FIRST DIVISION REBELS HAVE RICH REASON FOR WANTING A SHAKE-UP

DID you know the Scottish Football League is SIX times more expensive to run than the SPL?

And did you know First Division champions St Mirren earned only £15,000 more in SFL prize money than Third Division strugglers East Stirlingshire who finished 29 league places below them?

Both these nuggets were news to me and maybe underline the general ignorance around the country about the running of our national sport.

Talk of a breakaway is again in the air and despite the cancellation of a meeting scheduled for Friday night all 10 First Division clubs have been invited to rescheduled summit talks in the next couple of days.

There's serious concern about the future of full-time football out with the SPL and there seems little doubt several clubs could go to the wall unless urgent action is taken.

Going back to my original point I'd love to know why the administration of the SFL costs the best part of £600,000 compared to around £100,000 for the Top 12 equivalent.

And that big bill is hardly producing positive results at the moment with no sponsorship of the league formerly backed by Bell's and no television coverage.

It's hardly surprising many Second and Third Division clubs are supportive of status quo when you find out they were all paid a six-figure sum for their league placings last season.

As far as I'm aware 75 per cent of the SFL's annual income is shared equally among the 30 member clubs and the remaining 25 per cent is performance related.

That sounds fine until you realise there's only a £500 differential between each place in the three divisions.

That's why there's only £15,000 between the bonus for finishing top of the First and bottom of the Third.

Compare that with the final weekend of the SPL season. Dundee United chairman Eddie Thompson's smile lit up the Fir Park tunnel after his team's late equaliser against Motherwell.

Finishing ninth instead of second bottom made a difference of nearly £140,000 to the Tannadice coffers.

That was some incentive to end the season a couple of places higher.

So a lot of the part-time teams in the SFL who collect a substantial slice of the pie have no interest in change. It's the full-timers with ambitions to go to the top flight who are being choked to death.

You've heard the phrase many times before but examine the facts and there's all the evidence you'll need to prove the tail wags the dog beneath the SPL.

Does there need to be a breakaway? You would hope not.

It would be good to think serious change could be achieved within the existing set-up but I don't think that's realistic.

If the league was going to make a belated move into the modern era it would surely have happened by now. It's far from the first time the SPL2 warning has been sounded.

And there's potential for fairly obvious conflict in the forthcoming discussions when you realise three of the invited club representatives - St Johnstone's Geoff Brown, Brown McMaster of Partick Thistle and Airdrie's Jim Ballantyne - serve on the league management committee.

But all are highly conscious that the football businesses they run could be strangled by the archaic system which has been allowed to deteriorate into rust and ruin.

There's scope for constructive talks with the existing authorities but equally it could all get pretty messy.

It's a wrangle that could end up in court if it goes the distance. A two-year notice of resignation is just one of the SFL rules set to be contested.

So what if some of the First Division clubs want to quit and some don't?

There are others like Morton, Raith Rovers and Peterhead who would be waiting in the wings to join the new set-up.

Radical change to bring back more freshness and excitement is badly needed. It's high time the long-awaited pyramid system came into play.

The current Second and Third divisions could be regionalised and run by the SFL with scope for some of the top Junior clubs, as well as teams from the north and south leagues, to be promoted into the new structure.

I'm sure the SPL would be interested in replacing the Top 12 with two leagues of 10. There's already pressure from the European and world governing bodies to set a limit of 36 domestic games per club per season.

And presumably it wouldn't be too difficult to extend the existing television coverage on Setanta Sports to take in SPL2 as well as SPL1.

One of the good things about a second SPL is that lessons could be learned from the original breakaway.

Something's got to give or the SFL will become a graveyard for full-time clubs with big ambitions.

Taken from the Sunday Mail