Alan Pattullo: Time to undo damage done by previous league reform

While gratifying for the person or organisation involved, unanimous approval does not necessarily mean success is guaranteed. Remember, all of the people were fooled into backing the creation of the Scottish Premier League back in May 1998, helping send Scottish football down a path where it lived high on the hog for a spell before crashing and burning in spectacular style.

The new company, now known to all as the SPL, was given unanimous approval at the SFA's annual general meeting in Glasgow 13 years ago. Ironically, this was at the same time that measures recommended by the so-called Ernie Walker "Think-tank" to rejuvenate the game were accepted - also unanimously.

The clearance for the SPL was billed as historic at the time. It was described as preparing the way for a higher standard of football - not just at home, but on both the European and international stages.

For the first time in 108 years a new professional league had been given the all-clear to start. Nine months later Scotland were lining up at the opening game of the World Cup. They haven't made it back since, not to the opening game or indeed any other match at a major championship finals.

In perhaps the last major vote on the future of the Scottish game prior to Tuesday, the motion to allow 10 clubs to breakaway and form a so-called super league of sides was given unanimous backing, in the same way as Stewart Regan's SFA reforms were passed without a single dissenting voice on Tuesday. Remember Chris Robinson? "It is the new way forward," the then breakaway league spokesman, and Hearts chief executive, said.

His was one of many voices heard hailing the new dawn. But nobody needs to be told that it didn't work out the way they envisaged. The television money stopped rolling in, and the supporters stopped rolling up. It might have brought a new commercial edge for a brief period but then the dream died when exposed to the harsh light of reality. Divisions have set in again as the SPL continues to eat itself.

Regan, flushed by the success of early this week, has now called on the Scottish Football League and SPL to sort out their problems, hoping that the spirit of co-operation witnessed on Tuesday might blow down the corridors and into the offices of both these organisations. They are, after all, both housed at Hampden Park, on the same sixth floor as the newly-reformed SFA. Funny to think of this governing body, so often criticised for its arcane ways, is now being hailed as the arch reformer with the squabbling SPL and the largely impotent SFL holding Scottish football back. Perhaps someone - Regan himself? - can knock some heads together and help people understand that the SFL should never have been split in the first place.

One of Henry McLeish's recommendations was for the SFL and SPL to work more closely together.But bringing the leagues back under one umbrella seems the only sensible way forward. However, it has to be a merger rather than being achieved in the high-handed way which so much of the SPL's work has been seen to be carried out, going back as far as its creation.

Former chief executive Roger Mitchell was one of the main culprits, casually informing anyone who cared to listen that the SPL had decided to extend into an SPL 2, thereby going back on the original intention to expand to a top tier of 12 clubs.

This, though, did eventually happen, until, almost inevitably, some club officials decided it was no longer the way forward. Instead, the top tier should go back to a safer number - ten sounded about right.

No-one is saying the SFL is a perfect organisation. They have lost power, transferred into the hands of men who are not necessarily in it for the greater good of the game, and who are instead forced to listen to what their shareholders tell them. Whether Regan's success in getting people to see the bigger picture will rub off on those in charge of the league set-up remains to be seen. Hopefully the wind of change which has blown into Hampden is powerful enough to whip away the walls between the SPL and SFL. Better still if it can topple some more egos.