Ultimately the split is a good thing and it provides some genuine excitement for the mid table teams as we saw some late drama with St Johnstone and St Mirren this weekend.
Unfortunately it can lead to some issues with the fixtures as someone generally misses out on a home fixture, and that’s a big deal to the smaller teams as a decent home gate can legitimately pay a yearly wage for one of their players.
In theory that should be less of a problem this year because there aren’t any home fans who will be attending games, but a recent post from a St Johnstone Twitter account has made an interesting observation.
If the top six teams are scheduled to play in the natural way to make it two home games and two away against the same teams this year, there’s a slight imbalance that needs to be fixed – And the really obvious way of doing that would be to flip the final Celtic vs Rangers clash:
Looking at post-split fixtures. Given that Rangers' one away game is already against Saints then easiest thing looks to be to switch Aberdeen vs Saints to Perth and also switch Old Firm venue. Simple for the @spfl this time surely… pic.twitter.com/88YDChS7pq
— St Johnstone 1884 (@stjohnstone1884) March 21, 2021
That would mean that Celtic would have three home games this season against the Rangers, there will be absolute outcries of conspiracy and all sorts of bed-wetting from the Rangers’ side of thing, so ultimately you do think a smaller team will get shafted to make up for this.
It will be interesting to see how they resolve this though!
