Andy's Sting In The Tale (07/11/25) "EuroTrash and Entitlement"
- Andy Smith
- Nov 7
- 11 min read
Not our best ever week in Europe.
Results there are a benchmark and show just how far our leagues have fallen below the pace.
But a red card or not seems enough to keep our red tops chattering away and fan rivalry active and ‘all is well’.
But we all know it isn’t.
And the songbooks last week were embarrassing to this proud Scot.
Have we really sunk so low that the Glasgow derbies cup ties and increasingly frequent managerial changes are all we need to fill airtime and pages and assuage ‘fans’.
But the reality is while all that bollocks keeps lots of people employed our game is sliding and doesn’t seem to be addressing real issues, because it’s easier not to.
Even the BBC seem like an in house channel for our Glasgow clubs.
This Week’s Sting
1. Monday’s Round Table
2. Where and When Will We Play Israel?
3. Roll Up, Roll Up to JD Sports
4. World Cup Draw and First Ever Fifa Peace Prize
5. Uefa Not Immune from Pinching Good Ideas
1. Kid’s Football is Everyone’s Business
Maree Todd’s ‘Enhancing Scottish Football’ Roundtable meeting on Monday focussed on kids.
That’s not been something the game has been good at in the last 50 years and boy does that show now with an almost total absence of Scots in our starting elevens every week.
It was the Sports Minister’s best convened meeting so far but the reality is it’s what it ‘maybe’ leads to that will be the real judge.
And disturbingly eyes ay Holyrood are already focussed on next year’s elections and the very real chance of unprecedented changes.
The time frame of government forgets that life goes on beyond the political frameworks at Holyrood and Westminster.
Back to last Monday.`
There were some meaty presentations from kids football insiders whose wisdom and input we will need if we are to make a collective difference.
The reality is they had too much to share and it all took too long, and I suggested that in future presentations should be pre-circulated.
Anyway the meeting ran out of time because the reality was/is there is so much to discuss, and to do but it will be reconvened at the next get together.
There is nothing more important in Scottish Football than kids.
Our game just lost its way on all aspects and hence we are not where we’d like to be.
For now, here are a few observations from the day for and I’ll share and discuss the minutes when they appear.
- The cost of maintaining football pitches, sports areas and the required facilities is already beyond most financially pressurised councils and the situation will get worse.
- The cost to clubs of hiring the same pitches is shocking and in my mind obscene when you see the good that kids sport does for the kids and their communities.
- As of now the football estate if you can call it that is very male focussed, i.e. urinals rather than toilets, so not female friendly.
- Research constantly shows that playing football, and other sports is overwhelmingly good for kids, and the fabric of the nation.
- There is an ongoing issue with ‘parents’ on touchlines thinking they have the ‘whatever’ to spout abuse at kids and referees who are also often not much more than kids or volunteers.
- There is not enough money coming into kids football from football and elsewhere like local sponsorships and an over-reliance on ageing volunteers.
- Football development should not be restricted to lined pitches with goals and nets. Skills are learned by playing with the ball not having organised ‘games”.
- Most in the room had not read the just published by the `SFA’s Andy Gould 130 pages report, ‘Review of Youth Development in Men’s Football’.
He and his team ‘get it’ and are starting to ask the right questions but it will take a community to make it happen.
The Scottish Youth Football Association has long been ‘challenged’ by the sheer volume of needs and the new team of volunteers have had a proverbial ‘baptism of fire’. Onlookers wonder how they have coped.
Unasked Questions from Andy
(There was no time and the First Minister was waiting outside and wanting the room after us).
Why do we have different teams looking after boys and girls football with minimal or maybe zero overlap? How can we get better workings together? Why are some salaried and some volunteered?
Why is the SYFA not a fully funded division of the SFA and responsible for all kids football, boys and girls, that is fully integrated for the common good?
Why has Scottish Football never sat down and thought through the important short and long term role of volunteers across our game at all levels and areas?
I can see that we need an integrated assessment and programme and as of now it seems that it’s nobody’s job.
Why are volunteers seen as revenue opportunities by the centre rather than key elements in a machine?
It’s about more than selling them courses needed to volunteer!
More later because this is everything.
2. Certainly Not in Gaza
This week Scottish Women drew Israel in their group B pool and will have a home game that last time, just last year, had no Scottish crowd allowed and someone chained to the goalposts.
And also an away game that almost certainly won’t be in Israel and again will be crowd free.
Uefa’s World Cup Women’s qualification route map is quite bizarre and is fully laid out in Uefa speak as a difficult to understand appendix below.
But we all know like an earthbound comet, the real issue is that sport and politics will collide and we and our women will be slap bang in the middle of it.
A bit like just happened in Birmingham when Villa took on an Israeli team who had no supporters.
But there were opposing groups outside, both convinced they had their god(s) on their side, and the usual marches and unpleasantries.
Maybe, by spring, King Donald’s flimsy pitch for a Nobel-Prize, The King Donald Ceasefire, (cease of fire in name only), will have flourished into a genuine even and fair peace.
Maybe Gaza will have world support and real help for the rebuild, proper state-ship will mean something, the illegal settlements will have been handed back to the Palestinians and both countries will have positive futures for their peoples.
Maybe Fifa and Uefa too will finally have addressed a long term series of questions about treating all members equally.
OK.
Maybe not
My prediction is there will be a potential fuss heading for Glasgow.
No crowd allowed in and we’ll win home and away.
Our world cup dream is all about the playoffs and Belgium will be our real worry but we’ll keep the candle burning, for now.
3. Cheaper Than the Barras
Kids Scotland tops at JD Sports for £15.
It’s true.
But only 2 sizes and very limited liability.
But Fear Not, The New Scotland Kit Now On Sale
A real match shirt, as worn and modelled by Ryan Christie, just £120.
Or a cheaper ‘replica’ version at just £75
(I don’t know the difference).
Junior tops just £55 with shorts a bargain at £30.
Infants kit a steal at £40
And all made from recycled polyester so doing our bit for climate change.
I have no issue with the SFA harvesting revenue at £120 for a shirt that costs less than $10 to make from adult fans but in a nation with something like 40% of kids below the poverty line I’d like to see kids tops cheap like the £15 option for remaining stock from the last time JD premiered the ‘New Range’.
4. King Donald Wins Gianni’s Peace Prize
What do besties do?
They hang out, rub each other’s backs, allow much beak wetting and create ‘Fifa Peace Prizes’ to show those curmudgeons at Nobel how wrong they were not already honouring The King for his multiple deliveries of what he calls ‘peace’.
The award will happen in the good Ol’ USA on December 5th when the World Cup draw takes place and good luck to Scotland men with two huge matches on the horizon.
Will we be there in our new £120 Strips from J D Sports with the centre badge and the thicker Adidas stripes?
Maybe.
I’ll be there watching on BBC with a chilled bottle of Retsina and some Gyros crisps from a recent Lidl Greek promotion.
But whatever happens life will go on and we were never going to win the Mundial anyway.
In the meantime many host cities are failing to reach their funding targets for ‘hospitality’.
King Donald has personally targeted and attacked Boston, LA, San Fran and Seattle and said he will relocate the games and find new venues.
Maybe these cities voted Democrats.
5. Euro Trash
No interest in the real Euro football
Two ‘not good enough” in the Europa for the Glasgow pair and an improvement-ish for Aberdeen away in the Conference.
Not far off rock bottom and the question is can we as a nation collectively sink further.
Scottish Football reset/short term solution is to buy better mercenaries but that doesn’t work guys.
The in-house answer really is kids and time.
Chilean Law Suit for £20 Million
It seems the new ‘League formats’ for the three Uefa competitions was taken from the model created in Chile by Sports Consultancy MatchVision.
A legal action has progressed and heading for Swiss Courts.
Uefa cheekily called it the ‘Swiss Model’ but it was seemingly created and copyrighted by Leandro Shara in Chile in 2006.
His company presented it to Uefa at several sports conferences and say Uefa have taken their intellectual property.
Sting Is
A weekly insight into different things in the world of football from a lifetime fan who loves the game sees what it can do for our community and wants it to be even better in the future for kids I don’t even know.
A fan who’s not scared to ask the awkward questions about any aspect of our game.
I’m just one voice and football needs to hear yours too.
I’ll make sure yours is heard in the right places because football North of the Wall is slowly realising that it needs to become more customer aware and focussed.
The Scottish Football Union is new, growing fast and together our voices become a crescendo that can’t be ignored.
Please Join Us
And as always feel free to write to me about anything in football or beyond and send me nice things like McCartney books.
Andy’s Album of the Week
Macca : McCartney
First huge thanks to the very generous ‘Sting’ reader who not only asked me to consider this album but also sent me a spanking new book called ‘Paul McCartney, Wings, The Story of a Band on the Run’.
The record was released in 1970 after Paul had been universally blamed for destroying The Beatles and to some/many he was persona non gratis.
It was all Macca’s fault.
Life is never that simple.
‘McCartney’ was and is the defiant output from a displaced icon, smarting, wanting to move on defiantly, and not sure where he was going.
The tracks include songs that the fast-imploding Moptops project couldn’t and didn’t use and it has a rawness still because many were simple and home recorded in St John’s Wood and Campbeltown with Macca playing all the instruments.
And then mixed by the man on equipment any kid with a pc or phone app today would laugh at.
I never had this or really heard this album at the time because I was just starting out and looking in other directions.
McCartney was hardly on the radio at all and the welter of mixed reviews was always more about separating those pro and agin the man rather than a critique of the music.
Looking back with the benefit of ‘2025 hindsight’ this album has been re-reviewed and re-rated substantially.
And is now rightly up there with Ram and McCartney 2.
Yes its under produced and almost raw.
But this is undervalued genius that was a man being musical because that was all he could do.
Confusing Appendix Uefa:
(Lifted from Uefa’s site, with them trying to explain the lengths they go to, to protect their ‘Big’ Countries Teams for the monied that big tournaments generate.
If you can understand it first time, well done indeed and I’ve even had to add some words to clarify what they are trying to say).
The Women's European Qualifiers league stage groups have been set in all three league levels running between February/March and June 2026.
The groups will decide four of UEFA's eleven slots at the 2027 FIFA Women's World Cup in Brazil and also determine which 32 teams go into the next play-offs between October and December 2026, which will carry seven more direct finals spots plus one place in the inter-confederation play-offs for the last place. Also at stake will be promotion and relegation ahead of the next UEFA Women's Nations League.
The European Qualifiers league stage is played in the same format as the UEFA Women's Nations League, with teams split into three leagues: League A with 16 teams, League B with 16 teams and League C with 21 teams.
The final composition of the leagues was decided by the 2025 edition of the UEFA Women's Nations League.
League B includes five teams who competed at Women's EURO 2025: Belgium, Finland, Portugal, Switzerland (quarter-finalists as hosts) and Wales. Play-off places are at stake in Leagues B and C as well as promotion and relegation.
WOMEN'S EUROPEAN QUALIFIERS LEAGUE STAGE GROUPS
League A
Group A1: Sweden, Italy, Denmark, Serbia
Group A2: France, Netherlands, Poland, Republic of Ireland
Group A3: Spain, England, Iceland, Ukraine
Group A4: Germany, Norway, Austria, Slovenia
League B
Group B1: Wales, Czechia, Albania, Montenegro
Group B2: Switzerland, Northern Ireland, Türkiye, Malta
Group B3: Portugal, Finland, Slovakia, Latvia
Group B4: Belgium, Scotland, Israel, Luxembourg
League C
Group C1: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Estonia, Lithuania, Liechtenstein
Group C2: Croatia, Kosovo, Bulgaria, Gibraltar
Group C3: Hungary, Azerbaijan, North Macedonia, Andorra
Group C4: Greece, Faroe Islands, Georgia
Group C5: Romania, Cyprus, Moldova
Group C6: Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia
DATES
The Women's European Qualifiers league stage will be played, in principle, on the following dates in 2026:
Matchday 1: Tuesday 3 March
Matchday 2: Saturday 7 March
Matchday 3: Tuesday 14 April
Matchday 4: Saturday 18 April
Matchday 5: Friday 5 June
Matchday 6: Tuesday 9 June
Changes to the scheduling may be made within a certain deadline after the draw, provided all associations concerned agree.
WORLD CUP QUALIFICATION
UEFA has been allocated 11 places in the 2027 FIFA Women's World Cup. One additional team may qualify through FIFA's intercontinental play-offs.
At the end of the league phase, group standings and overall league rankings will determine:
Direct qualification for the 2027 FIFA Women's World Cup
The four League A group winners.
Qualification and seeding for the European Qualifier play-offs for the 2027 FIFA Women's World Cup.
Round 1 of the play-offs is played in two paths as follows:
Path 1: The four second-placed teams and four third-placed teams of League A play against the six first-placed teams and two best-ranked second-placed teams of League C.
Path 2: The four fourth-placed teams of League A and four first-placed teams of League B play against the four second-placed teams and four third-placed teams of League B.
In round 1 of the play-offs, the ties are determined by means of a draw.
Path 1: The eight League A teams are seeded and play their second-leg matches at home.
Path 2: The four fourth-placed teams from League A and four first-placed teams from League B are seeded and play their second leg matches at home.
The winners of the round 1 play-offs qualify for the round 2 play-offs.
In round 2 of the play-offs, the ties are determined by means of a draw. The round 1 path 1 ties are seeded for the round 2 draw and the winners of those ties play the round 2 second leg match at home.
The seven best-ranked round 2 play-off winners according to the 2026 Women’s European Qualifiers overall league rankings qualify directly for the 2027 FIFA Women’s World Cup. The one remaining round 2 play-off winner qualifies for the FIFA Women’s World Cup intercontinental play-offs.
Automatic promotion and relegation for the next competition cycle, 2027-29
The four group winners in League B and the six group winners in League C will be promoted.
The four fourth-placed teams in Leagues A and B as well as the two lowest-ranked third-placed teams in League B, ranked 27 to 28 in the overall league rankings, will be relegated.
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