Scottish Football Seeing Sense? Surely not!

For those of you who have not seen the latest PricewaterhouseCoopers annual report, the basics are thus: overall debt is down, losses are decreasing and turnover is up. Essentially whilst Scottish football clubs are not making money they have at least stemmed the bleeding. However, just about everyone in the SPL – Livi and ourselves being the obvious exceptions – are in debt up to their eyeballs. And that can only be good news for us…

Football is now a business but it is still a unique business. Rangers are competing with Celtic but it is not in their interests to grind Celtic out of existence. Football clubs need each other – without them there is no league to play in – and not only that. They need their rivals to have some level of competitiveness to keep things interesting. In our specific case, we obviously can’t wish the rest of the SPL out of existence, that would be self-defeating, but the millstone of debt hanging around their necks and weighing them down is a very good thing for us.

Two or three seasons ago Dunfermline seemed to be light years ahead of us on the pitch. Skerla, Brewster, Crawford and Nicholson all received big money wages and to an extent they delivered – fourth place, a cup final and Europe is a return which the Pars fans would have been delighted with.

Now though, they have lost their high earners and replaced them with players who are distinctly average. Not only that, the money that they owe is being called in – perhaps not all at once but even an extra few thousand a week siphoned off their income can make the difference between making a new signing or not. Now, as Dunfermline saw on Saturday, we are better than them and doing it within budget. Okay, we’re not a lot better…but the cutting edge that is the difference between winning and losing is there. This is not meant as a dig at Dunfermline, they were just the first example that came to mind.

There are five clubs who (Rangers, Celtic, Hibs, Hearts and Aberdeen) are significantly bigger than everyone else in Scotland. We and the other teams are fighting for the next spot but we have a slight advantage in that our finances have bottomed out at zero – everyone else is paying off debt. And the best thing about the debt factor? It also affects those above us as well. In the 1980s and 1990s the wages Aberdeen could afford to pay in comparison to ourselves were huge. Now they can still pay more and they still have a greater pedigree as a club but the difference is not so great. They are forced to rely on strikers signed from relegation fodder and play kids who are being hailed as saviours simply since they have to play because there is no one else.

We are possibly a little jealous of Hearts in their position at the top of the league but we know better than most what happens to footballing houses built on sand. No, it’s better to be in budget and take our chances from there. We’ve done not too badly in our two years PA (Post Administration) and if we win our next two games at home we’ll be fifth in the league and in another cup semi final. Life is good when you’re in financial health!