Doncaster's denouement?

Neil Doncaster, grinning inanely as usual

Neil Doncaster has been the Chief Executive of the Scottish Premier League, and subsequently the Scottish Professional Football League, since July 2009.  His (nearly) six years as the figurehead of club football in this country have not exactly been distinguished.  For example, STV were able to publish an article this week titled 'Neil Doncaster's most memorable blunders', which listed some, but by no means all, of the cock-ups that have occurred during his tenure.

At the time of writing, the league is coming to the end of a second straight season without any title sponsor.  The TV deal is worth a relative pittance to clubs, and yet allows the broadcasters to extend it to 2019 with only a marginal increase in income.  He received a 16 per cent pay rise in 2013 to a staggering £200,000 per year, announced at the same time as the league's income had dropped six per cent.  His response to criticism is standard - the sort of inane grin that an infant makes when you find him drawing on the walls with crayon.

In March, he presented a lecture at the University of Leeds.  The subject?  'Crisis management in football'.  My irony-meter has never quite recovered from that one.

And yet, remarkably, he has remained in his post - and even, in 2012, fought off competition to be made Chief Exec of the SPFL after the leagues were merged.  And that was in the aftermath of the shambolic handling of the Rangers liquidation saga.  But, for a cool 200k, he seems willing to be the public face and perennial laughing stock for the league board, a group of club representatives which has barely changed over that six year period.  All that can be said of them is that they appear to feel Doncaster is worth the money, and that the only other board member who is not attached to a club, chairman, Ralph Topping, is sufficiently shameless that he brought his grandson along to present the medals at the League Cup Final last season - a tournament that he and his cronies couldn't even find a sponsor for.

It is the board who make the decisions on behalf of the clubs; a little birdie told me previously that TV and sponsorship deals are made and presented to clubs as a fait accompli.  Hence a situation where, for example, matches were being transmitted live on BBC Alba, at a loss to clubs - the minimal money from the Beeb did not nearly compensate from lost gate receipts and hospitality.  But the clubs have the power to vote out these useless idiots; it remains a mystery to the average fan why, every year, they do not.

Neil Doncaster resorts to his default expression

This week's events may change that.  The attempt to schedule Hearts-Rangers a day later than every other match on the final day of the Championship season was cack-handed even by the remarkable standards Doncaster has previously set himself.  Apart from royally pissing off Hearts and their fans by rescheduling the match at less than three weeks notice, the move raised the dreaded spectre of 'sporting integrity' once more, as it potentially gave Rangers an advantage in the race for second place - with the other matches being played on the Saturday, the Gers would know what result they needed to finish above the likes of Hibs and Queen of the South.

Was it a deliberate attempt to aid the Ibrox side?  I very much doubt it, as that amount of cunning is well beyond Doncaster's limited faculties.  It should also be noted that Rangers made it quite clear that they had no part in this fiasco.  More likely, it was a clumsy move to keep Sky Sports happy by giving them a match at a time the TV company wanted it.

God knows what is happening out of shot here

The league, however, reckoned without Ann Budge, who runs the show at Hearts, and Leann Dempster, Chief Exec of Hibs.  With a level of integrity and determination that should shame many of their contemporaries in Scottish football, they smacked down the SPFL.  Budge, a highly successful businesswomen used to having to deal with other businesspeople, gives the impression that she can't quite believe that a professional organization and business (which is what the SPFL is meant to be) is run by folk who probably couldn't be trusted to run with scissors in their hands.  Dempster, meanwhile, was already looking for blood after accusations that the Hibees, and others, were looking to do all the other teams out of huge sums of money from the playoffs.  The spectacularly inflated and inaccurate figures that the press were bandying about, before Dempster shot them down a few hours later by providing a level of transparency that Doncaster could have done without, made me wonder whether the SPFL had actually briefed the press against Hibs on this issue in advance.

Would you pay this man £200,000 to run your league?

The fallout was increased spectacularly when, late in the evening, the SPFL released a statement that challenged the assertions from Budge and Dempster - by claiming ignorance as to what all the fuss was about.  It was such a horrendous PR move that it's not impossible to believe that the person who dictated/wrote it might have been under the influence of something.  For a start, why not just leave it till the morning?

When, the next day, the inevitable backtracking occurred, the parting shot from the league was the comment "the SPFL would like to thank Sky Sports for it's flexibility and understanding".  No apology to the fans for being messed around, no acknowledgement of an error of judgement, but instead a bit of grovelling to a TV channel which pays well below market rate for the right to broadcast our matches at inconvenient times (just see the 12:15 kickoff in Glasgow for ICT-Celtic tomorrow!).  That tells you everything about the league's priorities.

The non-apology just seemed to irritate Budge and Dempster further; the two have demanded an investigation into the governance of the league.  Once Doncaster gets hold of a dictionary and manages to find out what 'governance' means, he will be in for a bit of a shock.

One wouldn't be surprised if this might be the straw that breaks the camel's back.  What chance Doncaster quietly walking away this summer?  Only when he, and the tired old men who have been pulling his puppet strings for six years, are gone, can Scottish football hope to move forward.  I don't suppose we could replace them with Budge and Dempster?


Lawrie Spence has ranted and spouted his ill-informed opinions on Narey's Toepoker since September 2007.  He has a life outside this blog.  Honestly.