Almost a year ago now, Scottish FA chief executive Ian Maxwell sat in front of the Scottish Government’s health, social care and sport committee and fielded questions about the possibility of an independent regulator being introduced into Scottish football.
He was dismissive of the notion, citing four objections that, in his view, made it plain that there was no need for the Scottish game to follow our English counterparts in bringing in an independent regulator to apply scrutiny to how our clubs are being run.
Among the reasons for English football going down such a route, Maxwell explained, was a reaction to the potential breakaway by clubs into the European Super League, the impact of Covid on the ability of clubs to withstand financial pressure, and traditions such as club badges or colours being stomped upon at the whim of an eccentric owner.
Most pertinently though, as it turns out, was the citing of the financial failings of clubs down south who had fallen into administration, such as Bury, Derby County and Macclesfield Town, before concluding that ‘none of these elements is relevant for Scotland’.
With the benefit of hindsight, that was an assertion – along with his claim that governance in Scottish football was ‘robust’ - that aged like milk left on a radiator from that day to this, and it made him appear tone deaf to the concerns of fans.
Inverness Caledonian Thistle, and this week, Dumbarton, have of course since fallen into administration, leaving the pair in a scrap for survival at the bottom of League One in more ways than one.
In fairness, the chief executive of the Scottish Football Supporters Association and long-time advocate for an independent regulator, Stuart Murphy, pulled Maxwell up at the time for seeming to forget about the historical financial issues at 'clubs such as Rangers, Dundee, Dunfermline and Gretna, among numerous others'.
“The behaviour of club owners directly impacted these institutions and threatened their very existence,” Murphy said in an open letter.
“There are also serious questions around the ownership situation and the ‘fit and proper persons’ issue at other clubs. This demonstrates clearly that current arrangements and structures are not working as they should.”
Extending that fairness to Maxwell though, there are issues in Scottish football that would seem to make sense and likely draw agreement from most observers on the surface, that in fact prove more difficult in the implementation. And this may well be one of them.
Yes, we would all like to see Scotland matches on free-to-air television, for instance. But when it comes to the crunch of making that happen through government subsidies, let’s say, well, there’s a reason we were all watching the win over Poland on YouTube.
The theory of an independent regulator is sound enough too, and would actually make sense from an SFA perspective, if you think about it. They, after all, would no longer be on the hook for the variety of issues that would then fall under the regulator’s remit, be that safeguarding clubs, pyro or whatever else. Like the FA in England, they would be left to get on with the job of growing the game.
But herein lies the rub. Just as the SFA have found, and Dumbarton have too, sadly, there is very little that they or anyone else can do to prevent clubs from falling into the hands of owners who may not have the long-term wellbeing of these institutions at heart.
The Scottish Government established a roundtable to discuss the introduction of an independent regulator to introduce “accountability with real teeth”, but within the game, there are fears that they would in fact be toothless when it comes to handing out sanctions to owners who are breaking any rules imposed upon them.
When Ketan Makwana was announced as the new owner of Inverness in the summer, for instance, he raised more red flags than the shed behind the goal at Pittodrie. Frankly, he should have been disqualified by his use of the term ‘phygital’ to describe the merging of the physical and digital worlds alone.
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And when Cognitive Capital Ltd took control of Dumbarton, as explained in detail elsewhere in these pages by my colleague Matthew Lindsay, there was immediate concern about the club’s ‘opaque ownership model’, as the Sons Supporters Trust put it, with plans for land redevelopment tied into a subsidiary company of Cognitive named More Homes DFC Ltd.
If that all sounds a bit murky to you, then surely similar eyebrows were raised at the SFA. But sources told Herald Sport that due to the limitations placed on them by company law, there was little they could do about issues such as shell companies operating in Scottish football. And those same restrictions would apply to an independent regulator, only now you would be paying a hundred grand a year or thereabouts for the same end result.
We await then the impact of the independent regulator down south, and to see what powers in practice they have to protect clubs, particularly those lower down the food chain. It seems to me though that the best guardrails against malign actors mismanaging our clubs to the brink of oblivion are the fans themselves.
I’m not suggesting that American businessman Erik Barmack, for example, who attempted to invest in Motherwell earlier this year, had any malicious intent. But the fans own the club, and they ultimately decided that his proposal didn’t pass the smell test.
Dumbarton don’t have the level of support to sustain a similar fan ownership model to the one at Fir Park, but greater influence from the Sons Supporters’ Trust in the boardroom would be a start. Hopefully, administration allows Dumbarton to turn a page, rather than being the final chapter in a proud club’s long history.
It may be a lot to ask for the fans to be the guardians of their club, but independent regulator or not, there seems to be no one else with the power to protect them.
