SPL2 - and the point is...?

It was once said of FIFA president Sepp Blatter that "He has fifty new ideas a day, and fifty-one of them are bad".

The same could increasingly be said of the SPL and its head honcho, Lex Gold. Though, as maintained previously, any man whose name sounds like it's straight out of a Clint Eastwood spaghetti western deserves some respect, he continues to come up with solutions to the current problems of Scottish football that are about as workable as a staircase designed to M.C. Escher's exact specifications.

The latest is this idea of "SPL2", a concept of another ten clubs joining the SPL, with it then being split into two divisions, though the lines by which this would be drawn are anyone's guess. The question that I would like to ask is, "why bother?" The theory is that by bringing current first division clubs under the SPL banner, their income would improve on the grounds that, against all logic and reason, the lure of their product would increase, resulting in bigger gates and more TV money.

One the other hand, none of the current top division, all more strapped for cash than a poor church mouse, who has discovered his wife has left him and run away with all the cheese - paraphrased from Blackadder, sorry. So there is no way in a bajillion years that they would let any more of their money trickle down. So instead we will end up with an SPL2 that is, er, exactly as good as the first division is right now.

As has been claimed previously on this blog, the best solutions to getting fans and TV back into Scottish football are as follows; get shot of all the diddy teams with a fan base of three men and a dog (four clubs in Angus, three within 2 miles of Falkirk's town centre); a pyramid scheme which finally gets Junior and Highland League clubs involved and forces the likes of Elgin City to shape up or ship out; or expanding the top division so more teams get to play the Old Firm and there's less of the overfamiliarity that comes with having to play Kilmarnock four times a year.

But just like American politicians fighting over the stimulus package, the decision makers are too wrapped up in what's in it for them than to look at the greater good. The SPL2 concept simply results in more of the protectionism that is slowly dragging Scottish football down.

L.