SFA needs a new leader

Scottish football has just experienced the worst week of its long history.

Yet the silence from Hampden has been deafening.

Scotland are the first European country to be eliminated from the 2014 World Cup Finals in Brazil. Dunfermline are the latest club to enter administration. And the SPL and the SFL are further apart than ever to finding a financial solution to the bankruptcy that envelopes the game.

Yet what do we hear from the most powerful man in Scottish football, SFA Chief Executive Stewart Regan?

Absolutely nothing!

The SFA is responsible for running football in Scotland, yet it continues to hide behind its locked doors on Hampden’s Sixth Floor, shut off from the real world.

The only noise emanating from there in the past few days came from Performance Director Mark Wotte.

And all he was doing was protecting his own position by insisting everything is on course for Scotland to qualify for the World Cup Finals in 2022.

By 2022, the way things are going, there will be no football in Scotland.

The country is crying out for some old-fashioned Churchillian leadership. Sadly, it isn’t coming from the country’s top man.

Personally, I trace the demise of Scottish football back to the first round of re-construction in 1975.

The game wasn’t as bad then as it was painted.

After all, Scotland had just given a decent account of themselves at the 1974 World Cup Finals in West Germany, having qualified for the first time in 16 years.

Yet leading clubs became too greedy and introduced a 10-team Premier League, with two teams relegated a 20 per cent failure rate.

It led to negative tactics as teams used every means possible to avoid relegation, and before we knew it our attractive, entertaining game was gone.

Since then crowds have disappeared season on season.

The only way to encourage fans back is to produce exciting, fear-free football. That means bigger Leagues with fewer penalties for failure.

The game needs a leader, willing to shake things to their very foundations.

That means someone with innovative ideas to persuade clubs to think about the game in general, instead of just themselves.

Sadly, Stewart Regan isn’t the man.