My dad doesn’t like football, and neither of my uncles showed much interest in it either. So, when I started playing and watching the game, aged around 9, it was my grampa that became my footballing mentor. I think (I hope) he enjoyed having a family member to share his passion for the game with at last. At that time my parents were divorcing, and my father travelled a lot for work, so I probably imprinted on my grampa more than I would otherwise have. Apart from football he was a fantastic pianist and jazz fan, a model railway enthusiast, a trivia buff, and a habitual dad joker. Those of you that know me can probably see those influences in me.
One of our favourite recurring topics was Scottish football reconstruction. Both of us appreciated the unusual structural problems the game here faced, and as the nineties progressed and the Old Firm pulled away from the pack we discussed ways we could make the league more competitive. Our most radical proposal was for smaller league clubs to merge into regional franchises – i.e. ‘Central’, ‘Tayside’, ‘Glasgow’. However, neither of us laboured under the illusion that was ever likely to happen, due to the fierce if slightly strange loyalty football fans have to their teams.
If mergers were an unpalatable solution, what was the problem? As far as our discussions went, the hypothesis was Scotland had too many football teams for its population size and could do with reducing their numbers. At the start of the 1995-96 season, there were 40 Senior league clubs in Scotland, for a population of around 5m, compared with 92 in England (population ~48m). That works out at 125,000 people per club in Scotland, compared with 413,000 in England. But wait, there’s more. There were another 55 odd senior non-league teams (playing in the Highland, Northern Caledonian, East of Scotland and South of Scotland Leagues,) and a whopping 170-odd Junior teams.
It’s at this point a bit of context regarding the Junior system in Scotland should be provided, if it’s something you’re not familiar with. The term ‘Junior’ didn’t refer to the players’ ages, but rather their status. If I’m being honest, I’m not entirely sure what the difference between ‘Senior’ and ‘Junior’ actually was as there were non-league Senior teams, Junior teams in the Scottish Cup, and it wasn’t uncommon for players from the Seniors to join Junior teams on loan.
Apart from these loan moves, and some clubs participating in the Scottish Cup, the two leagues were almost entirely independent. This was somewhat analogous to the way the NFL and MLB are both comprised of conferences that used to be competing leagues, or the way Rugby League and Union operate in England now. While the Seniors and the Juniors played the same code of football, there was a flavour to the Juniors that was entirely its own.
It should be noted that the best-supported teams (and most of the resources) in Scotland would always be found in the top two tiers of the senior game. That said, the best-supported Junior teams drew bigger crowds than some of the smaller Senior teams, with the subsequent benefit of being able to offer better wages as well. There wasn’t much money spent on ground maintenance though; your average Junior ground consisted of a small lumpy, bobbly patch of grass surrounded by grass slopes for terracing (some paving slabs if you’re lucky,) a small pavilion with perhaps a social club annex, and a signature barrier around the pitch comprising of concrete posts with metal cross bars.
My local Junior team growing up was Arthurlie. While I wasn’t a massive football fan myself until I was 9, I did end up in the club’s Dunterlie Park on more than one occasion during my childhood due to my press photographer father covering one of the Lie’s games and me being sent along with him.
And that’s the way it used to be, three closed systems, with occasional cross-pollination if a Senior league team went to the wall, or expansion took place. And then, in 2013, the Lowland League was formed and everything changed. Part of an SFA initiative to foster a pyramid system where for so long there’s only been great walls, from its second season the Lowland League afforded the chance of promotion to the SPFL. The Lowland champions would have to play off against the Highland champions, with the victor then facing the team that finished bottom of League 2, but it was progress.
And it seemed to kick-start something. From 2017 to 2021, the majority of the Junior East Region clubs moved to the Senior East of Scotland League. On the other side of the country in 2020, the West’s Junior teams transferred en masse into the newly formed West of Scotland League. The rest of the non-league Senior and Junior divisions were also integrated into the new system; the North Caledonian, North Juniors, and South of Scotland leagues made up the rest of tier 6, with almost all of them having further divisions at lower tiers as well. Scotland went from having no pyramid to a massively comprehensive one in 8 years.
The Pyramid has brought both positives and further issues. While there is no such distinction between Junior and Senior clubs now, not all clubs in the Pyramid hold SFA licences. As such, they can’t automatically enter the Scottish Cup, or gain promotion above tier 6. I’d always got the impression that the majority of Junior teams weren’t that fussed about turning Senior and progressing through the leagues, but over the last 4 or 5 years there has been a flurry of activity as clubs upgrade their grounds and footballing operations in order to become licensed. A similar process has been in place in England for years, and seems to have had a net positive in improving spectator facilities, developing young players, and clubs’ relationships with their communities.
The ramshackle nature of Junior grounds was undoubtedly part of their rugged charm. You could probably draw a parallel with Sean Connery’s James Bond here; he didn’t play the character as urbanely or as sophisticated as Iain Fleming had intended, but the author came to respect the Scotsman’s portrayal. Incidentally, Connery himself played for Bonnyrigg Rose in the Juniors in his youth.
But one person’s ‘charmingly ramshackle’ is another person’s ‘severely dilapidated’. I’m not sure what obligations Junior clubs had to upkeep their grounds, but many of them were (and some still are) literally falling apart with boundary walls collapsing, and rusty terrace coverings on the brink. Toilets? Hah! Disabled toilets? Double hah! The Juniors were also infamous for a couple of teams always having between 8-12 games in hand over the teams that had played the most by March or April, which was partly due to the bewildering number of cup completions the Juniors played in, but partly because no-one had floodlights and the pitches were terrible, which resulted in a de facto winter shutdown.
However, that has started to change over the last ten years as more and more clubs have bought into the concept of Senior football. In order to achieve promotion to the Lowland League (and potentially the SPFL afterwards,) and to be guaranteed a place in the Scottish Cup preliminary stages, clubs need to hold a licence. And for most of the former Junior clubs that means upgrading some elements of their operations.
A lot of what is covered in a licence operation relates to behind the scenes and football administration elements, such as coaching, medical staff, insurances, and financial stability. What your average football fan is likely to see are the floodlights, dressing rooms, 100 covered places, toilets, and disabled places. But here are other aspects of the licence that relate to community engagement; Junior teams have always been part of their community, perhaps more so than their top flight equivalents. The ubiquitous social clubs functioned as fund-raising avenues for the team, as well as community hubs (where the clubs annexed the ground they also acted as working-class renditions of executive boxes.)
However, in the modern era ‘community engagement’ refers less to providing somewhere for people to get pissed on a Friday night, and more to giving local people somewhere to play, train, and work. This has probably manifested itself in the increasing number of artificial pitches in the lower leagues, as these can be used all week round by the community, but also in the number of academy teams. In an inversion of the traditional approach, where a club would develop an academy to engage their community, some community academies have entered teams in the league, an end goal for their player pathways to aspire to. It’s fascinating to see an organisation like Easterhouse Academy form a team and enter the Pyramid at step 10. One wonders if this is how exciting the game was in the Victorian era.
Another area where lower league clubs are engaging through their communities is their idiosyncratic, and surprisingly savvy use of social media. I’ve been following the West of Scotland Football League Twitter account for a while – their regular retweets of their member clubs’ line-up graphics, signing announcements, and general news stories have given me an insight into a collection of clubs who are ambitious, determined, and oddly polite to their rivals.
By the summer of 2023, the bigger ex-Juniors appear to be thriving. Six tier 6 and two tier 7 teams reached the third round of the 2022-23 Scottish Cup, with tier 6 side Pollok having routed tier 5 Huntly and beaten tier 4 Annan on their own journey. Fellow West of Scotland Premier Division side Darvel even managed to knock out tier 1 Aberdeen in the fourth round. This isn’t a one-off either, with 5 pyramid sides making the fourth round last season, and 3-4 regularly reaching round 4 before that. So, the bigger non-league sides can certainly cut it with the big boys – the issue is getting the opportunity to compete in the league.
In part due to legacy issues, in part the way the pyramid developed, and the effects of Covid lockdowns, there are now a lot of teams that are probably in completely the wrong tier in terms of their potential. However, due to the relative lack of promotion and relegation places between tiers 4 and 7, there’s not a lot of upward and downward movement possible right now which kind of defeats the purpose of a pyramid.
Let me illustrate. Each season three teams are promoted from the English Championship to the Premier League comprising two automatic promotion places and one play-off place, where the teams finishing 3-6 in the table engage in a further mini-tournament at the end of the season to claim the third promotion spot. With even the team finishing bottom of the Premier League receiving at least £100m in prize money, it’s not a surprise that many teams in the English second tier run at frightening deficits to make the big league.
Still, the Premier League have never quite been able to pull the ladder up after themselves, and three promotion spots are still available to Championship clubs. If I were to express this mathematically, I’d say that 24 teams were competing for 3 places, so 24 divided by 3 gives us a ratio of 8 teams competing for each promotion place.
In the Scottish Championship (and Leagues 1 & 2 for that matter,) the ratio of teams to promotion places is a little more complicated, because a number of divisions have partial promotion places. To clarify, this is when a team has to play off against one or more teams from other divisions in order to achieve promotion. It’s something that’s fairly commonplace on the continent, with the most common model being where the team that finishes 2nd or 3rd in tier 2 plays the team that finishes 16th or 17th in tier 1.
A similar mechanism operates in the Scottish Pyramid from tiers 2 downwards, and in the English Pyramid from tier 5 downwards. In Scotland, most divisions have at least one automatic promotion space, but many have play-off dependent spaces. The issue is that tiers 5 and 6 don’t even have automatic promotion places. And there are a lot of teams competing at those steps. In terms of teams competing for promotion places, the SPFL’s three lower divisions have an average of 6.67 teams competing for each spot, which isn’t too bad. It’s better than the English Championship and League One, and slightly worse than EFL League Two.
However, when you get to tier 5 it increases to 102 teams per promotion place, as the winners of the Highland and Lowland Leagues then play off against each other, and subsequently have to take on the team that finished bottom of the SPFL. And that’s not even the worst ratio in the pyramid, because tier six has essentially 90 teams competing for each promotion spot, resulting in a combined ratio of 135 teams per promotion place.
Below tier 6, things open up again. In fact, in the West of Scotland Fourth Division this season, three of the 12 teams stand to go up. That’s a ratio of 4 teams per promotion place, although the bottom step of the WoSFL is a bit of a basket case at the moment.
Over the tail end of the 2022-23 season, there was much discussion about the SFA’s proposal for a new Conference League, which would have slotted in at tier 5 in the pyramid and effectively relegated hundreds of clubs. This was part of a move to integrate more B teams into the structure (there have pretty much always been B teams and reserve sides in the Scottish game
What this will almost certainly result in over the next few years is a bottleneck as the big former Junior teams all fight over a paucity of promotion spots. It probably wouldn’t be unfair to say that there are around a dozen teams in tier 6 that are bigger in terms of resource, facilities, and support than some of the teams in tiers 3 and 4. But due to not taking up the invitation to join the Lowland League at the outset, they’re now on the wrong side of the bottleneck, and if they have aspirations of moving up the pyramid it might take them a while.
I’ve started following the West of Scotland Football League on Twitter, and they regularly retweet member clubs’ updates. Regardless of the promotion issue, there’s still a frisson of excitement and pride as these teams upgrade their grounds, put social initiatives in place, and just play football. It all feels a world away from the Junior game I was brought up with, and I feel that’s for the betterment of Scottish football.
I wonder what my grampa would have made of it all. I think he would have been intrigued at the least. While it’s true that the Pyramid will result in some teams fading away and other less familiar names taking their places, this is undoubtedly better than mergers or folding. It’ll take time for teams to find their new levels in the structure; we can only hope that the new Senior teams remain as enthusiastic as they are now. If so, I think Scottish football can only benefit.
The above is all well and good. But how can we objectively measure the benefit of a pyramid system? Well, as promotion and relegation between the league and non-league has been in place for 8 seasons now, we have some data to play with. First though, there’s some historical context to consider. In the 28 seasons between the Scottish Football League (SFL) switching to a 4-division structure in 1994, and their eventual relegation in 2016, East Stirlingshire finished bottom of the league a remarkable 8 times, including a 5 season run between 2002 and 2007 that almost saw their membership revoked. If we’re being charitable, we could suggest that perhaps competing at tier 4 was a little beyond their means. The fact they’ve averaged around a 5th place finish in the generally 18-team Lowland League since suggests they’ve found their level. Similarly, Berwick Rangers endured a slow decline over 20 years, but since their relegation in 2019 they’ve improved their performance year-on-year. It’s too early to tell how Brechin City and Cowdenbeath will fare having dropped down in 2021 and 2022 respectively.
But what about the promoted clubs? As of writing there are 4; Edinburgh City (later renamed FC Edinburgh), Cove Rangers, Kelty Hearts, and Bonnyrigg Rose Athletic. Three of the four have since managed to make their way up to the third tier, with Cove even reaching the Championship in 2022. Bonnyrigg are only part way through their debut season, so the jury is still out on them.
This modernisation seems to have inspired some other existing league clubs as well, as least partly. Queen’s Park, famous for being Scotland’s only amateur league club, ended a century and a half of playing for the love of the game only in 2019 as they were finding it increasingly hard to compete with pro and semi-pro rivals. They subsequently sold Hampden, the 50,000 seater stadium they’d incongruously owned for decades, and invested in upgrading the adjoining Lesser Hampden ground, the playing squad, and their academy. They went on to secure back-to-back promotions in 2021 and 2022. Notably, the Spiders were the last team to finish bottom of the pile before relegation was introduced, in 2014.
Elsewhere, Ayr United are building a new stand, Clyde have a proposal in to take over a venue closer to their spiritual home of Bridgeton, and Raith are modernising the main stand side of Stark’s Park. These changes may seem modest to readers from England per se, but there’s not a lot of money in Scottish football, and the pessimistic part of my brain thinks the situation will only get worse. Some people will lay the blame of Scottish football’s financial malaise at the feet of the governing bodies, and that may well be true, but I say time and time again that the game here (and in Wales and Ireland) just can’t compete with English football, and rugby, and cricket, which tends to hoover up all the British pounds.
Still, the more disaffected I become with elite-level football, the more the Scottish pyramid draws me in. I think if you’d told me that 30 years ago, I’d have thought you rather mad, but maybe that’s just a sign that the Scottish game has got itself pointing in the right direction.
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