Frank Owen
Well-known member
What a depressingly factual post BB. Absolutely sums up most of our game's problems.Let's be honest, our national sport has become a joke thanks to the many different small-minded administrators who do a crap job of running and promoting the game in Scotland.
From the referee's association which actively promotes people based mostly on their location and allegiance to the handshake mob rather than on ability right through to the incompetents paid large salaries to oversee the game who continually undermine the very rules that they make up and are supposed to enforce, so many self-serving arseholes involved are more interested in benefiting the biggest rule breakers of them all.
No wonder it is so difficult to sell the sport when you see so many horrendous matches made worse by a string of appalling and frankly baffling decisions. Now today I have read that Barclays are going to be putting £30m into English Women's Football over a three year period when their current sponsorship deal is renewed in 2025.
Compare this value to the astonishing pittance that cinch are paying to sponsor all 4 senior men's leagues up here in Scotland in our biggest ever deal (only £1.8m per year for five years). Scottish men's fitba has had a headstart of about 130 years on English women's football, has a well-established fanbase (highest % match attendance per population for Europe, I believe) and yet the arseholes administering our sport are so delighted that they managed to negotiate such a terribly low valued contract (mainly due to their crap running of the sport and allowing it to become an often poor spectacle).
The less said about the painfully low tv and radio deals they have negotiated too the better (smaller than countries like Finland, FFS!).
The whole sport needs a good shake up, cut out the layers and layers of deadwood, sort out the running of the sport to make it more exciting and appealing and a total rebrand. Now some of this is long-term and we wouldn't see benefits for many years, but there is still an awful lot of much-needed changes that could be done to make a big impact on the sport in the very short term.
Is any of this new? No!
Is any of this a surprise? No!
Is there anything that will be done about it? Of course not! The blazers with the local bowling club mentality are happy enough to plod on year after year getting their comfy seats at all the high profile matches and their all-expenses paid for jollies to international events and matches while sneering at the plebs below them.