LIKE many of your readers, I would imagine, I am a fairly enthusiastic armchair football supporter with no real club affiliation.

However, the machinations going on at the Scottish Professional Football League (SPFL) over whether/how the season should be ended have been more interesting than most of the football served up on a weekly basis in Scotland, pre-crisis.

I have read the twisted logic that the well-paid, well-tailored supremos who run the sport have applied as to why the vote to end the season for the lower leagues had to take place with such a short period for deliberation.

Of course, it was all about money – or the lack of it, as far as the poorer teams were concerned.

Not being one of the be-blazered crew, I have to assume that the money held by the SPFL was, by rights, the football clubs’ own money anyway, paid to the SPFL by sponsors and television companies.

Effectively, the SPFL hold this money in trust for the clubs pending distribution.

Neil Doncaster [chief executive of the SPFL] has said that the only way to enable them to distribute the money was to end the season for the lower leagues, assessing the league position of clubs on the basis of points per game.

It was not possible to make loans to the clubs as that would require doing due diligence and the money could be at risk if the clubs went bust.

I find this logic difficult to follow.

The money has now been distributed with no strings attached and with no due diligence having been done

But clubs can still go bust – and the money is then effectively lost.

If the money had been distributed as a loan against a future payment, based on placings determined on a completed season or by a more considered method than the one chosen, the money could still be lost but there might be a chance – albeit slim, perhaps – of recovering some of that money from the administrators.

So, actually, making the payments in the form of a loan would have placed the SPFL in a stronger position.

It would also have given clubs more time to make considered decisions. This could have included fundamental reconstruction à la the Gordon Smith proposals (a forlorn hope) but, alas, the opportunity was lost.

I see the SPFL as a metaphor for society’s handling of the corona crisis – throwing money at the immediate issue without grasping the opportunity of making fundamental changes as to how our society is run, and placing a sticking plaster over the situation so that things can return to normal for the suits and their backers, who remain detached from the real consequences of their mismanagement.

For the Scottish Professional Football League, read Her Majesty’s Government?

William Thomson,

Denny,

Stirlingshire.