Bebo

Lots of people have been trying to expain the drop off in attendances this season at Celtic Park. 'The standard of football is not good enough', 'It's too expensive', and 'We can't sing the songs we want to sing' are probably the most popular reasons given for the empty seats. One or maybe all may be to blame but I think the situation is much much worse.

My explanation is much simpler; attending most SPL matches has become a miserable, joyless experience. In fact I think we are witnessing the start of the slow death of Scottish football as we know it.

As some of you may or may not know, I love watching the NFL. Like most American sports, people in the UK look down their noses at it. 'I cannae understand it', 'Ach it's all just adverts' and 'It's all just stop start stop start' are among other comments used to describe it. But I think that we can learn a lot from how American football and American sport in general works and how they treat their fans. They understand the golden rule of sport. Competition puts bums on seats. Even in the most capitalist country in the world, they understand that domination by a handful of the strongest teams will ultimately be a turn off. So they have a salary cap and the NFL draft means that the worst teams from the previous season get first pick of the best young players out of college. They are also unpretentious about how they cover games. Reporters don't have to wait outside changing rooms for an hour to try and squeeze a few words out of a manager who thinks that football is too complicated for the 'ordinary' people to understand. They get battered into the locker rooms and interview whoever they want.

So with all that in mind I've got a plan to save Scottish football.

1. Play through the summer. We need to stop pretending that we are some kind of miniature tartan Premiership. We are not a major league so we need to market the SPL as something radically different.

2. Introduce 2 top leagues of 16, with regionalised divisions below that including the Highland league and possibly juniors. Play each other home and away making it a 30 game regular season.

3. Introduce play offs at the end of the season. Top plays 4th and 2nd plays 3rd in 2 legged semi finals before a grand final to decide the Championship. The team that finishes top during the regular season gets to host the grand final. If that team doesn't make it then 2nd hosts and so on.

4. 2 teams get relegated and 2 come up automatically, and next 2 play off against 3rd and 4th from SPL2.

5. Introduce a salary cap.

6. Give away teams a share of gate receipts. Not necessarily a 50/50 split but a decent percentage.

7. Improve the facilities at the stadium to make going there a far more enjoyable experience.

8. Re-Introduce alcohol at grounds. Not to carry in but on sale inside the stadium.

I know most of these ideas would disadvantage Celtic in the short term, but I think they would help everyone in the long term. They would give more teams a fighting chance and give more teams something to play for. It would also take a bit of the pressure off the Old Firm games and hopefully encourage the teams to play better and more positive football, but also make the games bigger 'events' themselves.

On the 12th day of Christmas Lyon gave to me,
12th man was silent
11 Crappy Players
10pts for Lyon
9pts for Celtic
8pts were needed
7 wasn't enough
6 games for fuck all
5 at the back
4 shitty midfielders
3 goals for lyon
2 shitty linesmen
1 miss of the centureeeeeeee