WE all know the script. The Scottish men’s national team qualify for a major tournament. We raise our hopes. Once more they go out in the first round to deflation and dismay. All of this feels very familiar. We have been disappointed and hurt so often.
The men’s national team have turned up for 12 major tournaments. Twelve major tournaments have seen us come home at the earliest opportunity. This story of underachievement and underperformance runs from the 1954 World Cup in Switzerland to last weekend in Germany.
Seasoned football commentator Archie Macpherson described the latter: “In Europe in the past few weeks we performed like provincials stricken by the bright lights of the big city – over-cautious, dreading footfall in unfamiliar territory and lacking the appropriate guidebook.”
Seventy years of hurt. But should it stop us dreaming? And can we learn from this pattern of failure and do things differently? Surely it doesn’t have to be like this?
Recent years have shown that a decent manager like Steve Clarke can deliver in terms of organisation as the men’s team qualified for Euro 2020 and 2024. But at each tournament, we failed to deliver with a mere two draws and three goals across six dispiriting matches.
Some will say none of this really matters compared to big issues. But professional football is more than a game. It draws on deep emotions and says something about Scotland as a nation, how we support sport, and the wider cultural terrain of how Scotland is portrayed on the world stage.
Scotland is saturated by football with some of the highest football attendances per head anywhere in the world – some studies putting only Cyprus and Iceland ahead of us. Global football historian David Goldblatt, author of The Ball Is Round, notes: “Given the depth of the lower leagues, the high level of grassroots participation, and the scale of public affection and attendance for the game it [the record of the men’s team] is just baffling.”
Knowing Our History
FOOTBALL is not that different from the rest of Scotland and our history. The kaleidoscope which is the history of our game – the pioneers, global influence, the triumphs and disasters – goes way beyond the obvious examples forever cited.
When association football was constituted in Victorian Britain with the establishment of the FA in 1863 and Scottish FA in 1873, the Scottish game was hugely influential. “The Scotch professors” based around then mighty Queen’s Park invented large aspects of the modern game and taught the world how to play including parts of Latin America like Brazil.
Scotland in the late 19th century were more successful than England, regularly defeating them by emphatic margins. The Scottish international team had an unbeaten record of 22 matches which was a world record for decades. Fifa’s ratings have been assessed retrospectively into the distant past and the men’s national team were the equivalent of world champions before the World Cup was invented – ranked first in the 1890s!
Scotland gave the world a host of football pioneers. There was Andrew Watson at Queen’s Park, the first black player at a senior level to win silverware and international caps. There is the captivating story of Rose Reilly who, when women’s football was banned in Scotland until 1974 (as it was banned elsewhere), went to play in Italy and won the unofficial Women’s World Cup captaining their national team in 1984.
As well as such inspirations there have been reverses, failures and embarrassments, particularly in relation to the men’s national team and the blazers who have run the SFA through the years. The first World Cup that the men’s team qualified for was not 1954, but the tournament before – 1950 in Brazil – the first post-war tournament.
Scotland qualified, finishing in second place behind England in the Home Championship which formed the basis of our qualification group. Yet the bigwigs at the SFA decided that Scotland would only go to Brazil if we won the group and turned our place down!
In 1954, we qualified and went to Switzerland, but disaster ensued. Instead of taking a full-strength squad of 22, the SFA restricted the playing group to 13. The reason? To make more room for SFA apparatchiks and their wives.
Not surprisingly with this attitude, when Scotland met World Champions Uruguay we lost 7-0 – the much-cited result of late and our worst defeat. One player on returning home was told by a SFA selector: “Forget what happened in Switzerland, just so long as we beat England in April.”
It is too easy to paint a simplistic picture where everything that has gone wrong can be laid at the foot of the SFA. Some of the problems can be found in the nature of the domestic game, how it has evolved and not evolved (more on that below). And some of it can be put at the door of the insular, self-obsessed way that we have viewed our game.
Take the great Scottish triumph of 1967 and how Jim Baxter (above) and company taught the recently crowned English World Champions how to play the game. We stormed to defeat them 3-2 and some joked that this made us “unofficial Champions of the World”.
What this account virtually ignores is that the Wembley victory was not just a normal Home Championship match, but part of the 1968 European Championship qualifiers taking place over two seasons with all four home teams. Scotland, despite this illustrious victory, did not qualify for these finals.
We drew with England in the Hampden match, dropping further points in our other away matches – drawing with Wales and losing to Northern Ireland, allowing England to qualify. But in our insular accounts, you only hear the 1967 England game in splendid isolation, not its wider context of magnificent failure. It does make you wonder why Argentina 1978 was a surprise!
The Domestic Game and Problem of the Old Firm
SCOTTISH club football has problems. We have a lop-sided game at the top level. Since the professionalisation of the game in 1893, the two clubs with the biggest support, Celtic and Rangers, have dominated (whereas before this Queen’s Park were the most successful team).
In the years since, there have been challenges to the Old Firm. Post-war, club football enjoyed a golden era for nearly 20 years of hyper-competition – with Hearts and Hibs winning the league as well as a host of others, and in the early 1980s. Aberdeen and Dundee United under Alex Ferguson and Jim McLean won the league and became powerful forces in Europe.
From 1986 onward, a Graeme Souness-led Rangers saw the money pour in, changing everything. The reality of our domestic game is now that the two Glasgow clubs have won every senior title since Aberdeen in 1985. Next season, normal service will continue as Celtic and Rangers will stretch their run to 40 titles in a row. In that period Rangers won nine in a row, as did Celtic – a record first set by Jock Stein’s Celtic in 1966-74, as both tried and failed to win 10. The world record is held by Tafea FC in the Pacific island of Vanuatu with 15 in a row.
It was not always like this. In 1985, the Scottish senior league was rated the most competitive league in Europe with five of the 10 top teams competing for European places and five fighting relegation. Fast forward to the present and we have fallen from that mantle to the joint-most uncompetitive senior league in all Europe. Since the creation of the European Champions League in 1992-93, only two top leagues have solely been won by two teams: Scotland and Ukraine.
Numerous factors influence this. The Bosman ruling allowing players to be free agents when contracts expire hit the game, and the minuscule monies available to our game via TV sponsorship has
increasingly left our football as a backwater – with every year the colossal monies that Sky Sports throw at the English Premiership eye-watering compared to Scotland.
Add to this the historic role of the SFA. Having now run the game since its creation in 1873, this is a private organisation and closed shop with little democracy, transparency and unaccountability. This is how large parts of Scotland used to be run but while much have embraced modern methods, the SFA has only done so superficially.
The SFA and Scottish Professional Football League are a major part of the problem, according to Paul Goodwin, head of the Scottish Football Supporters Association (SFSA).
“Sadly, Scottish football doesn’t want to change anything as there are too many vested interests fighting against the common good,” he says. He believes the reform agenda of their fan-led review point in the right direction – one the SFA won’t go in unless forced.
Then there is how we run public spaces and resources. Julie McNeill, whose book on the history of the women’s game, A Most Unsuitable Game, is published soon reflects: “If my son or daughter want to play football with their pals in the evening or at weekends, they have to jump a fence at their high school or council ground and risk getting turfed off facilities which are lying empty.”
There is a link between how sport is administered and invested in, and our systemic lack of support in arts and culture. McNeill observes: “We are too short-sighted – investment in sports is like investment in the arts – you are nurturing the heart of the type of nation/ society you want to be. We should see the wider impact of sport (and the arts) in dealing with the mental health crisis, loneliness, isolation, building confidence and resilience.”
A Scottish Crisis of Confidence in Football?
SOMETHING just as profound can be identified in how we think of the game and the psychologies that inform it which influence club owners, managers, players and fans. Across elite sport, there is a deep-seated psychology of winners at the top level which differentiates them from non-winners. World Cup winner Rose Reilly stated: “To be a winner is down to mindset and complete self-belief along with a basic talent and sheer hard work, you can make it happen.”
This was obvious to the likes of Jock Stein and Alex Ferguson. Sadly now amongst the non-Old Firm there is the opposite attitude, namely a belief that they cannot win. One example was when Rangers were out of the top league for four seasons and the main challenger to Celtic was Aberdeen; yet their manager Derek McInnes said repeatedly that his team could never hope to “challenge” for the title; accepting they were losers.
A similar attitude can be identified with the men’s national team at international finals. This built-in inferiority complex adds another layer of weight. Scottish football has even rationalised this post-Argentina after Ally Macleod dared to dream of success only to see the team fall flat on its face.
Yet over 45 years after what Hugh McIlvanney memorably described as Scotland’s “kamikaze at Cordoba” when we drew with Iran after defeat by Peru, observing that “something they believed to be a metaphor for their pride has all along been a metaphor for their desperation”, we have internalised that we are not good and can do nothing to change.
Scottish senior football is held back by a culture of inferiorism – a belief that we are second rate and cannot compete either in our domestic game versus the Old Firm, in European competition; or the men’s national team and its endeavours.
Twenty years ago, Scottish policy makers and government agencies debated whether there was a cultural set of attitudes in society which contributed to holding us back in how we brought about change.
Empirical evidence in this is difficult to muster. But what it did illustrate was that culture and cultural values matter, and this is as true in football as anywhere. A country which led the world has presided over slow, inexorable decline and the game being transformed by others while we struggle to keep a foothold clinging on to fading memories: Lisbon 1967, Archie Gemmill in 1978 and David Narey’s “toe-poke” in 1982.
If we think there is any truth in psychology mattering, this is reinforced by how the media presents Scottish football – by endlessly talking about England while excluding ourselves, the Welsh and Northern Irish. There are so many instances of this. The coverage of Euro 2024 in broadcast and print media often forgets that two home teams qualified.
Take Scotland’s encounter with Hungary last Sunday. In the BBC’s coverage which was broadcast UK-wide and anchored by Welsh-born Gabby Logan, she continually referred to Scotland as “they”. One prescient observer, Johnny from Dundee, pointed out what was going on, writing on Twitter/X the next day: “I don’t fucking want to be othered in my own living room.”
By being “othered”, we are being told we are secondary, not worthy or worse, invisible. Cumulatively, it diminishes us and makes us feel smaller, less visible and with less voice and power; all adding to an amplification of inferiorism and what psychologist Martin Seligman calls “learned helplessness”.
We are being told we don’t matter or count and that we cannot aspire to compete or sit at the top table. Combine this with the cultures of psychology which already exist in our domestic club game and international team and you have a recipe for failure, encouraging defeatism and believing the worst in ourselves – a vicious, downward cycle.
If this is where we are, we need to take action as this situation has become steadily more entrenched over recent decades. All around the world, there are examples of success and innovation that we can examine and learn from, so below are five practical suggestions.
FIRST, Scotland has a population of 5.4 million people and is a relatively rich country. Lots of small-sized countries have made an impact at the Euros such as Slovakia (5.4m), Slovenia (2.1m) and Georgia (3.7m) – all ranked lower than Scotland. Georgia have just qualified for their first-ever football finals (having finished nine points behind Scotland in the qualifying group) and got into the second round at the first attempt.
Such countries are all competing more successfully against the big nations; better than the Scots. They technically play better, attack more, create more chances, and have a psychological belief they can win. Small nations such as Denmark and Greece have won the Euros; Croatia got to the 2018 World Cup final, losing to France.
Second, we must do something about football governance. It is a mixture of Victorian institutions and MBA business jargon – the worst of all worlds. Obviously the SFA do not want to reform themselves, but they can be forced by fan pressure if it is articulated.
Third, outside regulation of the game would affect the football authorities. This has been progressed in England with government backing for a statutory regulator: –the legislation for which was lost by the election. The Scottish Football Supporters Association (SFSA) and Goodwin back such an initiative here – an “OffBall” which could provide accountability and regulation.
Fourth, as David Goldblatt observes: “There does seem to be something going on in youth/player development that is amiss … anecdotally the level, quality of academies/youth development programmes/quality of your coaching is not up to scratch”.
Finally, psychology and culture matters. We need to nurture a culture where we believe in ourselves. Julie McNeill states: “We are not a nation that prioritises sport and wellbeing financially or emotionally, and until that changes, the talent pool coming through will be severely compromised.”
In this, the role of the media and media representation needs discussion. We cannot endlessly endure being “othered in our living rooms” and being put down, diminished and told we don’t count. This does serious damage to the Scottish psyche which goes beyond football.
One policy which would have an impact is the devolution of media regulation and broadcasting which would restrict this pernicious “othering”. It would allow us to take charge of the broadcast rights of the men’s and women’s national teams and stop the ridiculous situation of the former being on subscription Premier Sports while the England men’s team are free to watch on Channel 4. Devolved broadcasting could entail us deciding the legislative framework for live football coverage.
Reilly signed off our chat with the thought: “It’s not how you fall, it’s how you get back up.”
Too often we have just accepted the reverses and humiliations; surely it is time to not just get back on the horse, but to change things and how we run domestic football? But that would require us getting serious and would be tantamount to a revolution in how we govern the game, prioritise resources and even think of ourselves.
