THE new chief executive of the Scottish Football Association, Ian Maxwell, is far too diplomatic to put the boot into his predecessor Stewart Regan, but as the former Partick Thistle managing director took his bow at Hampden last week, you could hardly have blamed him for buffing up his size 11s.
It wasn't so much a new broom that Maxwell needed as he swept into power as a pooper-scooper to deal with the mess he has inherited.
The national side were flying out to Peru and Mexico the next day, and it is fair to assume such end of season follies will be a thing of the past under the new boss. The decision over the future of Hampden and the independent review into sexual abuse in football are near the top of his in-tray too.
But it is the expiration of sponsorship and broadcast deals that on the face of it, could provide Maxwell with his biggest headache. Where one man sees a problem though, others see an opportunity, and Maxwell is very much in the latter camp. He believes that Scottish football is in rude health at the minute, and that is why he hesitated when asked if it was frustrating to take the helm with so many crucial deals to be renegotiated.
“I don’t know if frustrating is the word,” Maxwell said with impressive restraint. “I’ve said this a lot in the past week, but we are where we are. There’s no point in me wondering why we’ve got here. Let’s move on.
“We’ve got a really good team up the stairs who’ve been working really hard. [Commercial Director] Chris Rawlings has a lot of experience in this area and he’s been knocking a lot of doors and making a lot of phone calls and hopefully we will be able to come up with news in the coming weeks and months that start to fill in the sponsorship gaps we’ve got. We’re in a position where we need to bring in new deals and that’s what we are focused on. I think there’s a lot of opportunity.
“The TV deal is a massive opportunity for the clubs. Obviously, it has been well-documented the numbers we get in comparison to other countries and it’s about driving that. If we’ve got Celtic getting to the Champions League group stages, the high-profile appointment at Rangers, Aberdeen, Hibs have done really well and Kilmarnock with their manager, and you’ve got a lot of success stories further down the leagues, the association and the SPFL working together and harnessing those aspects and that good energy will driving every commercial aspect.”
Maxwell and his team may very well succeed in driving up the SFA’s commercial revenue, but he is realistic enough to know that like the national team manager, the perception of his success in the role will be inextricably linked to how well the national side do on the park.
That is not his prime motivation for wanting Scotland to once again grace a major tournament, but he knows the difference that could make for the image of the oft-derided association as a whole.
“I think a lot of that comes with the territory,” he said. “We are a governing body. That makes life difficult because you have to make tough decisions and some people won’t like them, some people won’t care about them really. You won’t get many that will like them but that’s just the nature of the beast.
“I would love to be the chief executive when we qualify for a tournament. That would be an incredible thing. That would really change the mood and the appetite in the country for the association and the Scottish national team as a whole.
“I remember France '98, Simon Donnelly was there then I played with him at St Johnstone and I knew him from Queens Park so there was always a connection. I remember playing out the back with my brother when the World Cup was on and all those sorts of things.
“That’s what we need to get back to. My son is 17 in July, he’d love nothing more than Scotland to get to a finals because he’s never actually even thought about it. He thinks it was back when it was black and white.”
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