The BBC is depriving Scottish football of its fair share of licence fee funding, one SPFL board member claimed yesterday.

A day after Sky and BT agreed a bumper £5.136bn deal to televise Barclays Premier League matches between 2016 and 2019, Mike Mulraney, the chairman of Alloa Athletic, claimed that the Beeb are short changing Scottish armchair football fans by anything up to £7m a year.

The BBC recently retained the rights for their Match of the Day highlights programme through to the end of the 2018-19 season, a three-year deal thought to exceed £200m.While the Beeb also holds rights for domestic cup matches and international matches, and BBC Alba screen live games, that is a figure which dwarves the sums paid by the BBC for their league highlights show, Sportscene, north of the border. As Scotland has in excess of 8% of the population of the UK, were funding for the Scottish game worked out on a pro rata basis the sums involved could have a transformative effect on our game.

"No-one's problem is with Sky and BT," said Mulraney. "But the enormous elephant in the room is the BBC contract. The Scottish tax payer is funding ten per cent of the Match of the Day contract, but where is the Scottish money? 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," he added. "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 fair that Scots ask for 10% of it back. It is disgraceful the BBC are paying that money to the English game, especially with all the wealth they have. There is a democratic deficit there. We have let them away with it for too long."