I AM glad the Scotland national team is staying at Hampden. I would have missed the place. From attending games as a fan there back in the days when we could mix it with teams like Belgium without an inferiority complex to spending great swathes of my working life there as a journalist, I have generally enjoyed my visits there. So too, sadly, have Scotland’s opposition.

After the £5m deal which the SFA – with a little bit of help from their friends Lord Willie Haughey and Sir Tom Hunter – agreed with Queen’s Park on Tuesday to secure the future of this historic old Mount Florida stadium, I am as excited as the next man about the prospect of multi-million pound upgrade which might take the stadium into a new era. Something along the lines of Stuttgart’s Gottlieb-Daimler Stadium might just fit the bill, where those oft derided shallow ends with poor spectator sight lines behind the goals could be handily be fixed. It would be great if this could be done in time for a joint 2030 World Cup bid along with England and Wales.

Where I part company, though, from much of the reaction to Tuesday’s announcement is that the logical next step is for shedloads of public money to be diverted into this arrangement. While SFA chief executive Ian Maxwell admits the figure involved for such an upgrade would be a ‘chunky number’ - ie. north of £50m – the truth is that neither first minister Nicola Sturgeon or prime minister Theresa May has that kind of cash lying around. And if either of them did, I’m sure they would find multiple better uses for it than upgrading a football stadium which is often wrongly said not to be fit for purpose – last week’s games proved it actually is – in a city where we already have two other 50,000 plus seater stadia.

As much as I love the place, Hampden simply has to take its place in the queue. And this would be a long way behind the chunk of public cash which is no doubt already being earmarked to bring Birmingham’s Alexander Stadium up to speed for the 2022 Commonwealth Games, not to mention even further behind more pressing matters such as ensuring adequate provision of health and social care, education, housing and transport.

Could a case be made to the government for redevelopment on the grounds of the role sport has upon health and wellbeing? Well, perhaps, but it would have to be a creative one. Making the chairs comfier at Hampden isn’t exactly the same as making sure more people get off their backsides and actually play more sport.

While funding for capital projects such as Hampden and central grants for the running costs of sports bodies tend to come from separate pots, it certainly would be no laughing matter for most minority sports if the funds which keep them ticking over were suddenly siphoned off to give the Scottish national team a souped -up home.

It all went wrong, you will hear, when they put in the dreaded running track at Hampden. In fact, a design feature in the shape of the stadium from way back, the track was used a grand total of three times for athletics meetings, all in the summer of 2014, the track since re-utilised at other venues.

Unlike football, athletics is a sport in Scotland which IS punching above its weight on a world scale right now. But there is little carping there about the lack of a venue capable of staging large-scale outdoor athletics meets in Scotland – ongoing debates with the SRU over the use of Scotstoun Stadium notwithstanding – or that the UK’s bigger events must be squeezed into the short summer lease period when West Ham aren’t using the Olympic Stadium. Instead, modest developments are being pursued at Meadowbank and Dundee, while a virtue is made out of their indoor provision by hosting the European Indoor Championships at the Emirates Arena next March. Why should they, or any of Scotland’s minority sports, suffer as result of any public hand-out for Hampden?

No, now that they own it,, it falls to the SFA to foot the bill for any Hampden upgrade, and creative minds are already working out ways to try to make it pay for itself without passing the bill on to member clubs. The possibilities are out there, if someone is bright enough to seize them. Surely the Tartan Amy couldn’t be the first football fans in history to crowdfund an upgrade to their own spectator experience?