Glenn Gibbons: 18-team league fiddles with numbers for its own sake

PROFESSIONAL football is a breeding-ground for selective amnesia, a place where trends spring from whims and the wheels are driven by economics and the urge to thrive – or, more commonly, merely to survive.

In such circumstances, it is hardly surprising that, when the contents of the crucible cease to bubble, ideas for stirring the pot and improving the product arrive by the trainload. The problem is that none is new; all carry the off-putting mustiness of the second-hand.

Those prime movers behind the latest proposals for reconstruction of the Scottish Premier League, for example, appear to have forgotten their history, although there is a possibility that, in some cases, it was never learned. A peek into the past would have told them all they needed to know about the futility of fiddling with numbers for its own sake.

There was a time when "league reconstruction" was among the most frequently-used phrases in the Scottish vocabulary. It began in the early 1970s and was born of dwindling attendances as the boom years immediately following the Second World War receded into the past and football was challenged for the leisure time of the populace by other diversions.

Now, for unfathomable reasons, Walter Smith, the Rangers manager, favours a return to an 18-team league, playing each other twice in a total of 34 matches through the season. The one seeming certainty about this is that, if it was unworkable because of the tedium of meaningless matches 35 years ago – when it was first replaced by the ten-team Premier Division – there is even less chance that it will prove a panacea for the game's problems in the present.

The notion of a 16-team league appears to have gained popularity, although the proposal has not yet been accompanied by a persuasive explanation of how they will play more than 30 matches without a continuation of the notorious "split" that disfigures the modern set-up.

The commonest argument against the SPL appears to be that having teams play each other four times in a season is excessive, leading to the sourness and disaffection that has afflicted the paying customers to the extent of waning interest and diminishing crowds.

Curiously, nobody was making such a claim in the 1980s, when Rangers could finish fifth and Celtic second in the league and Aberdeen, Dundee United and Hearts could all occupy places in the top four, with the two north-east clubs winning titles. That was a time, too, when Scotland's national team was in the course of qualifying for five successive World Cups and the squad was peppered with important members of the Liverpool, Nottingham Forest and Aston Villa sides who captured seven European Cups between 1977 and 1984.

Nor was there any objection to the set-up as teams such as St Mirren, Dunfermline and Kilmarnock qualified for Europe by legitimate means; that is, by an elevated league position, as opposed to losing a Scottish Cup final to Celtic or Rangers. But that was also the time to which the genesis of the game's current difficulties may be traced. The clue is in the aforementioned pre-eminence of clubs outside the Old Firm and the presence in the Scotland team of players capable of capturing European championships. It was from about the mid-1980s that the country's production of high-quality goods quite suddenly clanked almost to a halt.

This was a providential time for Rangers, whose takeover by the cash-rich Lawrence Construction Company allowed them to recruit Graeme Souness as manager and allow him the financial wherewithal by which to purchase imports of genuine international class from outside Scotland's borders.

The new commercialisation of the game, coupled with the reduction in the number of seriously gifted players, created a climate – perpetuated by David Murray at Ibrox – in which buying power superseded the scouting and developing of native talent. The gap between the Old Firm and the others (especially after Celtic's regeneration under Fergus McCann), which had always been emphatic, now became an obscenity.

When Alex Ferguson famously told a gathering of reporters that "no Denis Law will ever be allowed to leave Aberdeen again", he could have saved his breath. Aberdeen would not produce another Denis Law, far less let him escape.

Now that the domestic game is failing to generate the revenue anticipated when the SPL was formed by the secessionists from the Scottish Football League a dozen years ago, the Champions League has become as necessary to the Old Firm as benefits to the unemployed. These are causes and effects which no amount of tinkering with numbers will change for the better. If, as a random example, Inverness Caledonian Thistle and Dunfermline Athletic were to play each other at this time of year while in, say, 12th and 14th place respectively in the SPL, would it be any more profitable as a fixture than contesting one of the top places in the First Division?

Increasing the membership would certainly give these presently marginalised clubs (Dundee and Partick Thistle would be other examples of medium-sized organisations now in reduced circumstances) the opportunity once again to play the Old Firm. By then, however, mass disillusionment will have put paid to the gates.