LongTimeLurker

As a licensed club in the LL entering the Scottish Cup automatically you would have been looking at around 15K this season fom the SFA minimum from what I understand. Make it to midtable SPFL L2 and the various handouts probably total 60K or so. Good runs in the Scottish or League Cups make large financial windfalls like the one you would have got from the Tynecastle game possible as well.

Now confirmed to have been a wind up.

McKenna's a nasty piece of work as well. What he doesn't seem to grasp with the paranoid bit at the end is that the survey results were a break with tradition not a reinforcement of it.

If the above is legit and neither poster is the type to wind people up on something like this, it could be related to Linlithgow Rose coming out in favour of pyramid entry and a push to get into the SPFL in their local paper:

Here's why the SFA would need to take out a loan from the Bank of Scotland at the moment: https://www.scotsman.com/sport/football/teams/scotland/queen-s-park-agree-deal-to-sell-hampden-to-sfa-reports-1-4716180 Not sure what buying Hampden has to do with the pyramid. The pressure to open up the national divisions to entry from below came from the need to comply with UEFA statutes more than anything else.

The ball is in the SFA's court at the moment. The easy fix is all three regions in as is at tier 6 and slowly reconfigure from there and that would be in line with what would have happened if the SJFA had been on board at the outset according to the rhetoric at the time. The financial implications of 160 new clubs trying to get licensed over the next few years to secure automatic Scottish Cup entry is the other angle that makes the easy fix unlikely to be viewed favourably at Hampden, because from the SFA blazers' standpoint the SJFA were never expected to engage with the process and that could reasonably have been expected to prevent anything too radical from ever happening. If east region clubs are gung ho about licensing best to proceed with EoS applications before some new obstacle to progress can be dreamed up by the powers that be basically, but it might be difficult to persuade a club EGM of that right now, because on the surface it looks like all is rosy and 160 SJFA clubs will all be in the pyramid after next season. Time will tell.

Overlapping east feeders was the plan only a few years ago, if the SJFA had wanted to participate from the outset. I have no idea how you can state that so definitively and on what basis. The east region feeder scenario is actually the relatively easy bit for them given there are so many clubs showing a willingness to switch grades and do something different and the tier six feeder is happy to oblige. The bigger problem for the SFA is going to be what happens in the Highland League catchment given the tier five feeder in that part of the country doesn't appear to really want to be part of the pyramid and doesn't want to open itself up to new clubs and hence is likely to go apoplectic when the prospect of having to admit any newly licensed Tayside junior teams enters the discourse. Interesting times ahead with issues that are unlikely to be fixed neatly by 2019-20, which is when the mass migration scenario of central belt clubs able to get licensed might become the path of least resistance approach to break the logjam.

Suspect some/many/most of the 12 applications may even be withdrawn this season due to that and what will be sorted out next will be how an EoS merger with the ERSJFA is going to be engineered and under whose control. That's not straightforward if 16 Tayside clubs are really in the HL rather than LL catchment, so I suspect a mass migration of Fife & Lothians clubs to the EoS could still happen eventually. The optimal time to negotiate getting everything semi-pro under tier 5 to be under the auspices of the SJFA was when the LL was being launched. It's a bit late in the day to try to do it now.

You can always withdraw an application, so they could have put one in with the EGM deciding whether to proceed with it.

But he also said this: ..."The likelihood is that junior football will move into the pyramid system, and we will move to achieve that entry level and possibly higher. "Because if we're in there we want to do as well as we possibly can. Although we've no ambitions to do it, if we're going to be going in there we'll be doing as best as we can, and that means our facilities as well... so it's not quite a Whitburn and the superleagues scenario.

Will over 10,000 be showing up at a ground like Brockville or Love Street? Most of us can remember when that was the norm for the semis. It's still a big deal, but it's not as big a deal as it used to be.

Saw somebody on the junior subforum claiming last night that it's only Penicuik that definitely want to stay junior in Mid- and East Lothian terms.

The deadline for the application isn't until Sunday, so they could still put the form in prior to this EGM, which they may have had to give a certain amount of notice for under their constitution. What I find interesting is they tweeted this information out about an EGM after the survey results info from Tom Johnston went online (which they had sent out a retweet about).

So presumably the application is already in and this is to ratify it.

Will be interesting to see what the decision is on this at the clubs that have put applications in. If the goal is the LL and beyond in the years ahead, the EoS may still provide the easier pathway.

To be fair to the guy the superduper league thing a couple of years back did look like a way to try to get in at tier 5 alongside the LL in a moderately sensible and coherent sort of way. In England the Isthmian League and Southern League that covered much the same area because historically one had been amateur while the other was part-time professional were both allowed to feed into the conference in the 1980s after the Isthmian league had initially given the pyramid concept the bodyswerve, because respecting old arrangements isn't necessarily a bad starting point for merging previously separate structures. Seriously doubt it will happen as I don't think the SFA will be in a rush to license lots of junior clubs, but a strong case can still be made for tier 5 entry for the west superleague as the best way to quickly deal with the geographical imbalance caused by the LL's membership being largely drawn from the old EoS premier.

Weird phrasing. Maybe "sooner" means "immediately" here.

Joining at tier 6 and tier 5. The latter had more support obviously.

More the influx of the SJFA member clubs in general. If the SFA wanted it to happen, they could simply have told the three regions to affiliate directly at the very outset of the process, but chose not to. All the SJFA does is run the junior cup and a semi-pro level national team given the SFA already do things like player registration and match official appointments for junior clubs, so the whole idea of separate grades is an anachronism. The problem with a mass influx of junior clubs into the senior grade pyramid from the SFA's standpoint is that subsidy money will get split many more ways if most junior clubs achieve licensing. The bar on entry level was set very low to make it possible for the likes of Golspie Sutherland to achieve it, so that could conceivably happen.

Well that throws the cat amongst the pigeons, because I seriously doubt the SFA actually ever wanted this to happen.

To put the numbers in perspective, by my reckoning 17 of 60 east region clubs are in the HL catchment if the Tay Bridge boundary is accurate (and the LL secretary seems like a credible source). Once you get past 10 clubs moving you are looking at about a quarter of the junior membership in Perth, Fife, Stirlingshire, Clackmannanshire and the Lothians. Both the EoS and the east region juniors would be profoundly different from what they have been previously at that point and old assumptions about their relative quality no longer apply. Having said that 10 clubs actually going through with it when all is said and done is still in believe it when I see it territory as far as I am concerned. Posts like that of drs should be taken seriously.