Marten

We're working on some strikers ourselves, sorry.

All of that simply for changing the vote for B-teams in the LL while the vote didn't make a difference anyway as it would only have been 9-6 instead of 10-5? And you miss the point that if anyone wanted to bribe Cowdenbeath that way it would be the SFA. They have no authority in giving League Cup places away. Also, if they wanted to do that, surely they'd see a vote for the Conference League as more important, so they'd bribe Cowdenbeath for both, while they were a no for the latter.

I have deliberately avoided all the debates around Cowdenbeath's votes but honestly, this is just rubbish. Cowdenbeath stated they are not happy with B-teams in the LL but felt they were forced to vote for it in order to stop the Conference coming in straight away. Now, I disagree passionately with that vote. Especially as I never believed the SFA could just add a league, which has basically been proven recently. However, Cowdenbeath were clear they would have voted against the Conference League had that vote happened. If the invitation was to reward a club that's pro B-teams, University of Stirling for example would have made far more sense. They consistently voted for B-teams, never criticised their presence and made no statement about the Conference League. Also, the SPFL decide about who to invite to this cup. The SPFL members are in majority against pushing B-teams, it's the SFA who are trying to push them. So the SFA can't even "reward" clubs with a place in the League Cup if they wanted to. Yes, I also agree it's odd Cowden got invited, but some of the conspiracies around it are just mental.

That's the Dutch professional leagues now fully finished for the season. In the Europa Conference League play-off final, Twente won 1-0 against Sparta, 2-1 on aggregate. In the promotion/relegation play-off final Almere City won 1-2 at Emmen, 4-1 on aggregate, to get promoted. Almere become the first ever club from the province of Flevoland in the Eredivisie, taking the place of Emmen who became the first ever club from the province of Drenthe in the Eredivisie 5 years ago. Zeeland is the only one of the 12 provinces left to never have had a top flight team. That's unlikely to change any time soon though as their strongest side are only midtable in the 4th tier.

There is a dedicated thread in the "Domestic Cup Football" forum, but a long story short, there are 2 preliminaries, all licensed sides start in the second preliminary round. The 7 qualifiers are in the first, 1 will get drawn a bye at random and the other 6 will face each other in 3 ties. The 4 teams from the first preliminary round are then joined by all 48 licensed sides, so 52 teams in total playing 26 ties. The 26 winners are then joined by 16 LL & 18 HL sides for the first round, total 60 clubs.

Last season the preliminary round was on 27th August so I'd expect the same. Maybe HL are planning a cup round that weekend?

Gretna 2008 joined the SCFA and will be in the Challenge Cup and Potts Cup as a result. https://twitter.com/SOSFLeague/status/1666907652847439872

Can't find anything about that online. I wonder what this is for.

Because they didn't want the non-league clubs out voting the SPFL ones...

Only these 3 have been confirmed so far as far as I know.

Carluke got their license too so I added them to the opening post.

All teams tier 5 and above and all teams below tier 5 that were licensed pre-2018.

The Netherlands did have one, although that was pre-WW2 when there wasn't a national league yet. There were 5 regional leagues, all teams in the top 2 tiers of each region played in this cup. It's the only major piece of silverware Excelsior ever won, by beating Feyenoord 5-0 in the final in 1927. So it's important to recognise that one.

I wouldn't dare to drink any coffee served by Maxwell. He is so incompetent that he'd probably mess that up too!

Maxwell forgot such facts in his "arguments", or the fact that there is only one B-team left in the Croatian pyramid, who just got relegated from the 3rd tier to the regionalised 4th tier. Even more hilarious was that he quoted the success of Brentford B, a team who aren't in the pyramid, play reserve football & friendlies and never even attempted to join the English pyramid as far as I know.

Yeah, the vast majority of countries have only 1 domestic cup tournament in which the top sides take part.

Absolutely brilliant this!

Yeah, Paul did win it, I was there on Saturday when he received the prize. Well deserved too imo. Indeed, that's the idea I get from speaking to people at Harp (and Violet), your main rivalry is with each other like it is for us and North End. We've always had a good relationship with Harp. Helped each other out in the past by swapping fixtures when the ground of the other was being worked on for example. Our first floodlit game was meant to be against Harp, they agreed to move a game to Friday night for that reason. Unfortunately, that never happened as the works overran.

Wrong choice... Joking aside (we actually get on quite well with Harp, it's more North End that are our rivals), this level of the game is still well supported up here. It is different compared to the recent past as it's now a very local league for just Tayside, but with the opportunity of promotion to the Highland League for licensed sides (so far only ourselves & Tayport are licensed in our league though, and none in the North Region). I hope you enjoy it though and maybe see you at a game one day! Edit: for discussion on our league, you're better off going to the "North Pyramid" subforum where there is a dedicated thread to it (and also one for the North Region).

Added Carnoustie Panmure who qualified as Midlands League champions (sorry, I was a bit late on this one). I guess we should find out in the next few days who get added as licensed clubs, as the SFA AGM is on Tuesday.

The previous statement by the club clearly wanted to push this plan didn't exactly work then. Well done on the fans turning this down with an 88% vote.

In England it already results in odd situations like Bishops Stortford in the Conference North. In Scotland it would likely be far worse. As said, Cowdenbeath could have been moved to the Highland League. Over time it could result that the HL contains clubs from as far south as Edinburgh, it already happened that Edinburgh clubs were in the northern section in the League Cup groups (when it was still split north/south) or in the Challenge Cup. Scotland's population spread is far too lopsided for a structure like that. England already have this problem despite having some major population centres in the north/midlands, like Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle and so on.

Yep, and the status quo was not an option...

That's already the case. Had Brechin been promoted, instead of Spartans, Albion Rovers would still have gone down to the LL. The LL would have relegated Edinburgh University to the East of Scotland League and the 4th placed teams of EOS Div 1 & 2 + 3rd placed team of EOS Div 3 wouldn't have been promoted. These teams now got promoted to fill up the EOS Premier vacancy caused by Linlithgow Rose going up to the LL while no teams came down from the LL (as Dalbeattie Star went down to the South of Scotland League). The LL, EOS & WOS all have rules how to deal with them ending up a team short or with a team too many due to promotion/releation.

Typical Maxwell, deciding something is wat League 2 clubs want without actually asking League 2 clubs...