Rangers and the SPFL hierarchy are far from best friends.
Stewart Robertson has never hid his feelings about Neil Doncaster and co. and has long advocated for a change at the top of Scottish football for us to finally get a better deal for every club, not just our own.
That a Rangers fan has to have a subscription to BT Sports, Sky Sports and Premier Sports to see their club pay is ridiculous, it wouldn’t be as bad if we made decent money out of it but we are European football’s poor cousins even compared to the Netherlands, Sweden and Belgium.
New 5-year Scottish TV deal with Sky Sports from 2020/21 is worth £30m (€34m) a year, up from £25m, but this is still not great. As #RangersFC chairman Douglas Park said, “we believe that Scottish football is a strong product, but it is undervalued and as a result undersold.” pic.twitter.com/VDqfGOK4xF
— Swiss Ramble (@SwissRamble) December 6, 2021
The SPFL regularly gets higher TV viewing figures than the English Championship and yet their TV deal dwarfs ours, another indicator that we aren’t getting value for money from our well paid executives – and that’s ignoring their questionable behaviour over the last 18-months – however, football finance expert, Kieran Maguire, has defended the SPFL, as told to Football Insider:
“Rangers see the gap between themselves and the Premier League as a source of frustration. Part of the success of the Premier League is that the degree of sporting competition is quite high.
“Smaller clubs will often beat the big boys. That degree of sporting chance is greater in the Premier League than it is in Scotland. Rangers and Celtic are so successful that it makes it difficult to sell the whole product of the SPFL.
“Overseas viewers, for example, will often know what the result is going to be before kick-off. That isn’t the case to the same extent in the Premier League.
“In terms of it being badly run, if you look at the finances of the SPFL, it is effectively run on a skeleton staff. It only has 16 or so employees. The Premier League has hundreds of employees.
“The SPFL doesn’t have a lot of money coming in so they are trying to reduce the admin costs. Reducing the admin costs increases the money that can be distributed to member clubs.
“It’s a catch-22 situation. It’s an impossible job because someone is going to take offence whatever you do.”
The thing is, and I think this is the only time Maguire has got something wrong, is that we don’t compare our league to the Premier League, that would be stupid, it’s the Scandinavian, Belgian or Dutch leagues that we look at and can’t understand why they get better TV deals than us without clubs with the worldwide pull of the Old Firm.
Cinch – the sponsor of our league – pays more to Tottenham Hotspur for a small shirt logo than it does to us to have their name on every team’s shirt, even given the league they are playing in, it just doesn’t make sense.
Time after time, we have seen Doncaster fail to get sponsors at all, never mind ones willing to pay a decent price, another reason why he shouldn’t be in a job – he paid (out of the clubs’ pocket) for a consultancy firm to attract cinch so what exactly is he doing?
We are miles behind the likes of Belgium and Austria and until there are changes at the top it will be more of the same, as Barry Hearn once told the SFA and SPFL bigwigs “if you worked for me you would be sacked” – that they thought he was joking says it all.