Save our troubled clubs

Steve Archibald appears to have rescued Airdrie

BBC Sport Online's Clive Lindsay looks at the financial crises affecting several Scottish clubs.

Save the Bankies, Save the 'Ton, Save the Bairns, Save the Thistle...

Over the last 15 years, nearly a quarter of Scotland's 40 senior football clubs have faced a crisis that threatened their very existence.

It is a startling statistic and is only the tip of a very frosty financial iceberg.

Even more remarkable is that none have so far joined Third Lanark in the list of football's dodos.

But it is perhaps only a matter of time before the proverbial excrement hits the Scottish football fan and another of their clubs is flushed away in a sea of debt.

Raith have had to sell many top players

That was certainly the implied warning in the annual financial review of the game north of the border by PricewaterhouseCoopers.

While the media spotlight shone on the spiralling losses and wage costs in the Premier League, the starkest remarks in the October report were reserved for those in Division One.

In season 1998-99, the nine clubs for which accounts were available together had debts of nearly £12m, an increase of £3m on the previous year.

"This downward trend, attributable to the significant losses, presents a worrying picture and suggests that the majority of First Division clubs cannot survive without a fundamental change in the way in which they operate," the experts warned.

Decaying grounds

"Assuming that little can be done to increase turnover in the lower divisions, the results would indicate that most of the First Division clubs need to perform a significant cost-cutting exercise in order to save what is not far from a financial crisis across the whole division."

Airdrieonians were at the time in the middle of their long wait for Steve Archibald's takeover to save their skins.

This month's collapse of buy-out proposals for Morton and Second Division Clydebank has led to both clubs calling in the administrators in an attempt to preserve theirs.

Raith Rovers need to raise nearly £1m by the end of the season, when they are likely to turn part-time, to avoid a similar fate.

Rovers had redeveloped their ground to comply with Premier League regulations, Airdrie have built a new one from scratch, Morton have let their's decay, Clydebank have abandoned theirs and now share with the Greenock club.

Clydebank are now in administration

No matter what strategy clubs adopt, it appears that all are at a loss to make football pay.

As PricewaterhouseCoopers point out, lower-division clubs have been borrowing more, not to advance, but simply to stay afloat.

Scottish clubs exist on the whim of their bankers, who have, until now at least, been willing to treat football more leniently than just about any other form of business.

The dilemma is that the club with the largest financial loss usually wins the league.

Aiming for the top is a high-risk strategy and big-spending Livingston are likely to get their Premier League reward at the end of the season.

Poor attendances

Meanwhile, those clubs content to exist at a lower level playing part-time football appear able to tick along.

They make losses but survive thanks to money trickling down from above, like the profits distributed across the board this week by the Scottish Football Association.

There appears little middle-ground, with Airdrie, Falkirk, Partick Thistle and Raith all recently paying the price of failure to stay among the elite.

Not long ago, the thought of a town the size of Airdrie, Clydebank or Greenock without a senior football club seemed unthinkable.

With attendances barely breaking the thousand mark, their clubs have lost touch with local communities that are now virtually suburbs of Glasgow thanks to urban sprawl.

Back in 1967, Third Lanark had many more faithful that were quickly lost to football or absorbed by the city's other outfits.

Thirty-three years on, Scotland's sick list must recapture their place at the heart of society or suffer their own final beating.