Hibs chief Leeann Dempster now wants to play out the season

Hibernian chief executive, Leeann Dempster, believes finishing this season behind closed doors could help football moving forward.

The SPFL have been considering the option of ending the campaign, which would see Celtic crowned champions and Hearts being relegated.

Dempster admits she has altered her view and is not in a rush to call the season.

She said: “I have changed my position on this two or three times.

“At the start, I was thinking we weren’t going to finish, we were going to have to have to take hard decisions and it was more important to use our energies to fight the virus.

“But, as the days and weeks have passed, we start to share and explore options.

“There’s going to be a meeting of medical professionals to look at how sport might return. It will return at a point.

“I’ve been more hopeful over the last week than I have been over the last five or six weeks.

“I don’t know if it’s practical, and I don’t know if it’s certain we can finish this league. But I think we at least have to try.

“And then if we can’t do it, we say: ‘We’ve tried, we’ve worked with the government, the health authorities, we’ve looked at the practicalities and it’s not going to be achievable, then we’ll call it’.”

The Easter Road administrator is keen to look at the way closed-doors matches might work.

Aberdeen chairman, Dave Cormack, wants the SPFL to consider going this way before calling the league.

Dempster went on: “We’re talking about what matches might be like in the coming months, whenever they are, and it’s going to be very different.

“Let’s not kid on here, clubs in Scotland make the majority of their money through a couple of ways – sporting success and that usually means playing well and having people come to the stadium to watch, season tickets etc.

“Match-day income is very important to us. The other element is things like transfers, but these are things you can’t rely on.

“For leagues like ours, not having fans being able to come to the stadium is going to be very difficult for us.

“There will be a new normal for some time and we need to work out the practicalities of that.

“What is that going to look like?

“We need some time to think about that and explore these issues.

“If we’re not going to have supporters in the stadiums, certainly not in the way we would normally recognise, maybe it’s an opportunity for us to complete the league.

“Not because I’m desperate to complete the league, but when we do come back in a more-realistic way we’ve had the chance to test the stadiums and all the processes.”