Following in the aftermath of Charlie Green’s application for top flight entry being rejected by the clubs in the Scottish Premier League, Regan, the chief executive of the SFL, has made a claim that social unrest would be the result of Rangers fans being deprived of their team.
Regan has said that the only viable solution now for Rangers was to come into the SFL in the first division, as if they played anywhere else it would result in the game as a whole losing around £15.7m in revenue.
He also made it clear that the Scottish Football League couldn’t allow Rangers to start right at the bottom, which effectively means that the SPL clubs are facing the prospect of a breakaway and an SPL2 if the plan for Rangers to join the first division is also rejected.
He added that for big clubs that were at the top of the league, that amount equated to half of their annual distribution, and for clubs at the bottom is would basically wipe out their entire distrbution, and for the even smaller clubs it was a large proportion of their annual turnovers.
Regan went onto say that even if the Ibrox club did go into the first division, there would still be a loss of income to other SPL clubs of £5m, and as the game isn’t self sustaining it would mean a slow and lingering death for football in Scotland. This would then trickle down through the SFL and he considered that from their perspective, being the governing body, they simply can’t allow this to happen.
Regan has also confirmed that a real threat as arisen pertaining to TV contracts and said that they had had conversations with broadcasters and understood what the stakeholders from Sky, Sport 5, ESPN and various other commercial partners of the SPL were likely to do if Ranger were not a part of the top two tiers of the SFL, and it wasn’t pretty.