Ian Wright has identified the root cause of Scottish football’s malaise: broadcasting deals so thin they make a championship medal look valuable. Fair point. But what if we’ve been solving this all wrong?
Instead of negotiating better contracts or investing in youth academies, what Scottish football genuinely needs is a Punditry Olympics. Hear me out.
Imagine it: former players competing in seven disciplines of absurd analysis. The 100-metre Hot Take Sprint, where pundits sprint to a microphone and deliver the most inflammatory opinion about a Rangers-Celtic match without actually watching it. The Long Jump Into Irrelevance, measuring how far into a completely unrelated topic a commentator can drift mid-sentence. The Synchronised Contradictions event, where two ex-strikers must simultaneously argue opposing points about the same player’s performance, maintaining perfect disagreement throughout.
There’s the Punditry Pentathlon of Clichés—contestants earn points for uttering “he’s left it all on the pitch,” “the manager’s hands are tied,” and “they didn’t want it enough” within a single three-minute segment. The Javelin Throw of Outdated Comparisons tests how far back into the 1980s a pundit can reach to justify why modern football has gone soft.
Wright himself would naturally host the Decathlon of Self-Referential Anecdotes, where every analysis must somehow circle back to his own playing career. The gold standard.
Surely this solves everything. Better than relegation reform, anyway.