United in a state of flux. . .but just where is Scottish football really going?

But those are headlines. Where does the game really stand? Over the following days The Herald will examine the state of Scottish football in 2015, looking at various element of the national game and talking with key figures and decision-makers. These sort of snapshot profiles tend to happen at the punctuation marks in a season, most commonly when the national team fails to qualify for a World Cup or a European championship. But there is just as much merit in pausing to survey the scene in a period of relative calm.

The last 16 of the Champions League comprises teams from Germany (4), Spain (3), England (3), France (2), Italy, Switzerland, Portugal and Ukraine. The last 16 of the Europa League has representatives from Italy (5), Spain (2), Ukraine (2), Russia (2), Germany, Turkey, Belgium, Holland, England. That's 22 representatives from the five richest leagues in the final 32 European survivors, almost 69 percent of them. This matters because it illustrates the macro-economics of football, which is a grandiose way of saying Scottish football is a tiddler which gets carried around by tides it cannot control. All football is shaped by a growing polarisation of finances in which England, Spain, Germany, France and Italy hoard the riches and others are left to squabble for meagre leftovers. That, more than anything, shapes and limits Scottish football today. The English game has just announced a deal for domestic television rights worth £5.1 billion. This will shape and limit Scottish football, too. From 2016-17 the team which finishes bottom of the Barclays Premier League - a Burnley or a Hull City or a Norwich City - will receive £99 million in broadcasting income. It is a grotesque, eye-watering, hugely distorting amount of money. Celtic do cartwheels if they successfully negotiate the qualifying tightrope and secure £25m for a Champions League group campaign. From 2016, they will find it even harder to attract players who can compete respectably at that level when so many English clubs can obliterate them on transfer fees and wages.

That is what television money has done to football, in this country and beyond. It has taken what was a traditional and natural pecking order and amplified it, creating near certainty about who will win the honours. A team from one of the big five countries will win the Champions League. One of three, or four at the most, clubs will win the Barclays Premier League. Only one team will win the SPFL Premiership, at least until Rangers raise and successfully use the money necessary to challenge Celtic. With a wage bill of £6m Aberdeen have tried to challenge Celtic and their wage bill of £38m.

That Celtic are restless and crave a slice of the English broadcasting income is an open secret. They are tormented by what they see as the injustice of being a huge and deserving club excluded by geography. There is no evidence that there is an escape route for them. Celtic want out because of self-interest, and the self-interest of English Football League clubs will deny them an entry point. The idea of some sort of pan-European league of malcontents - with representatives from Scotland, Holland, Portugal, Belgium and others grumbling about their lot - is no further forward.

All things are relative. Celtic are frustrated but win trophies and enjoy thrilling European nights. Everyone else has a degree of frustration with much less to celebrate. Most football supporters are reconciled to their club's place in the natural order, a point which was lost amid the tiresome "Armageddon/so-much-for-Armageddon" debate since Rangers disappeared from the top flight in 2012. That became a topic debated on tribal grounds and both sides often missed the point. Life for an average St Mirren or Ross County or Kilmarnock fan is by-and-large the same now as it was when Rangers were in the top flight. In this, part one of The Herald series, we publish attendances figures from this season and 10, 20 and 30 years ago. The most interesting thing of all is how consistent some club's crowds are: Aberdeen's average crowd this season is within 300 of what it was 20 years ago. Hibs' is within 1300 of what it was in 1995. After 20 years Dundee United's crowds are different by just 163.

The attendance given for the Celtic-Aberdeen game on Sunday was 50,296, the highest for any league match in Scotland this season. But when you take the pulse of the national game you don't do the test based on two buoyant and well-supported sides meeting for our main honour. The other five top flight games played at the weekend told another story: 6,517 at Dundee United-Partick, 3,508 at Motherwell-Caley Thistle, 3,503 at St Mirren-Hamilton, 3,414 at Ross County-Dundee, 3,170 at St Johnstone-Kilmarnock. A handful of games drawing only 20,111 between them.

There are three ways to look at figures like that. One, it's evidence of a game in terminal decline. Two, it's evidence that an unusual number of smaller clubs are in the top flight this season yet thousands still turn out on a rain-lashed day in late February to watch them. And thirdly, and the dullest but perhaps most accurate conclusion of all: it's just par for the course. There has been a general downturn in attendances across Scottish football in recent seasons but not alarmingly so. And the two main variants are the same as always: whether a team is in the top flight, and whether or not it is winning.

In the coming days this series will consider Scottish football from the fans' perspective, it will examine how television shapes the game and whether the SPFL could be securing far more lucrative deals, it will study our clubs' business models and ask if they have pulled back from the worst period of multiple administrations and liquidations, and it will scrutinise whether the SFA is getting it right with its National Performance Strategy and producing a higher standard of young player in time for its medium-term target, the 2020 European Championships. There are issues which would make the game more appealing to some who do not currently attend: safe standing areas, a move to summer football, and a relaxation of the current ban on alcohol sales within grounds. Would any of them make a substantial difference?

Scottish football has some grave problems. The Scotland team hasn't been at a tournament since 1998, every year the majority of clubs get skittled out of Europe before the school holidays are over, the decline in the standard of our footballers over the past quarter-of-a-century has been alarming, ticket prices are often too high and attitudes to supporters from clubs, stewards and the police can be disparaging and ignorant. The game is under unprecedented pressure from other elements of the leisure industry. You don't need to spend long in a pub, or on social media, to hear someone mouth off about how Scottish football is "finished" or "dead".

Yet in a research paper published by the fans' organisation Supporters Direct Scotland before the start of the season there was a telling little line buried on page 66. It was an unfashionable description of Scottish football and how fans feel towards it, and it captured the essence of an enduring addiction: "It is (on the whole) a positive experience and that is what keeps them going back for more. It makes fans happy."