Thumper

Doncaster quite clearly stated at the time that the SPL would simply hold off themselves. Anyway, this is bollocks. Integrity means "cannot be bought". If any restructuring deal was predicated on Sevco being given a direct route to the top of the league then the game was dead and buried. Falkirk fans should be grateful that it wasn't, as the positive-sounding statements from their club (and especially the very strong interview from their manager on the radio) would have melted like snow off a dyke if the correct sweetener were offered and they'd be pariahs right now.

"Largely been subverted"? I've never heard of anyone being paid in vouchers. So long as bonuses are paid in the denomination of the Realm it doesn't matter if 90% of your pay is in bonuses, as long as the rest is above the minimum wage. Am I just too middle class to have noticed this supposed subversion of the law?

Ummm, no he hasn't. He's lied like a rug throughout the entire affair. He may not have lied in the specific way that many other chairmen did in the quite specific case of the vote (cf. Petrie declaring that sporting integrity was of paramount importance while directly acting to subvert it), but he lied about why he abstained and most certainly didn't tell any truths in the process. His reward for this is a position of authority. The SPL is corrupt.

Ummm, the Truck Acts? It's been illegal to pay employees in scrip for over a century.

Working for scrip is illegal. As are Dundee United. Their support isn't full of plastic, self-hating imbeciles though.

You know what's fucking brilliant at 37 minutes past midnight on Fairs Monday when you've got work tomorrow? Seagulls chasing each other down the street for a shag outside your window.

I assume that this is void given the collapse of oldco. The outsourced caterers and merchandisers are just another bunch of creditors who will see tuppence back after H&D are done with the liquidation proceeds. Presumably this also means they're not on the Sevco payroll, so other grumpy bottle-blonde teenagers will need to be press-ganged into burger service. Broadfoot can maybe miss the half-time talk to punt up the stairs and ensure they're sufficiently whipped. Not a terrible piece, but somewhat uncritical considering that David Conn has been the authoritative source on Leeds's shenanigans for quite some time. Portsmouth's odds on survival are fairly slim right now as well. Darlington were given no lifelines prior to their resurrection either (indeed they even precipitated a ban on phoenix clubs using "AFC Oldco" to retain a relation with the past). The honeymoon may be over.

What were Livi's crowds like in the Third? Closest analogue we have. [edit] Average crowd was half what it is in the first.

Right, but the difference is still marginal, and based on a deeply flawed premise. Under this hypothetically perfect model we'd have ten professional teams getting crowds of 5000 each, evenly smeared around the country, with another sixty part-time teams playing to crowds of between 10 and 30. The best thing about a pyramid is that it would theoretically rebalance the senior teams a bit. Ayrshire is considerably under-represented by senior sides right now, for instance. There's only one of them.

It'd be boring if any of the Fife teams were named after real towns anyway. It's more interesting for them to have weird made-up names like East Fife, Raith or Dunfermline.

Not by much, if the rather tired "tenth of England" proportion is taken. There are presently only 19 full-time teams in Scotland (20 if Sevco actually end up with a team). The Premier League and Football League are both fully full-time and the Conference National is almost all full-time. That's 116. If the recession drags on much longer (and it will, because of the fucking Tories) SFL1 will be all part-time soon enough.

Succulent? It's on commentisfree, though. That's basically just a free blog for any old dafty to contribute to.

I'd still dearly love to know which of the succulents physically threatened him.

It's been the same throughout.

With his one share? That's 1/300th of what most SFL chairmen seem to have.

Spiers's schtick is saying the opposite to other journalists. Where the other journalists are dead wrong this results in Spiers looking erudite, but that's a happy accident.

I remain awestruck by quite how many people think this was orchestrated by Celtic. This is CFC's worst nightmare.

Spiers is a contrarian wee shitebag. If you're just looking for a "good guy" list here then you'll need Jim Spence added.

And yet that's precisely what happened. There's no way of knowing how many SPL chairmen would have voted yes had they not been assured by the people at the very top of the SFA that the stitch-up was assured. If anything I imagine the SPL chairmen are madder at Regan and Doncaster than we are. Gilmour may very well deserve what he gets for being complicit in this, but there's no doubt that the SFA's failure here has cost him a metric fuckton of personal wealth.

What would be amusing is for Sky to state clearly and unequivocally that they will continue with the deal on its present financial terms. And then for ICT and St Mirren to be relegated in successive seasons, and go bust.

Haw you. I believe you made a promise regarding your avatar should jelly and ice cream indeed be provided.

Yet.

Players usually aren't very bright. They are also, as others have pointed out, quite explicitly in it for the money rather than the love of their clubs in most cases, and indeed are the primary cause of most clubs' financial troubles. Little point in being too hard on them for their misspelled, punctuation-free ramblings on their iPhones.

Do you still have a sign advertising season tickets which promises access to games against Celtic and Rangers? Another grim casualty of this debacle.