Coronavirus and the Scottish Championship

[Double Jack D]

44 minutes ago, virginton said:

Well yes - we knew that Omicron was a glorified cold producing mild symptoms in the vast majority of cases, based on the real-world data from South Africa.

The SG chose to ignore said data because it didn't fit their proven garbage public health modelling. 

Apples and oranges. The UK already had a high level of immunity from its summer exit wave, as well as a booster programme underway that could be rapidly scaled up to meet the challenge. Countries that had only one or neither of those advantages faced a different set of options as a result. 

The UK government had access to the exact same information as the SG and did not impose utterly useless capacity restrictions on events because there were and are no credible grounds to do so.

I'm not going to waste my time having a go at the Dutch government for their nonsense measures, because err, I don't live in Holland and can't turf them out of power. 

Scottish Championship fans were directly penalised for the sake of the SG's safety theatre. Your utterly desperate wagon-circling exercise around your beloved SNP does not change that reality. 

Totally agree. 

The 500 spectator rule was based on absolutely nothing in reality. We played 1 game at Starks with 500 folk in one stand whilst the exact same sized stand at the other end of the pitch was empty. At the same time there would've been much smaller and much larger stands across scotland with exactly the same limits. Nonsense.

Meanwhile down south there was no restrictions. 

Looking at the numbers, I'm not convinced it made one iota of difference in the number of infections/ hospitalisations compared to England.

[itzdrk]

2 hours ago, virginton said:

Scottish Championship fans were directly penalised for the sake of the SG's safety theatre. Your utterly desperate wagon-circling exercise around your beloved SNP does not change that reality. 

This is spot on tbf, Scotgov made an arse of it.  The club's then made a smaller arse of it themselves as well by carrying on. 

[PB1994]

36 minutes ago, itzdrk said:

This is spot on tbf, Scotgov made an arse of it.  The club's then made a smaller arse of it themselves as well by carrying on. 

To be fair to the clubs, did anybody actually think the restrictions would last only the 3 weeks? Even though they were totally unnecessary to begin with, I expected them to be kept up until the end of the season.

Edited January 13, 2022 by PB1994

[Double Jack D]

Scottish sports affected by crowd limits to share £2.55m financial support - BBC Sport

Scottish football to receive £1.79m support for financial impact of Omicron restrictions. Up to SPFL/ SFA to distribute. Anyone in the know as to how this will be divvied out?

[DA Baracus]

12 minutes ago, Double Jack D said:

Scottish sports affected by crowd limits to share £2.55m financial support - BBC Sport

Scottish football to receive £1.79m support for financial impact of Omicron restrictions. Up to SPFL/ SFA to distribute. Anyone in the know as to how this will be divvied out?

£850k to Sevco.

£850k to Celtic.

Rest to be divided up between the other 40 teams.

[1320Lichtie]

11 minutes ago, Double Jack D said:

Scottish sports affected by crowd limits to share £2.55m financial support - BBC Sport

Scottish football to receive £1.79m support for financial impact of Omicron restrictions. Up to SPFL/ SFA to distribute. Anyone in the know as to how this will be divvied out?

Not clicked the link but I assume they are offering financial support for this 3 weeks shut down... good 

 

But 

 

What a massive waste of money that is and this whole thing has been. Pishing money up against the wall and achieving f**k all from it. UK government and Scottish government and indeed governments around the world. Even the tests etc. They aren’t free, someone pays for them, I now have 21 of them sitting in my room just so I can go to a football game
 

 

[Guest Flash]

14 minutes ago, Double Jack D said:

Scottish sports affected by crowd limits to share £2.55m financial support - BBC Sport

Scottish football to receive £1.79m support for financial impact of Omicron restrictions. Up to SPFL/ SFA to distribute. Anyone in the know as to how this will be divvied out?

SPFL will probably pay consultants £1.7m to work it out.

[Tattie36]

Surely premiership teams were unaffected by the omicron shutdown as they just moved their winter shutdown to coincide. Would like to think all the money will be divided amongst the non premiership teams.

Most should go to the championship teams as they have been far more impacted than L1, L2 and below in regard to lost revenue through crowds. I would imagine the 500 cap had minimal to no impact on many teams.

[vikingTON]

It would be a brass neck for Championship clubs to do too much special pleading now, after getting an arbitrary £500k lobbed at them last season rather than the lower amounts further down the pyramid. 

A similar breakdown by division would not be unreasonable now - the Championship's benefit last year being evened out by less meaningful support this time round. 

Edited January 13, 2022 by vikingTON

[Double Jack D]

31 minutes ago, DA Baracus said:

£850k to Sevco.

£850k to Celtic.

Rest to be divided up between the other 40 teams.

Probably.

[Scary Bear]

36 minutes ago, DA Baracus said:

£850k to Sevco.

£850k to Celtic.

Rest to be divided up between the other 40 teams.

Probably about right. The VLs who run Scotland only know about Celtic and Sevco.

[oneteaminglasgow]

16 minutes ago, virginton said:

It would be a brass neck for Championship clubs to do too much special pleading now, after getting an arbitrary £500k lobbed at them last season rather than lower amounts further down the pyramid. 

A similar breakdown by division would not be unreasonable now - the Championship's benefit last year being evened out by less meaningful support this time round. 

If this happens, the statement Thistle put out will be fucking spectacular.

[Skyline Drifter]

33 minutes ago, Tattie36 said:

Surely premiership teams were unaffected by the omicron shutdown as they just moved their winter shutdown to coincide. Would like to think all the money will be divided amongst the non premiership teams.

Most should go to the championship teams as they have been far more impacted than L1, L2 and below in regard to lost revenue through crowds. I would imagine the 500 cap had minimal to no impact on many teams.

They certainly weren't completely unaffected. They had a round of fixtures on Boxing Day that was limited to 500 fans. St Johnstone, Rangers, Motherwell, Hearts, Dundee United and Aberdeen all played a home game with 500 attendance limit. I assume Rangers probably weren't massively financially impacted though. Are the majority of their fans not season ticket holders who wouldn't have been paying anyway? The biggest losers were probably St Johnstone who lost a visiting Celtic crowd.

26 minutes ago, virginton said:

It would be a brass neck for Championship clubs to do too much special pleading now, after getting an arbitrary £500k lobbed at them last season rather than lower amounts further down the pyramid. 

A similar breakdown by division would not be unreasonable now - the Championship's benefit last year being evened out by less meaningful support this time round. 

To an extent that's true. Though other than that one round of Premiership fixtures, it's not unreasonable to point out that only the Championship was significantly affected by the restriction. Falkirk presumably also. I know 9 out of 10 League 1 sides have an average attendance above 500, but most of them aren't far above it and averages are probably corrupted by the visiting Falkirk support.

I fully expect there won't be any means testing this time either and whatever is given to each division will be split evenly, taking no account for instance of the fact we lost a visit from Killie (and so will Thistle) and Raith lost a derby crowd with Dunfermline whilst Kilmarnock themselves moved their moneyspinning game to not lose the cash. Getting support for doing so would be ironic to say the least.

Edited January 13, 2022 by Skyline Drifter

[Tattie36]

Yeah, forgot there was a round of premiership fixtures that were impacted.

I think the fairest way would be to give every club an equal flat payment then look how each individual team was impacted and share the remainder based on lost match-day revenue. My team, Arbroath, only had one home fixture at the 500 limit and one home game postponed in that period so would happily expect a lower share than teams that had 2 or 3 games impacted.

It won’t happen like that though.

[itzdrk]

By my calculations Ayr should get £1.7m with the rest shared equally by the remaining 41 clubs. 

[John MacLean]

The Scottish Government handout should be means tested, just as the monies distributed last season should have been means tested, but whatever is the easiest route to distributing these funds will be taken. 

Shouldn't be too difficult to come up with a flat rate in any case. 

How many games were played in front of restricted crowds?  Take away from that figure the matches that drew less than 500 and divide the £1.79million by the figure left to come up with a figure per match. Then hand out the monies to the clubs based on the number of home games they played. 

There's no way the Premiership clubs that didn't play a home game should receive a penny of this money and equally those lower league clubs that had a sub 500 gate(s) shouldn't receive a penny either. 

Edited January 13, 2022 by John MacLean

[Skyline Drifter]

17 minutes ago, John MacLean said:

The Scottish Government handout should be means tested, just as the monies distributed last season should have been means tested, but whatever is the easiest route to distributing these funds will be taken. 

Shouldn't be too difficult to come up with a flat rate in any case. 

How many games were played in front of restricted crowds?  Take away from that figure the matches that drew less than 500 and divide the £1.79million by the figure left to come up with a figure per match. Then hand out the monies to the clubs based on the number of home games they played. 

There's no way the Premiership clubs that didn't play a home game should receive a penny of this money and equally those lower league clubs that had a sub 500 gate(s) shouldn't receive a penny either. 

It's not that simple. The restrictions themselves discouraged attendance. For instance the 1st of our two home games in the period did not sell out the 500, having a crowd of 440 or so I think off the top of my head. As poor as our crowds have been this season, we've not had a crowd lower than 980 when no restrictions existed. It didn't sell out but that's because people either chose not to faff about with advance applications, couldn't be bothered with it or didn't understand the process or just didn't realise until too late that they couldn't just rock up on the day. I doubt we were unique.

Away fans were routinely banned across the divisions unless the match in question could clearly accommodate both sides. There will be games that had under 500 that would have been way over it if away fans had been welcomed.

Whilst I accept that giving for instance Celtic a significant share of this will be a tad ridiculous, they will have faced costs and inconvenience from having to move games to change the shutdown inevitably.

[John MacLean]

7 minutes ago, Skyline Drifter said:

It's not that simple. The restrictions themselves discouraged attendance. For instance the 1st of our two home games in the period did not sell out the 500, having a crowd of 440 or so I think off the top of my head. As poor as our crowds have been this season, we've not had a crowd lower than 980 when no restrictions existed. It didn't sell out but that's because people either chose not to faff about with advance applications, couldn't be bothered with it or didn't understand the process or just didn't realise until too late that they couldn't just rock up on the day. I doubt we were unique.

Away fans were routinely banned across the divisions unless the match in question could clearly accommodate both sides. There will be games that had under 500 that would have been way over it if away fans had been welcomed.

Whilst I accept that giving for instance Celtic a significant share of this will be a tad ridiculous, they will have faced costs and inconvenience from having to move games to change the shutdown inevitably.

The point re a lack of away fans is a fair one. On reflection then rather than those clubs whose gates fell below the 500 limit not receiving a handout then perhaps clubs whose median, father than average, gate was below 500 shouldn't receive any of this cash. Too many clubs have benefited financially as a result of Covid as it is. 

Premiership clubs haven't lost income, merely had it deferred. No Premiership team that didn't play a single home game during this period of restrictions should receive a penny. 

I have no faith, however, in those that purport to govern the game in Scotland to even explore the possibility of distributing this money in a fair and equitable fashion. 

 

[jagsfan57]

5 hours ago, virginton said:

Well yes - we knew that Omicron was a glorified cold producing mild symptoms in the vast majority of cases, based on the real-world data from South Africa.

The SG chose to ignore said data because it didn't fit their proven garbage public health modelling. 

Apples and oranges. The UK already had a high level of immunity from its summer exit wave, as well as a booster programme underway that could be rapidly scaled up to meet the challenge. Countries that had only one or neither of those advantages faced a different set of options as a result. 

The UK government had access to the exact same information as the SG and did not impose utterly useless capacity restrictions on events because there were and are no credible grounds to do so.

I'm not going to waste my time having a go at the Dutch government for their nonsense measures, because err, I don't live in Holland and can't turf them out of power. 

Scottish Championship fans were directly penalised for the sake of the SG's safety theatre. Your utterly desperate wagon-circling exercise around your beloved SNP does not change that reality. 

I knew you would think that my argument would make me an SNP supporter. Even for Delta the outcome for most was not serious.  
 
You talk about apples and oranges but South Africa is an ok comparison. No sense in this.

You are kidding yourself if you think Boris didn’t impose restrictions, other than because the Tories wouldn’t stand for it. 
I am not sure they made the right call - 360 deaths in England yesterday.

The question you need to ask yourself is what is the threshold of deaths that you are prepared to “live” with when eventually we decide this is endemic. Is it yesterday’s level ? 

[craigkillie]

1 hour ago, John MacLean said:

There's no way the Premiership clubs that didn't play a home game should receive a penny of this money and equally those lower league clubs that had a sub 500 gate(s) shouldn't receive a penny either. 

 

The Premiership clubs moved their lucrative New Year fixtures to now be shunted on to a midweek - many will undoubtedly lose out on income as a result of that. There's also potential loss of income from having to postpone matches at short notice.