SCOTTISH football is shrinking.

They will not be the only ones to take such drastic action, not the only ones poring over the balance sheet to see where further savings can be possibly made. Out of financial necessity, our game is getting smaller.

Dunfermline’s announcement that the North Stand at East End Park would be closed for the foreseeable future would have been embarrassing for the club.

It was an open admission that not enough people want to come and watch them, that money was so tight that even a saving of £20,000 a year could make a big difference.

In an interview with this newspaper earlier in the season, chairman John Yorkston had expressed a curious bemusement that home crowds were not higher now that promotion out of the first division had been secured.

This latest statement, then, also serves as a warning to ambitious lower league clubs not to bank on entry to the Scottish Premier League as being the answer to all their money worries. The land of milk and honey it ain’t.

Dunfermline are certainly not the poorest club in the league, just one of the more honest. If anything, they should be given credit for their candour, not pilloried for any loss of face. For too long there were plenty others in denial about the truth of their circumstances, preferring to hide the extent of their financial shortcomings.

The mess engulfing both Hearts and Rangers shows how that strategy usually turns out. Clubs can only run away from their troubles for so long.

At least Dunfermline’s decision to close off a stand is only a temporary move. Over at St Johnstone they are facing up, rather willingly it must be said, to the possibility of their North Stand being demolished as a result of roadworks planned for the area.

A smaller replacement may one day be built in its place but former chairman Geoff Brown was not exactly devastated at the prospect of the McDiarmid Park capacity being reduced. “Any supporter who has seen two stands lying empty for many of the games in the SPL in the past two years will know that this has to be done,” he said in one of his last acts in office last month.

St Johnstone will, presumably, be well recompensed for the inconvenience, another example of a club keeping an open mind when it comes to finding increasingly inventive ways of balancing the books.

You don’t have to be a teary-eyed sentimentalist, however, to feel there is something quite symbolic about this proposed partial bulldozing of McDiarmid Park.

One of the first out-of-town, all-seater modern stadia to be built in Scotland, its construction was meant to usher in a new era for football in which sold-out signs were posted every fortnight as families flocked to the game.

The boom years lasted for a while before numbers gradually dwindled away once more. With their average home crowd now hovering around the 3000 mark, it is hardly a shock that St Johnstone feel they can operate with a reduced capacity.

Dunfermline’s statement on the closure of their stand was not the only downbeat Scottish football story to emerge that day. The Clydesdale Bank also announced they would not be renewing their sponsorship of the Scottish Premier League, while Hearts again failed to pay their players on time.

Clustered together it painted a rather negative picture. One tabloid newspaper deemed it “the day our game went down the toilet”, illustrating the point with a lavatory so disgusting it could have come straight from the set of Trainspotting.

At first glance the stories seem largely unrelated, but there is a common thread running through them all. Dunfermline are closing a stand because they are not bringing in sufficient revenue to meet their costs.

The loss of sponsorship money -- normally a fairly small percentage of a club’s overall income -- will be felt more sharply because other revenue streams are drying up. And Hearts, mired in debt due to paying exorbitant salaries to average players for years, can no longer afford to do so as there is not enough money coming in.

How to stimulate an increasingly uninterested and disenfranchised paying public is key to any revival of the game. Looking at figures for the last two full SPL seasons, only Celtic, Kilmarnock and St Mirren bucked the trend for falling attendances.

Celtic’s crowds were up as a result of Neil Lennon replacing the unpopular and unsuccessful Tony Mowbray as manager, while Kilmarnock’s gates spiked thanks to Alexei Eremenko’s arrival and the entertaining football played under Mixu Paatelainen. St Mirren’s average crowd was up, but only by 36. The other nine clubs’ attendances fell by varying degrees.

It is not a surprise that numbers have tumbled during a time of recession, with supporters understandably hesitant to shell out up to £100 for a family day out when levels of disposable income are, for many, at an all-time low.

What remains to be seen is whether the dwindling interest in the game is just part of a cyclical trend or the result of a much deeper malaise. When the global markets finally pick up -- as they must surely do again at some point in the future -- will Scottish football enjoy a similar renaissance?

Clubs, of course, cannot sit around and wait for the recession to end, but any attempts to be proactive in the hope of bolstering attendances are hampered by two key factors.

Firstly, there is the matter of cost. Those who like to dabble in armchair economics believe that reducing admission prices drastically would automatically lead to a sufficiently large increase in attendances to cover any shortfall.

History suggests that isn’t the case. Clubs such as Motherwell have tried to chop and change the figures in an attempt to stimulate growth without ever alighting on an ideal solution. Plus, with a reduction in broadcasting and other income streams affecting their budget, there will surely be a reluctance among the SPL chairmen to reduce their ticket prices with no guarantees they will benefit in the long term.

The other factor to consider is the role of television in all this. There is little doubt we have moved away from being a nation that, without fail, went to the football every Saturday at 3 o’clock. The proliferation of matches being shown on an ever-increasing number of channels, with kick-off times staggered throughout the day from 12 noon onwards, has destroyed that tradition.

Fans who in the past would have turned out faithfully to watch their team are now settling for a seat on their couch or heading down to their local pub instead. There is little chance of that trend slowing down any time soon.

With broadcasting income becoming increasingly vital to clubs -- even if the terms are nowhere near as lucrative as they were prior to the collapse of Setanta -- for as long as they are willing to take the Sky, ESPN or BBC shilling, they will dance to TV’s tune.

There are some among Scottish football’s firmament who continue to insist everything is fine despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. And more power to them.

Among the realists, however, there remains a fear that things will only get worse before they get better. Squad sizes will continue to be reduced, with the inevitable accompanying reduction in standards.

Crowds will drop off further unless a way can be found to reduce ticket prices without obliterating the balance sheet, or fix kick-off times while keeping the broadcasters happy.

The SPL have the option at the end of this season to sever their contract with Sky and ESPN, that is scheduled to run until 2014, and look for another deal, or even set up their own channel, but it is hard to see an appetite for such an offering at this moment in time.

The worst-case scenario would involve clubs going into administration or even out of business entirely. As Scottish football contracts on every front, it is a grim prospect that can’t be ruled out.