Lower league football without fans: ‘like pubs opening but they can’t have customers’ | OneFootball

Football in Scotland, particularly in the lower leagues, is not being treated in the same way as other events, and those games are definitely not the same as ones with 45,000 in attendance…

The news that fans will not be allowed into grounds in the UK for the foreseeable future was obviously met with some dismay among lower league clubs.

That dismay is arguably worse because it feels so unnecessary, particularly for the smallest teams in the pyramid, but also because there’s a strong sense that football is being unfairly treated by the government.

And that isn’t just idle speculation and knee-jerkism from outside the game.

“I find it a little bit hard to take,” Stenhousemuir chairman Iain McMenemy told The Totally Scottish Football Show this week. “I said on the BBC that I didn’t think there was a huge amount of science behind the decision: the point I was trying to make was right now, despite all the changes that have come in and despite the news that we can’t have fans in anytime soon, the rules state you can still have outdoor events for up to 200 people.

“So we have the strange situation where Cowdenbeath, who are known for having a stock car track around the football pitch, 200 people can go and watch a stock car race sitting in the stadium. But the minute the football players come out, somehow that’s unsafe. I can’t understand the science behind that sort of decision.

“I think they’re treating all clubs as if we’re 45,000 seater stadia with all the issues with public transport, queueing for turnstiles, a sea of people going back and forth in the street.

“I don’t think the Scottish government holds Scottish football in very high regard – and I think that’s Scottish football’s problem. I don’t think they’ve engaged, and when they have engaged it’s been hostile, pointing the finger at the government, asking them to sort out fan behaviour and so forth rather than getting their own house in order.

“I did hear there could be some sort of decision coming from Westminster whether there will be funding, and how that might be distributed.”

Much like in England, Scottish lower league clubs are not obliged to test their players and staff for Covid-19 around routine league games, but McMenemy explained why.

“The Premiership clubs are now out of step with everyone else. They wanted to go early: they wanted to play football again when the science was telling everybody to be in lockdown. So they came up with a plan to get them back early, and that was the twice-a-week testing. That’s the price they had to pay.

“We talked about it in the lower divisions but we decided we couldn’t afford the cost, so we decided to wait until the Scottish government said contact sport is now back, and three or four weeks ago they did just that.

“Premiership teams now don’t have to test but they’re choosing to do so as an added safety net. Where there was a conflict was when a team that wasn’t testing would come up against a team that was, where two bubbles would collide: they’ve fixed that, and fixed it well, because they’ve said when a lower league club comes up against a Premiership club, they will have to test at their own expense. We accept that, we’ve got no issues.”

Of course the grim reality is that we are likely to lose clubs, which feels so avoidable. Is it inevitable that this will happen?

“We’re now going into the season without supporters – I heard a good analogy for that: it was like saying to pubs they can open but they can’t have any customers in. How sustainable a model is that for pubs? How sustainable is it for football? I think that could potentially put some clubs over the edge.”

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