SCOTTISH football has just been jolted by the most expensive wake-up call in history.

For all the delight sparked in boardrooms south of the border, and perhaps in selected corners of Wales, by the news that domestic rights to televise English Premier League matches between 2016 and 2019 had been auctioned off to Sky and BT for a whopping £5.136bn, the mood at a meeting of the SPFL board yesterday was a combination of awe, fury and dismay. Politicians and telecoms regulator ofcom are already being urged to take an interest in the ramifications of the deal for clubs north of the border.

Okay, so the additional billions swilling around in the collected coffers might drip down for a Scottish-based player or two, but that suddenly seems like a minor detail compared to the structural problem which is suffocating Scottish football. Once the Old Firm ran the Scottish game; now the malign influence of another duopoly threatens to ruin it.

That deadly duo is Sky and BT, both of whom place a strategic importance on Barclays Premier League rights to underpin their broadband, mobile, and TV businesses. Consequently they are prepared to pay a premium which Scottish clubs feel drastically overestimates the value of the rights in question.

These are hard-headed commercial decisions, made by companies which are merely following the law of the marketplace. But at last count, approximately 10% of Sky's UK subscribers were based in Scotland, while BT, who recently purchased mobile operator EE, are already the major broadband supplier in the country. While Scotland is hardly alone in feeling left out of the riches on offer in England - every other European nation looks on enviously too - it is our clubs who are on the frontline. To the eyes of the world, we are part of the UK, yet in the eyes of the football world, we are stuck in Scotland. No wonder our club chairmen look on powerless as our kids become colonised by the soft power of the Premiership.

"There is something just not right about this," one top flight director told Herald Sport yesterday. "Scotland is paying for this and getting nothing back. It has gone beyond football now. This is two global telecommunications companies vying against each other."

No wonder Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore was smiling when the numbers were announced on Tuesday. The deal averages out at £10.2m for the 168 matches to be screened each season between 2016 and 2019 (Sky will pay £10.8m for their 126 matches, and BT £7.6m for each of its 42 games).

This means £10.2m for your West Brom versus Burnley, or the 2016 equivalent of Sunday's low-key televised match, while your regular SPFL game, say Dundee United versus Celtic, comes at a knock-down cover price in the region of just £200,000. To put it another way, the complete broadcast worth of the Scottish domestic leagues, at around £15.5m a year, comprises less than 1% of a season of Premiership football, valued at around £1.7bn.

While a modest uplift in Scottish broadcast revenue might be expected in view of the likely return of Rangers to the top flight, this is hardly a given. In fact, Sky - who currently pay £10.5m to screen 30 matches, with BT Sport paying an additional £5m - have the option to renew under already-agreed, specially restricted terms until 2018. Taking the EPL billions out of the equation merely seems likely to lock in the recent pattern of penny-pinching when it comes to the sums broadcasters are prepared to offer for the scraps left on the table.

While it is legitimate to ask whether SPFL chairmen and administrators could have acted more decisively to see this all coming, it is hardly the most helpful of exercises going forward. A brains trust is required of the greatest minds in the Scottish game in order to stem the tide or else clubs like Celtic will forever sit glumly on the sidelines watching a new world order emerging, where even Burnley can appear a behemoth. The drip-down effect of this bumper deal to English Championship clubs - all of them desperate to reach the Premier League and the guaranteed £99m for a last-place finisher - means that they no longer offer the plausible escape route they once did.

The doomsday scenario in all this is a top flight full of part-time teams but while feeling short-changed from a commercial organisation such as Sky or BT is one thing, feeling slighted by a publicly funded organisation such as the BBC is another altogether. There is a growing feeling that guns should be trained instead on the Beeb, whose league highlights package is nowhere near the £7m it could be were it decided as a pro-rata share of the £200m recently spent by the BBC to screen Match of the Day between 2006 and 2009. The BBC does, of course, also screen domestic cup and international matches, in addition to radio coverage.

"I don't think it is realistic to expect our new TV contract with Sky and BT to be 10% of the size of the English one, but the reason English football is in the position it is in right now is because it has been force fed money for a number of years now from Sky and BT, at the expense of their Scottish subscribers" said Mike Mulraney, the chairman of Alloa Athletic.

"That is a genuine commercial, corporate decision that needs to be taken," he added. "But the enormous elephant in the room is the BBC contract. Nobody has taken the lid off the can of worms which is the second-class citizenship of the Scottish game of the BBC. Why is the BBC's money going to Gary Lineker's Match of the Day programme while they are starving the Scottish game of an equitable share of that funding?

"The Scottish tax payer is funding 10% of the Match of the Day contract, but what the BBC are giving the Scottish game, compared to the English game, is chicken feed. No longer is it appropriate that the Scottish game accepts a marginal distribution model from the BBC. It is disgraceful, obscene - and we should be asking politicians north and south of the border what their position on it is and asking the BBC to come out and give their answer to it.

"We are not getting 10% of the BBC's football spend. It is disgraceful the BBC are paying that money to the English game, especially with all the wealth they have. We have let them away with it for too long."