ABERDEEN chairman Stewart Milne was spot on when he said Scottish football needs Rangers and Hibs back in the top division. And if they could be accommodated as part of a move to a 16-team league then all the better. I think it’s a no-brainer that we need this country’s biggest clubs all in the Premiership.

The likes of Hearts, Rangers and Hibs have all dropped down in recent times for one reason or another but the product can only get better with them back in the top tier. It would make the league more competitive and the game more appealing to people here and in other countries. That, in turn, makes it more enticing to sponsors and broadcasters and should hopefully lead to more money coming into the game. It’s just common sense.

I think the time is also right to be looking again at moving to a bigger league. It hasn’t happened in the past because the 12 Premiership clubs have been protecting their own interests. Nobody wanted to see their slice of the pie getting any smaller. Eventually there was a change with play-offs coming in and more money going into the Championship but I’d like to see it go a step further now with a switch to a 16-team top division.

I have been saying for years that we only have to look at all of the big leagues in Europe and they all have more than 12 teams. The Premier League in England, La Liga in Spain and the Bundesliga in Germany all seem to manage fine with bigger divisions. And in most of these leagues you usually have just a handful of teams competing at the top and the rest fighting it out for Europe, in mid-table or trying to avoid relegation. I think we have enough clubs now who are strong enough and on good financial footing to consider seriously moving to a 16-team top league.

If you get Hibs and Rangers back to add to the existing 12 then you’re only two shy of what you need. Add in a couple from the likes of Falkirk, Queen of the South, Raith Rovers and St Mirren – all good clubs – and you’ve got enough quality there for a strong, interesting top league. I think it’s worth a go if you can get the existing 12 to agree to it.

A lot of the top-flight clubs are scared of change in case they end up dropping out and then take a good few years to get back up. But a bigger league should actually lessen their chances of relegation. You could maybe have one or two down automatically and then another in a play-off, something like that. And if you’ve got maybe two automatic promotion places then that means any club that finds itself relegated has got a decent chance of coming straight back up.

The details would obviously need to be all ironed out. The clubs might think 30 league games won’t be enough. My former BBC colleague David Begg had an idea that involved the 16 clubs splitting into three mini-leagues come the end of the season and playing off for different things. That could add another four to six games at the end of a season if clubs felt they needed more than 15 home matches. People will complain that a bigger league means more meaningless games in mid-table towards the end of the season. There’s maybe a chance of that but that already exists in some of the biggest leagues in the world and you don’t hear too many people moaning about it.

I just feel we need to give it a go because the current set-up isn’t delivering what we want it to do. We have to do all we can to make our league healthy again. Hearts have come back up and made a real positive contribution. Rangers and Hibs will hopefully get back up soon. We’ve revamped the League Cup. If we can look at the league next then it’s another step towards getting things moving in the right direction for the good of our game.

I WROTE about Nadir Ciftci earlier in the season when I hoped he would hit the ground running at Celtic. That didn’t happen for him right away but I never doubted he would go on to make an impact. So it was great to see him back starting games and scoring twice last weekend. Sometimes it takes time to settle at a bigger club but you could see he always had the talent. Ronny Deila might have been thinking he needed two more strikers to come in to help out Leigh Griffiths but if Ciftci can keep up this form then maybe that will mean Celtic only having to bring in one more. Hopefully this is the start of Ciftci showing just what he can do.