin on the ground
  • Ticket prices could not be ‘premium’ without a premium product. The game was not now played along the lines of the game in Spain, Italy or Brazil. It remained rugged, physical and often lacking in technique.
  • The transfer fees and wages required to keep clubs standing still were higher than income streams
  • Youth systems were collapsing as the strain of trying to catch Rangers and Celtic allied to the problems growing in youth football made trusting 16 and 17 year olds a prospect Chairmen would not entertain

So debts rose, TV deals went down in value, wages went unpaid and stadiums remained less than half full out-with the Glasgow giants. The link between 5 year olds playing street football, learning skills they would keep into adulthood, and those players then being able to forge a career in football regardless of size, shape or pace was broken.

Stefanford1:

In years gone past, the lower leagues were a valuable proving ground for players looking to make their way in the game. Murdo Macleod was with Dumbarton when he was picked up by Celtic and he managed a distinguished career in the game. Andy Webster learned his trade with Arbroath and went on to represent club and country with distinction in the top flight of our game. Closer to home we've had greats like Davie Cooper (Clydebank), Jim Baxter (Raith Rovers) and Bobby Shearer (Hamilton Accies) move from provincial clubs to have fine careers representing The Rangers.

That this stream of talent moving from lower leagues to the big time has slowed down in recent years is no accident: Danny Lennon may have taken many of his former Cowdenbeath players to St. Mirren with him but the majority of them were time-served professionals who provide familiarity rather than potential.

The biggest problem facing the lower leagues is money. The issues that impact on top flight sides are magnified in the lower leagues with clubs facing the difficult choice of investing in players for a potential promotion push or redeveloping ramshackle grounds that have been crumbling for decades. We regularly demand that facilities are improved, both for players to develop and for fans who are paying good money to watch the game, and whilst the results are generally drab concrete affairs that lack individuality, the safety and comfort at lower league games has improved and many families see it as a way of getting kids experience following a club first hand.

There's also an inherent danger in moving from traditional homes to modern stadia – an out of town ground can be that bit tougher to reach and few grounds in the lower leagues are a better example of this than Forth Bank. Built at the back of an industrial estate that's since been redeveloped for retail, Forth Bank is a soulless place that has attracted the bare minimum of fans from the local community. Undoubtedly the move was necessary but it hasn't been without its costs.”

As Rangers fans we cannot escape a period of reflection. Our owner, manager and many of our fans were overwhelmed by hubris. We didn’t need building blocks, infrastructure, scouting, caution, budgeting...we could rely on the ever expanding modern game’s ability to reward football with riches. Income would rise and the rise would be exponential. We came into the 2000s without a youth system to speak of, no training facility (albeit one was at the planning stage), in debt and with short-termism as our only operating model. And of course everyone had copied us.

And what of training, coaching and tactics? Here we suffered from a combination of trends and developments in the game. The game was faster, tighter and the top teams more athletic. To ‘break a game’ you needed more special players but across Europe and not just in Scotland the endless flow of talented playmakers was drying up. The vast sums of money elsewhere could be used to gobble up the few players who could open up the organised, fit and athletic opposition: they flowed to Italy, Spain and England. 4-2-3-1 or 4-5-1 lost its flexibility in our game as it became a defensive shield behind a back four.

Our youth football, when it did produce, produced big, tall strong lads and so we packed them into the teams. But we had neither the money nor the coaching at youth level to produce enough players to open up these big, strong teams. The result was stalemate; ‘stramash football’ as it would perhaps be called.