SCOTT’S TAKE: It’s About Time We Turn Our Attention To Neil Doncaster

By Scott McPike

How some people can fail upwards beggars belief, that is a line uttered by the excellent Adrian Dunbar’s character Ted Hastings in Line Of Duty and in recent years the SPFL supremo Neil Doncaster has made ‘H’ look like Columbo. For 14 years, Neil Doncaster has made one bad decision after another and never seems to receive any fallback on them. Scottish Football is being undervalued, misrepresented and downright badly run by this man and the people around him with the reported TV deal finally the straw that broke the camel’s back in terms of finally talking about how much Doncaster is dragging the SPFL down in my opinion.

If this reported new TV deal goes through then the massive winners are Sky, not the clubs in the SPFL who won’t be gaining at all from the last deal. You can have all the think tanks you want but you can’t help the game if you have incompetent leaders and that what we have had in Scottish Football for far too long as it pertains to Neil Doncaster.

Neil Doncaster entered Scottish Football in 2009 when he was appointed Chief Executive at the Scottish Premier League and 13 years later, can we really say that Doncaster has been a force of good for the overall landscape of Scottish Football. From speaches about Armageddon to preaching sporting integrity, Doncaster always seems to say loads of stuff without really saying very much and the issue is that Doncaster has been under scrutiny so many times since becoming Chief Executive and never seems to receive any form of criticism in the media or from the clubs who have the most to gain from any big financial decisions that are made instead it is the fans who every time a deal is made involving Doncaster, rightfully point out just how poor it really is.

Now, let’s look at a few indicators of why an article like this needs put out and I am not saying anything that isn’t out on Twitter from other Scottish Football fans who share the same opinions at almost every club in the country. Doncaster made clear in 2012 that Scottish Football would face Armageddon if the SPL clubs did not vote Rangers back into the league, he tried to back it up by saying he meant that clubs facing relegation would be doomed in the future but as we know now fans of clubs in the SPL at that time were willing to hold money back from their clubs to not see Rangers in the top flight and also Rangers felt it right and fair to start from the Third Division. It was a no-win situation but Doncaster’s lack of leadership just stood out and from then, it has only become more noticeable.

Arranging for Rangers to play Aberdeen and Celtic to play Hearts in League Cup semi-finals on the SAME DAY, in the SAME PLACE within hours of each other is without a doubt one of the most astonishing announcements I can ever remember hearing about in my 20 years following Scottish Football, our game has never had very competent leaders making competent decisions, Jim Farry and Roger Mitchell just to name a few but the fact that Doncaster genuinely agreed to this shows his lack of understanding as bad as arranging an Old Firm Title Decider at 6:05 on a Bank Holiday Weekend right?

In the 13 years since Neil Doncaster took over, he has attracted two new sponsors to the game in Scotland and I would like to go into small details on these agreements and I will touch on the second one later in the piece. The first one was in 2015, after Clydesdale Bank walked away in 2013 and the SPFL sat for two years without a sponsor for the leagues the betting giants Ladbrokes came on board and agreed to pay £4 million over two years. Ladbrokes don’t deserve any criticism for this because if you offer low and it is accepted straightaway by a desperate man who couldn’t attract a sponsor to leagues with two of the largest fanbases in the world into it then the buck stops with Doncaster.

We also have the situation involving the leagues being called due to the COVID pandemic, now we all had to make quick individual decisions due to the unknown nature surrounding COVID and I don’t see the huge issue with calling the leagues due to the unknown of whether the season could resume safely at the time but the SPFL and Doncaster in particular made a really tough situation worse than it needed to be. The clubs were all given a vote on whether to end the season and Championship side Dundee had submitted a vote not to end the campaign but the email was lost in cyberspace and they later had a change of heart deciding to vote for the season to be curtailed. The people involved in the decision making at Dundee can only answer why they changed their mind but Doncaster’s overall lack of leadership and the shambolic way such a big decision turned into fiasco again shows why Doncaster is not fit for purpose and hasn’t been for years.

TV is at the forefront of Scottish Football and it has been since the introduction of the new Scottish Premier League in 1998 and the fiascos we have seen with TV deals over the years are enough to give you a sore head thinking about them. In 2014, a statistic was shown that Scotland rank 16th in terms of leagues receiving TV money behind the likes of Denmark, Poland and Sweden. In Scotland, us as fans tend to naturally big up the game in the country to be bigger than it might well be but getting dwarved by countries like the above mentioned shouldn’t be happening and again the finger points to a Chief Executive who goes for the first deal as opposed to negotiating because you can’t tell me that TV companies who in the days of streaming are desperate for content wouldn’t explore the possibility of having the Old Firm Derby and a league like the SPFL on their platform.

Cinch must have felt like they won a truckload of Bugatti’s when they bid £1.6 million a season for sponsorship in the SPFL and the deal was accepted. To put it in context, Cinch who sponsor quite a few sports clubs and leagues pay £6.5 million a year to sponsor England’s Cricket Team and £10 million a year to sponsor Tottenham Hotspur’s sleeves. The difference will be that England Cricket and Tottenham Hotspur have good negotiating teams and don’t just jump at the first deal because they have dillied and dallied in attracting sponsors for years. Cinch don’t deserve any blame and plus the whole fiasco with Rangers not being part of it due to conflicts of interest, are Rangers digging their heals in to make things difficult again only the decision makers at Ibrox can answer that but the job of a board is to look for potential conflicts that might occur and again Doncaster and his team of staff did not bother to check would this be a potential problem and lawsuits since have proved that to be correct.

In conclusion, Scottish Football would be a better place if Neil Doncaster was removed and someone who has good negotiating skills plus a real desire to improve the stature of Scottish Football should be installed. For the life of me I have never been able to fathom why a Chief Executive who has negotiated so many bad deals and come under so much fife not only keeps his position but is given bonuses time and again. This new TV deal shows just how much he values the game he is put in charge to further and the longer he remains in power, the more we will be having problems like this.