Don't panic. All is not lost. Scottish football may still be reeling from the ongoing problems of Rangers football club, failing TV revenues and falling attendances, but Stuart Cosgrove believes things are not as bad as they seem.
In fact the presenter of Radio Scotland's football magazine show Off the Ball says he is surprised that football is as buoyant as it it is. Speaking to the Herald Magazine for a wide-ranging interview today, Cosgrove, famously a St Johnstone fan, challenged the idea that despite Rangers' ongoing absence from the top flight of Scottish football the SPL is struggling.
"When people measure crowds they always measure them against some historic high," he said That, he argued, is inevitably misleading.
As evidence Cosgrove said he asked a fellow Saint Johnstone fan to look at other major events in the Perth area in the last two years and compare attendances with the 4000 plus average home attendance at McDiarmid Park
"I said 'go through every significant event in the last two years that is within a 30-mile radius of Perth and look at what we get'. It includes the Proclaimers and Jimmy Carr at Perth Concert Hall. 650 people at both nights. When you actually put St Johnstone's crowd on that level it doesn't look bad at all. It looks quite decent actually."
Cosgrove added that Scottish football suffered because it was "cheek to jowl next to England" and would often get compared unfavourably to the English. He suggested that Rapid Vienna and Anderlecht would be a better comparison point for Scotland's top clubs rather than Manchester United and Arsenal. "And there's nothing wrong with that," he added. "But because Rangers and Celtic historically have had these huge crowds St Johnstone then becomes a diddy crowd and you think, 'wait a minute. Perth has 48,000 people. To have that percentage of people turning up every Saturday to watch a recreational sport is astonishing.' So I'm an optimist with that."
What has changed since he was a lad on the terraces is the way the game is squeezing ordinary working class boys out of the game, he believes. "They are almost an embarrassment. It's actually quite sad.
"I think that a lot of ordinary working class boys and their youthful behaviour ... They're trying to police it out of football either through discriminatory legislation or through fining the club. There's always some mechanism that the things I got up to at 16 you just wouldn't do now at St Johnstone. You wouldn't see it."
Cosgrove was speaking to publicise his new book Detroit 67, a book about the politics and pop music in the American city in that year. He admitted with a smile that the history of Motown records is a subject that is likely to have a wider appeal to readers than a book about St Johnstone FC.
And, if he's honest, music matters much more to him than football ever has anyway. "Although a lot of people know me for the football I wouldn't put that in my top list of passions."
"Maybe I was a bit cruel." The past, present and future of Stuart Cosgrove in The Herald Magazine today.
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