Falkirk appear to hae been saved from relegation by Airdrie's demise. But James Teideman is still bitter about the fate of clubs excluded from the SPL

It is the night that Bayer Leverkusen host Manchester United in the second leg of their semi-final. The Cham­p­ions League music that welcomes the teams on to the pitch at Brockville Park floats with comic irony over the terraces – as if it isn’t surreal enough that Ev­erton are playing here tonight for the honour of lifting the Alex Scott memorial trophy, highlight of Falkirk’s 125th anniversary celebrations. The travelling fans must have had a laugh as they surveyed the crumbling “stadium” that sums up the melancholy malaise of small Scottish clubs.

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Airdrie have gone bust and Motherwell almost suffered the same fate. Ken Gall reports on the financial troubles besetting Scotlands's middle-ranking clubs

After more than a century, Airdrieonians FC have, to all intents and purposes, ceased to exist. A few miles down the road, their not-much-loved Lanarkshire neighbours Motherwell – following an initial panic that they were headed for the same fate – entered interim ad­ministration, slashing wages, sacking staff and can­celling players’ contracts. All in all, then, the grim­­mest few weeks for Scotland’s domestic game since Third Lanark went out of business in 1967.

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Al Needham isn't ashamed to admit he was an ITV Digital subscriber. Here he recalls the channel's highlights – that's the first two paragraphs anyway

When ITV (née ON) Digital was launched in aut­umn 1998, it seemed a very appealing offer to the televisual tat aficionado such as myself. You could get WWF and back-to-back episodes of On The Buses without throwing any cash directly into the maw of Rupert Murdoch, and you only had to plug it in and ring a call centre to get connected.

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Millwall's Steve Claridge has seen life as a player and, briefly, a manager in the First Division. He tells WSC how the ITV Digital crisis has affected his outlook and the career prospects for League players at all levels

"I don’t think that the financial crisis in football right now would put off players who were thinking of going into management. Certain problems were there anyway at the lower levels. I said to Tony Cottee when he was going to Barnet, what are they are going to give you? A good year there is tenth place in the Third Division, but if things don’t work out there you’re back to square one. The amount of money around always makes a huge difference.

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Last summer we interviewed a confident David Burns, the Football League's chief executive. Since then his member clubs suffered the collapse of ITV Digital, while rumours persist that Celtic and Rangers will be asked to move south. So we went back to find out how he viewed the situation after a turbulent season

The Football League has called on the government to intervene in the ITV Digital dispute. What exactly do you believe they should do?
I think that the government can and should do more. I have made it clear to Tessa Jowell, the secretary of state for Cul­ture, Media and Sport, that the government should con­­demn the action of Carlton and Granada, yet they refuse to do so. They could have a full enquiry con­ducted by the regulator – the Independent Television Commission – and they could stop giving cash to Carlton and Granada by way of what’s called the digital dividend. These broad­casters, for every viewer they get transferred over on to a digital platform, whether it’s satellite or cable, get a tax-free sum, a rebate against what it costs to be a public service broadcaster, which for the ITV network is £400 million a year. Over the next ten years they can earn up to £320 million of that back through rebates. On Carlton and Granada’s own fig­ures, between 2001 and 2010, which is the period the government set for the switch over from analogue, it’s worth £2 billion to them. Carlton and Granada pulling out of the League deal is nothing to do with the product itself or with them hav­ing overpaid for what they got. Because they paid the going rate at the time – in the same way that Sky did. They just decided they couldn’t run a paying chan­nel against Sky. The reasons why were poor technology, poor customer service and poor marketing. And yet they suddenly saw that they could make more mon­ey out of the digital dividend then they could through subscribers. The government could simply call the ITV companies and say: “You can forget all about the digital dividend until you pay your debt to football.” And that would also serve as a warning to other companies gen­erally, because what we’ve got here are two major FTSE 100 companies who have just walked away from their liabilities – which is almost unprecedented.

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