'FIND YOUR LEVEL'

Ex-Celtic boss Strachan tells lower league clubs to join the Juniors if they’re going to ‘play’ at being professional

GORDON STRACHAN insists it’s time Scotland’s lower league clubs stopped pretending they’re professional.

The ex-Celtic and Scotland boss reckons radical reform is needed to save football in this country once the immediate impact of Covid-19 is over.

And Strach reckons brutal bloodletting of several League One and Two sides has to happen because too many of them are nothing more than glorified junior sides.

He said: "If you want to be a professional club, show it.

"Have full-time employees, have full-time players, have an academy, do the whole lot.

“Just don't play at being a football team and expect us to look after you.

"When you talk about clubs coming into the league, what are they bringing in? Two hundred people per week to a game, is that really professional football?

"The teams in the bottom two leagues at the moment, in general, how many players have they produced over the last 14 years?

"Nobody's going to kill a football club but find your level that you play at. Find the level your finances are putting you.

"Don't tell me you're a professional club when you're paying people part-time 80 quid a week and nobody turns up to your football matches.

“Don’t tell me that’s professional, what good is that to anyone? What’s that doing for football?

“If they can’t deal with it financially, they can go and play in the junior leagues.

“Teams will always stay there, but it’s about finding the league that’s best for them.

“There are clubs just floating around thinking ‘I don’t want to get there’ and are happy where they are.

“For maybe forty or fifty per cent of the clubs in Scotland we call professional, they wouldn’t have the ability to survive in the Conference in England.

“What I want to see is clubs who are professional and want to build, bring through young kids.

“Then be called professional teams, not pretending to be.

“Our professionalism would not get anywhere near the National Leagues.

“They’re not professional and we give them a vote like they are, but they’re not professional at all

“They’re not even good community clubs at times.

“It’s very very strange. I don’t think the radical stuff comes now because we need to think.

“Once we come out of it, we have to go ‘who wants to go head over heels on being professional and bring on the game’?

“I’m sure if we do it properly our product - the product we sell the world - can become one hundred percent better.

“We can be a generation who finally changes something, try something different instead of fiddling while Rome is burning.

“We have a product but it has to be all there at the one time.

“I’d love to be able to say that we changed it for the better rather than go round and round in circles forever.”

Strachan, who believes European leagues will soon be on the horizon, reckons it’s imperative Scotland gets all the biggest and best clubs facing each other.

And focus on selling television games which will be attractive to viewers beyond our borders.

The former manager, now technical director at Dundee, is also against plastic pitches being used in the professional ranks.

He said: “You have to give a good product and if you think that is two teams in the bottom half of the Scottish Premiership on a plastic pitch, you’re kidding yourself on.

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“Do we really want to go back to the platform it has been played on?

“You sit on a Sunday, Man Utd v Tottenham, Derby v Leeds and then is that Livingston versus Ross County I’m watching.

“There has to be a rethink on what product you are showing the rest of the world.

“I don’t want this grey thing appearing on my telly on a Sunday.

“If you have a better product you will get more sponsors. If you have the Hibs v Hearts, Dundee v Dundee United, Dundee Utd v Aberdeen, Celtic v Rangers - all those games.

“Then you can say to the sponsors ‘look what you’re getting’ and they’ll go ‘you’re right, we’ll sponsor these big games’ but they’re not going to sponsor games nobody is interested in.

“We always talk about we’ll do this or we’ll do that, but nothing changes.

“All that ever happens is Celtic and Rangers get stronger.”

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