Winter or Summer Football in Scotland

Winter or Summer Football in Scotland

It is difficult to know what should be better.

Having summer football would possibly bring in more fans, from having a better time to travel to home and away games. Rather than playing games in mid-winter when games are more likely to be called off.

Also the theory is our teams would be more ready for European football, as they would have already been well into the season.

But the drawback, is that Scottish football would out of kilter with the major leagues.

The main problem is what to do when the World Cup, and European Championships are being played.

It would be difficult to hold the Scottish League while international teams are at the major trophies, Particularly Rangers and Celtic would have stars playing in the World Cup or European  Championships. What if Scotland qualified for one of these tournaments, and 10 or 15 players were missing from Scottish League teams while the domestic games were being played. This could motivate teams not to produce Scottish internationals, as they would know if Scotland qualified for a major trophy, those players would be missing from domestic games, because they would be playing for the international side.

The major European leagues of Spain, England, Italy, Germany, France, Portugal, Russia, and the Netherlands, would see this as a major problem as their leagues produce so many international players at major tournaments.

This is the main problem for me.

Even the likes of Aberdeen, Hearts, Hibs, Dundee United and Motherwell could produce Scottish internationals in major tournaments. So this is not just a Glasgow Celtic or Glasgow Rangers issue.



A solution to the problem could be to have more games each season, and limit how many games a player can play in each season domestically. So teams would know every player would be out of the squad for a time in each season, anyway.

As I discuss in this previous post.
https://maryscottishmusic.blogspot.com/2020/01/how-can-scottish-teams-can-play-more.html



This way teams would just choose the World Cup to remove those internationals from the domestic club games.



This would solve the problem, but would simply mean playing games all year, which would defeat the purpose of having summer football, but less winter football. 

I think unfortunately it is not possible to play the league during major trophies, as it would mean teams would be punished for producing good international class players.  
The only solution is to play major international tournaments in the winter. And have the domestic seasons in the summer. But that would mean major football international tournaments could not take place in Northern Europe, as the weather would too tough, and unpredictable.