Club statement | Resolution not deemed competent

[TEFTONG 60,188]

N&V now at 38%. 

[pcbear 10,923]

1 minute ago, TEFTONG said:

N&V now at 38%. 

That's because hardly anyone has  voted, my one vote took it up 5%

[doc holliday 1,653]

4 minutes ago, TEFTONG said:

N&V now at 38%. 

But remember this is UK wide votes.If it was Scotland alone,the tarrier swing  would have to be taken into account .

[eskbankloyal 19,446]

7 hours ago, STEPPS BOY said:

“That has sent Scottish football into meltdown as Dundee have used the time to try and get a better deal for clubs, like Hearts, Thistle and Stranraer who would all face relegation via the current proposal”.

 

 

The other line they are spinning is that they want all ‘big clubs’ to play friendlies with those relegated in order to financially compensate them  

beyond parody

[murzo 7,447]

4 hours ago, born a blue nose said:

An internal investigation is hilarious. 
 

no cunts, it’s an external investigation we want.

Off yees fuck.

That’s it exactly. We put a claim in last Saturday and the spfl said “show us your evidence “. Nothing else.

 Yet on Tuesday night they now feel the need for an internal investigation even tho no evidence has been given to them. Why have they now decided the need for it. We all know it’s because they have something to hide and they are trying to do whatever it takes to keep it hidden.

[pcbear 10,923]

9 minutes ago, eskbankloyal said:

The other line they are spinning is that they want all ‘big clubs’ to play friendlies with those relegated in order to financially compensate them  

beyond parody

Aye, there is loads of room in the calender  for these "money spinning" friendlies that nobody will give a flying fuck about with more people on the park than in the stand, guys a clown.

[OceanRain 2,845]

The Herald (Matthew Lindsay)

------------‐---------------

Why the SPFL's voting farce risks tarnishing celtic's record-equalling Scottish title win forever

ABANDONING the 2019/20 campaign, deciding final Ladbrokes Premiership placings on a points per game basis and crowning celtic champions will never, if it ever gets the green light, be accepted by everyone in the Scottish game regardless of the logic behind the proposal.

Never mind that we are in the midst of the first global pandemic in a century, never mind that declaring the season null and void will have dire financial repercussions, never mind that playing the season to a finish when the shutdown is lifted will just prolong the pain and negatively impact on vital future revenue.

For many fans in this country, it will simply be another example of institutional bias, of a corrupt system that favours the all-powerful Parkhead club, if it gets the go-ahead. Such is the nature of the sport here. Paranoia abounds.

Yet, the treble treble winners - who were 13 points clear of their nearest challengers Rangers in the Premiership table when football was suspended last month due to the Covid-19 outbreak having won nine and drawn just one of their 10 league games in 2020 - and their supporters will be able to cope with the inevitable jibes about a tainted title.

They are quite content that Neil Lennon’s team have once again been the most impressive and consistent performers in the top flight and deserve to win the Scottish title for a record-equalling ninth consecutive year.

Sure, they could mathematically still be caught. But could Steven Gerrard’s side, who have lost to Hearts, Kilmarnock and Hamilton and been held to draws by Aberdeen and St Johnstone in the Premiership this year, really recover from their slump in form and overtake them? No sane supporter expected it.

Alas, the cack-handed manner the vote into the resolution which was presented by the SPFL to their 42 member clubs last week – which called for the Championship, League 1 and League 2 to be curtailed now and the board to be given the power to do the same in the Premiership further down the line - has been handled now risks tarnishing their achievement.

By making the votes cast before an unofficial deadline on Friday evening public without the final outcome being known and then entering into protracted negotiations with Dundee – the Championship club who have the decisive vote - the SPFL have irrevocably compromised the entire process and left themselves open to accusations of rigging the result.

That the Dens Park club now know the power they hold is, irrespective of what actually happened to their mysterious missing email, nothing short of farcical. What sort of way is that to run a democratic ballot? It has lost any credibility.

But even before that jaw-dropping decision to publish the votes so far the resolution was flawed.

The take-it-or-leave-it nature of the proposal incensed clubs. They were adamant – even if SPFL chairman Murdoch MacLennan this weekend refuted this point – that loans could be advanced to them ahead of receiving their end-of-season prize money thus allowing them to debate the way ahead at greater length. They felt they were being held to ransom.

Time is clearly a factor here. With no regular income from matches coming in clubs need funds urgently in order to stay afloat. That will have been foremost in the minds of both the board and executive. Still, the lack of meaningful dialogue disturbed many. Not least Ann Budge of Hearts.

“This is not, in my view, how you honour the principle that it is up to the members to decide how to ensure the fairest approach is taken,” she said. “To dismiss all but one option and present only this option for a members’ vote, within a very limited timescale, must surely raise the question of whether the board is attempting to unduly influence the members decision making process.”

In addition, a commitment to consult with clubs over possible league reconstruction ahead of the 2020/21 campaign didn’t go nearly far enough. It still meant that chairmen, chief executives and managing directors, if they backed the plan, were harshly consigning Hearts, Partick Thistle and Stranraer to relegation during a devastating economic downturn.

It would have made far more sense to present a definite solution. Even if it was just a stop-gap measure for a season. A switch to a 14-10-10-10 set-up was the best option in the circumstances.

That will ensure no club drops down a division, Dundee United, Inverness Caledonian Thistle, Raith Rovers, Falkirk, Cove Rangers and Edinburgh City will all be promoted and the Highland League and Lowland League winners move into the bottom tier.

Reaching a compromise which means that no club suffers unnecessarily would be, in these extraordinary times, quite a feat. So why wasn’t that possibility laid out more clearly? It would have made agreeing to the resolution far less painful and actually rather positive.

Of course, reconstruction will require a different vote at a later date. It will take an 11-1 majority for it to get cleared. By all accounts, Premiership clubs will lose out financially if their ranks swell next term. Recent events have hardly filled onlookers with hope.

[King Jela 20,371]

14 minutes ago, doc holliday said:

An article from 2018,background of SPFL Chairman,Murdoch MacLennan.Sources telegraph and Wiki.

MacLennan was appointed chairman of the Scottish Professional Football League (SPFL) in July 2017.There was criticism that MacLennan is not impartial in his role with the SPFL considering the fact that INM's majority shareholder is celtic's majority shareholder Dermot Desmond. One of Desmond close associates and fellow celtic fan Denis O'Brian is also an INM shareholder.

 

The SPFL refused to investigate the connection.

 

Rangers’ demands for an investigation into the business links between Scottish Professional Football League chairman Murdoch MacLennan and Dermot Desmond, celtic’s single biggest shareholder, have been rejected by the SPFL.

MacLennan relinquished the position of chief executive of Telegraph Media Group to become the group’s deputy chairman in June and was appointed to his SPFL role the following month.

He stepped down as deputy chairman of the Telegraph Group in March – although he remains as a non-executive director – having previously accepted the position of non-executive chairman of Dublin-based Independent News & Media, a group which includes Desmond among its shareholders.

MacLennan’s appointment to the Irish group was covered extensively at the time, in publications as diverse as the UK Press Gazette and the Morning Star.

It was, however, a report much later in a Scottish tabloid that agitated the Rangers chairman, Dave King, who issued a statement on the club website yesterday which read, in part: “It is now imperative that we discover exactly the nature of the information supplied to the SPFL regarding this relationship.

“It is equally important that any conflicts of interest, or even the perception of such, whereby positions within the Scottish football authorities could be undermined, or abused, must be aggressively rooted out of our game.

“The SPFL, therefore, must immediately suspend its chairman pending an independent investigation by a senior QC into the allegations and into the extent that other parties within the SPFL may have cooperated in this alleged non-disclosure. There is a clear prima facie case for this investigation.”

The SPFL rejected King’s demands. A league spokesman said: “The members of the SPFL board were each informed of Murdoch’s appointment on January 19th 2018, the same day it was publicly announced in a press release from Independent News & Media plc.

“That release was also circulated to the entire SPFL board that day. The appointment was widely reported in the national media at the time, including in the Sunday Times, Belfast Telegraph and Sunday Independent. No director raised this issue subsequently and it was not the subject of any board discussions.

“To be definitive, a non-executive position on a plc does not constitute a business relationship between that individual and a minority shareholder in the company and therefore no investigation is warranted.” 

It is the second time in a week that Rangers have taken umbrage at the actions of a member of one of the game’s governing bodies. They condemned Gary Hughes, non-executive member of the Scottish Football Association, after it was revealed that, 12 years ago in a trade publication, he had referred to the Rangers support as “the great unwashed”.

Fuck sake. 

[BlueKnight87 17,302]

8 hours ago, Sweetheart said:

 

Yes because internal investigations go so well in scotland. 

Club can tell them to shove this and get an independent enquiry carried out. 

[BlueThunder 8,454]

13 minutes ago, OceanRain said:

The Herald (Matthew Lindsay)

------------‐---------------

Why the SPFL's voting farce risks tarnishing celtic's record-equalling Scottish title win forever

Classic bait and switch. Suggests the title would be tarnished, then goes on to say they wouldn’t care and only the insane would suggest Rangers would have won it anyway.

Also suggests that null and void would be ruinous, and that the only realistic outcome is to declare celtic champions (without considering simply ending the league with no winners and no losers, and payout based on position with the league marked as incomplete)

[frenv 2,125]

2 minutes ago, BlueKnight87 said:

Yes because internal investigations go so well in scotland. 

Club can tell them to shove this and get an independent enquiry carried out. 

But internal investigations are super-thorough - just look at how long celtic have been 'internally investigating' the legions of child abusers they've harboured throughout the years without any sort of conclusion or result.

[Gale4530 1]

20 minutes ago, doc holliday said:

But remember this is UK wide votes.If it was Scotland alone,the tarrier swing  would have to be taken into account .

Exactly, EPL is a totally different audience. They would simply never ask this about the spfl. Same reason they barely open comments on anything related to scottish football

[doc holliday 1,653]

Internal investgation!!??!!

 

Are they having a laugh,this has to be a wind up,

 

What are they afraid of exactly. The truth I would assert.

 

The stench is getting worse.

 

Another rebuttal for a fair,impartial  and independent  analysis of events.

 

Another whitewash incoming.

[TEFTONG 60,188]

26 minutes ago, eskbankloyal said:

The other line they are spinning is that they want all ‘big clubs’ to play friendlies with those relegated in order to financially compensate them  

beyond parody

how many supporters do they honestly think will attend these "bribery friendlies?" 

[esquire8 42,901]

[JackAlex93 11,344]

What a fucking shambles this has become 

[eejay the dj 31,964]

2 minutes ago, doc holliday said:

Internal investgation!!??!!

 

Are they having a laugh,this has to be a wind up,

 

What are they afraid of exactly. The truth I would assert.

 

The stench is getting worse.

 

Another rebuttal for a fair,impartial  and independent  analysis of events.

 

Another whitewash incoming.

It is astounding , they keep getting away with all this . Are everyone else blind or powerless . Even when it's as obvious as this .

It's like the child abusers as bheastville . It's all mostly being brushed over or a non mention

[BLUEDIGNITY 33,647]

All internal investigations held in Scotland so far and counting =

 

[OceanRain 2,845]

The Times (Paul Forsyth)

-----------------------------

Discredited ballot offers no mandate to move forward

Nothing about Scottish football is big or important enough to compare with the protracted shambles that was Britain’s departure from the European Union, but there are shades of Brexit about this SPFL farce. Ill feeling, incompetence, misinformation: all have featured in a nasty, polarised debate that has succeeded only in dividing the football community.

Bad enough that the game is in limbo, hamstrung by the withdrawal of a “no” vote by Dundee, which would have ended the controversial attempt in last week’s SPFL ballot to declare the season over. Worse still is the prospect of them turning 180 degrees and sheepishly registering in the box marked “yes”: a cross that would leave the outcome with not a shred of credibility.

After a weekend in which they went to ground, Dundee finally broke their silence yesterday with a statement in which they refused to indicate how they were thinking, only that they had been in “positive discussions” about reconstruction. With whom they had been plotting the future of Scottish football was not revealed.

If it was with the SPFL, you wonder how it has come to this. By what perverse logic can it be right that the club who just happened to have the deciding vote, and did not — for whatever reason — register it properly, become the game’s self-appointed powerbroker? A club who flip-flopped their opinion in the space of ten minutes and, four days later, still cannot tell the world how they intend to vote? Despite Friday’s unofficial deadline, the rules allowed them 28 days to reach a decision.

If the upshot of all this, as some are predicting, is that Dundee do indeed back the resolution that they initially rejected, the SPFL will claim that clarity has been brought to the situation. With far more important matters in the world at large, they will urge their 42 members to come together, work for the game’s greater good and let bygones be bygones.

Some hope. There is no more chance of Rangers magnanimously applauding celtic’s ninth title in a row than there is of Hearts, Partick Thistle and Stranraer quietly taking their medicine and neglecting to bear a grudge. Far from bringing closure to a debacle, the fallout would be just the beginning.

The hope is that reconstruction can somehow establish a way out, but agreement will be difficult to reach, and the very idea of it screams the question: when is the SPFL resolution not the SPFL resolution? A proposal that relegated Hearts, but also incorporated a revamp that spared them, makes about as much sense as everything else in this humiliating fiasco.

Scottish football is tribal enough. A “yes” vote could set it back years. Rangers would step up their calls for an independent inquiry and perhaps even produce the evidence that they say raises “serious concerns” about the voting process. Hearts would be tempted to further expose what they describe as the SPFL’s attempts to “unduly influence” the outcome.

For those who believe that sporting integrity is more important than the immediate distribution of prize money, the prospect of a premature end to the season was already hard to stomach. If that decision were arrived at in such controversial circumstances, it would make for a febrile atmosphere of resentment, betrayal and allegations of skullduggery.

How can Dundee be undecided about the SPFL’s resolution, never mind supportive of it? In a statement last week, they said it would be “difficult to accept” a proposal that would make any clubs worse off than they were before football was suspended.

Just before Friday’s 5pm deadline, they submitted a “no” vote. Then the SPFL said in a statement that there had been no submission from Dundee. Shortly after that release, which also revealed that the outcome hinged on the missing ballot paper, the Tayside club asked for their vote, apparently held up by a technical hitch, to be disregarded.

Since then, Murdoch MacLennan, the SPFL chairman, has said that he had a “number of conversations” with Dundee over the weekend. One report claimed that unnamed Premiership clubs had offered them lucrative friendlies by way of an incentive to vote ‘yes’.

Irrespective of its outcome, the ballot is surely no mandate with which to move forward. The immediate future of Scottish football cannot rest on the outcome of a vote that is so discredited as to be meaningless. If the SPFL continues to suggest otherwise in a desperate attempt to secure victory, it will only be storing up trouble for another day.

[VanVeenRangers 2,537]

Internal investigation proves how guilty they are.

Can we force anything here?

[BLUEDIGNITY 33,647]

A big bhoy dun it and ran away !😂😂😂😂😂

[NeoGeo7 10,543]

2 minutes ago, BLUEDIGNITY said:

A big bhoy dun it and ran away !😂😂😂😂😂

It took an hour between Dundee sending the vote and when they asked for it to be retracted. I don't know about you but if I vote for something I naturally believe thats it done and it can't be changed.

So what happened in that hour? A phone call perhaps from SPFL or SP(eter)FL(awell) to Mr Nelms to say "What the hell are you doing! You need to vote Yes, just send us a mail saying the vote is retracted and we'll say our IT system buggered up and we didn't get your first vote"

Dodgy as fuck and an internal investigation = destroy all evidence

[esquire8 42,901]

Safely say an internal investigation, if there actually is one much like the probe, will not replace the independent investigation. The SPFL can and have only get rid of the their own evidence on their own premises. 

[Sweetheart 8,458]

SPFL proposal descended into farce long before Dundee’s non-statement statement

That seems the succinct way of summing up Dundee’s astonishing delay in deciding whether to complete a U-turn in voting to back the SPFL’s proposals to end the Championship, League 1 and League 2 season. A rushed process had descended into a shambolic farce long before John Nelms steeled himself to cast the deciding vote yesterday only to shy away, ironically, at 5pm. 

The club statement declaring their delay will only raise more questions is the understatement of this debacle. So much has happened over the course of the last four days that it is easy to forget that Dundee not only cast their vote – only for it to go missing – but they initially voted no. Having discovered their vote would be the decisive one the Dens Park outfit then asked should their vote eventually arrive at Hampden that it be regarded as void.

That last part has become the fundamental issue in this saga as it has left Dundee and the process as a whole open to claims of being tainted. Honestly, as we wait for a pivotal and deciding vote to be case who can argue against that view? As for the SPFL, it’s fair to say they have not covered themselves in glory thus far. They shot themselves in the foot with their handling of this episode too by asking clubs to vote within 48 hours of receiving the proposals was an insult in itself. 

In addition whoever thought it was a good decision to announce the state of play with three votes still to be counted just after the 5pm deadline on Friday should be asked to explain themselves too. For an organisation with the word professional in its name, this has been amateur stuff thus far. Anyone who believes the Dundee managing director’s change of mind will be the end of this sorry tale has clearly not been paying attention. 

Long before the announcement of yet another delay yesterday both Rangers and Hearts have sharpened their knives. They both voted against the proposals and it has turned ugly since with Rangers wanting SPFL chief executive Neil Doncaster and the league’s legal adviser Rod McKenzie suspended pending an inquiry after declaring there are in possession of information which raises serious issues about the voting process. Hearts owner Ann Budge meanwhile, wants league reconstruction and believes the SPFL has questions to answer on whether they unduly influenced the voting procedure. 

Dundee’s dithering and delay as they ponder whether to change their no to a yes will only fan the flames among the conspiracy theorists out there. Partick Thistle certainly want to discuss it and were quick to get their point of view across before their Championship rivals announcement yesterday. A lengthy statement from the Jags included the nugget that, having obtained a joint opinion from senior and junior counsel, they believe Dundee’s original vote against the proposals was in line with the SPFL’s own rules and must stand. 

Clearly the SPFL see it otherwise and it seems inevitable this one is destined for a courtroom in Scotland in the not too distant future. With so much at stake for Partick, and in all likelihood Hearts, who also face succumbing to the same fate as the Jags in dropping down a division by the time next season starts, it appears league reconstruction is the only way in which the SPFL is going to head off a legal challenge down the line if Dundee do eventually vote to support the proposals.

 

Whether peace can be brokered to settle what has become an increasingly acrimonious and polarising situation for clubs is another matter entirely. Spare a thought for the teams in Leagues 1 and 2. They were braced for some much needed funds coming their way in the next couple of days which would have alleviated the financial pressure. A depressing and unfathomable mess has been created and the attempts to resolve it are threatening to turn ugly as those with a vested interest prepare to dig their heels in and fight their corner. It’s not boxing but in Scottish football, the gloves are about to come off.

https://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/sport/football/spfl/2146000/comment-spfl-proposal-descended-into-farce-long-before-dundees-non-statement-statement/

[BlueKnight87 17,302]

1 hour ago, Dave Hedgehog said:

Season ends.

No Chamion.

No relegation.

Prize monies based on end position.

Im utterly baffled why some people won’t allow that or some people think it’s wrong. 👍

 

It's the easiest and fairest solution. Season goes down as incomplete and above is applied. 

However we all know 2 clubs that don't want that now. Embarrassing themselves by publically calling for titles they haven't won during a pandemic. 

Lawell and the cabal seem intent on financially busting other sides unless they get their tainted title