The State of Scottish Fitbaw: Fossils, Folklore, and the Madness of Standing Still

Why our game keeps folding when it matters—and how a broken football culture conditions failure from grassroots to Hampden

First things first: this isn’t your usual fitbaw column. You won’t get coddled here. You won’t get sugar-coated tales of ‘plucky Scots’ or excuses wrapped in tartan and nostalgia. If that’s what you came for—close the tab. Because this is about truth. Hard, uncomfortable, necessary truth.

Scottish football is a museum piece disguised as a sport. A game fuelled by passion but throttled by parochialism. A national pastime clinging to relics of a bygone age that in truth was never as golden as we pretend.

It is not just the play on the park that is stuck in amber; it is the entire ecosystem—coaching, playing, reporting, even the very bricks and mortar that house it. Dated stadiums that reek of warm Bovril and faint memories but leak mediocrity and rainwater in equal measure.

And the media? Christ. A cliquey cabal of ex-pros and their pals, trotting out the same old stories about ‘banter’ on the team bus or the time they put Deep Heat in a teammate’s pants—as if that’s the summit of professional insight. They sit in studio chairs like throne-squatters, oblivious to the fact that the game has roared past them. The modern fan, savvy and connected, sees right through it. The game deserves better. We deserve better.

We cling to a romance of the past because the present offers too few comforts. We lionise the days of Baxter and Law and Dalglish as though they constituted an uninterrupted era of greatness, rather than a scattering of moments amidst decades of dross. The game today is operated and narrated by fossils—men for whom progress is a threat, not an opportunity.

So aye, I’m going to write about it. Not as an ex-pro trading on bygone glories, nor as a click-hungry hack peddling sentiment. Rather, from a different angle entirely—one rooted in empiricism and scientific enquiry. I intend to interrogate this national relic through the cold lens of a biopsychosocial framework: to understand why things happen in football not through the comforting fog of nostalgia, but by examining the human condition, the structural realities, and the cultural contexts that shape behaviour on and off the pitch.

Scottish football is not merely underperforming—it is institutionally dysfunctional. Human behaviour under pressure. Cultural rituals wrapped in scarves and chants. Group dynamics in dressing rooms and boardrooms alike—all of these will be examined with the same rigour one would bring to a study of any social system. The politics of the terraces. The mythologising of national identity. The fragile egos of players and fans. The atavistic governance structures. The decaying infrastructure. The pervasive self-sabotage. The learned helplessness that seeps through the veins of our footballing culture—where mediocrity is normalised and genuine excellence viewed with suspicion or envy. I will shine a light on the issues no one else thinks matter—expose them raw. I’ll dissect them through a psychological and sociological lens that cuts through the bullshit, then lay down a solution forged in proper science and research—not half-baked folklore. And if that ruffles a few feathers in the blazered halls of Hampden, all the better.

If such a lens offends those who prefer their football served with the easy sugar of myth and parochialism—so be it. The truth has no obligation to flatter. The facts don't care about you feelings, to coin a phrase.

Bring this angle up in your local boozer and you’ll get a stare like you’ve shown the dug a card trick, to coin another phrase. But that’s the point of this writing—to translate it into something the average punter can grasp. Because Scottish fitbaw deserves better than the rinse-and-repeat narratives it gets. Better than ‘we’re plucky’ or ‘we’re unlucky’ or ‘we’re a nation of underdogs’. Better than the constant scapegoating of players, managers, referees, foreigners, the weather, the grass or lack of it. Better than the sentimental pish that passes for analysis.

We need to get under the skin of the game. Peel it back. Understand why we keep ending up in the same loop. And if in doing so we must offend the guardians of this antiquated temple—so be it.

Iceland

Let's start with Friday night’s debacle at Hampden: Scotland 1 - Iceland 3. Ranked 30 spots below us. I was there with my teenage son—only because the tickets were freebies. Free entry, aye, but £7.50 for a hot dog outside the ground, and £17 for a tea, juice, macaroni pie and Dairy Milk inside. The game wasn’t that free after all. And there were murmurs all around the ground—£40 a ticket, they said. Add on your £80-plus for the latest home shirt and this is the going rate for following the Tartan Army in 2024. And for what? To sit in a half-empty stadium watching a team sleepwalk through a meaningless fixture. The value for money is diabolical. Fans aren’t daft. They see it. They feel it. And they talk about it. The whole experience—overpriced, underdelivering, and transactional to the point of absurdity. A sport that once belonged to the people now feels priced to exclude them. The return on that emotional and financial investment? Weak. And weakening by the game.

First red flag? Vast sections of the East and West stands closed off—not enough punters buying in. Why? Because they ain't daft. They see the cost. Forty quid for a ticket, plus twenty buck for the weans and another small fortune on food, drink, and travel. It's a wedge of cash most can ill afford—especially with summer holidays round the corner and maybe an entire season of burning through money following some shite Scottish club week in, week out.

And here’s the main point—the match was on council telly, thanks to the new SFA deal. So why cough up the extra dosh for a flat atmosphere and a dire performance? Folk stayed at hame. Who could blame them? Great for the armchair fan, aye, but a gut punch to Hampden’s atmosphere and SFA coffers.

And there’s a deeper psychology here—when you devalue the live experience, you devalue the sense of belonging that comes with it. Fitbaw is ritual. It’s community. It’s folk gathering in the cold and wet, sharing a pie and a pint, singing the same daft songs they sang twenty years ago, standing shoulder to shoulder through ninety minutes of joy or misery. It’s fathers and mothers taking their kids for their first game. It’s mates meeting up after a long week. It’s about being there, part of it, in the flesh. That’s the magic. Strip away the crowd, and you strip away the soul. You turn it from a living, breathing communal act into a sterile broadcast product. And that’s a cost we can’t afford—because once that habit is broken, once folk get used to staying at hame, they might not come back. And when the terraces empty, so too does the heart of the game.

Second red flag? The line-up. Steve Clarke trotted out a 5-4-1. Defensive as fuck. I imagine to squeeze Tierney and Robertson into the same side again. More likely prepping for Denmark—a game that actually matters.

This used to be smarter. Back in the day, friendlies had purpose. Facing Brazil in a tournament? Play Colombia first to mimic style and tempo. Iceland—a Scandinavian dry run for the upcoming tussle with Denmark’s rigidity. Used to be about preparation. Now? It masquerades as preparation but is largely about selling a product. The media don’t see it for what it is. They expect some grand spectacle, some impassioned display, and when it falls flat, they wring their hands in faux bewilderment. Meanwhile, the SFA and Steve Clarke don’t communicate the true nature of these games honestly—because they too are selling a product. They have tickets to shift, merchandise to flog, sponsor obligations to fulfil. It’s not about building a team; it’s about managing optics and balancing the books. A box-ticking exercise that fools no one. And the players feel that. You can see it in their body language. You can see it in the tempo. The game had the energy of a testimonial, not an international.

The psychology here is clear: low incentive equals low effort. End of season, players with one eye on a sun lounger, the other on next season’s contract. Just going through the motions. This is classic cognitive fatigue. Mental burnout. Players who’ve been asked to go to the well one time too many. You can’t fake hunger. And it showed.

Then, one minute in, Angus Gunn’s crocked. Enter Cieran Slicker—Ipswich sub keeper, 23, yet to save a senior shot in anger. Two minutes later? Ball in our net from a botched clearance. One nil doon. FFS. And here’s the thing—this isn’t about the lad. It’s about preparation. About decision-making. About resilience. The whole event exposed the thinness of our depth and the fragility of our system. We live on the edge because we’ve never built a proper foundation.

The whole squad looked leggy, disinterested. Misplaced passes, sloppy control—from our stars: McTominay, Gilmour, McGinn, Robertson and Serie A standout Lewis Ferguson was MIA. We scrambled an equaliser, only to ship another before half-time. 2-1 down. My son and I left at the break. Couldn’t be arsed watching the second half. When apathy wins, your product is broken.

That’s the point: I didn’t care. Neither did they. It was a friendly. Should they be more professional? Of course. But here’s the rub: the SFA needs the big names on the pitch to sell tickets. No McTominay, no Robertson, no punters. We’ve built a system modelled on the marketing machines of bigger, more talent-blessed nations—where star players are paraded like prized assets, not just team members. The problem? We don't have the same conveyor belt of talent, nor the same depth to support it. Our few marquee names are treated as essential to the spectacle, because the spectacle is what they’re selling as much as the football itself. It’s not sustainable. It’s not resilient. And it’s not honest. The players know it. They’re not daft. They feel the burden of being marketed as a product rather than supported as part of a properly built footballing culture. And that creates a fragile system where when one or two cogs falter, the whole machine grinds to a halt.

The next day, Tam Cowan and Stuart Cosgrove were bemoaning Clarke’s failure to pick Simon Murray. Great story lads, sure—33-year-old Dundee striker in good form. But would that have filled Hampden? Naw. Romanticism won’t close that quality gap. It won’t solve structural issues. It won’t inject dynamism into a static system. You can’t sentiment your way to success.

The Comparison

Later that weekend, I watched Spain vs France—a 5-4 thriller. Seventeen-year-old Lamine Yamal ran the show. The gulf in class, mentality, and desire between that match and ours? Vast. You can argue those were competitive fixtures and ours was a meaningless friendly, but we’ve seen this Scotland team fold when it mattered—and not just fold, fold specifically at this time of year, when it most matters in international terms. Czech Republic, Hampden, Euros opener 2021. Ukraine in the World Cup play-off 2022. In Germany at the Euros 2024. All summer fixtures. Bottled it. Didn’t show up. Because this is the season where the pressure truly reveals the truth. And the truth is this: our system does not prepare players for adversity, particularly not when they come off a stop-start domestic cycle and enter summer internationals mentally drained and rhythm-less. We coach caution. We incentivise safety. We rarely teach courage, risk-taking, or mental robustness. And so when the big stage comes, and when it comes in the summer glare when every other nation is ready to sprint, we shrink.

Everyone bangs on about the glory days—back when we used to qualify for major tournaments with some regularity. But here’s the truth: we never actually performed well in any of them. Ally’s Army in Argentina '78 is the poster boy for it. We were blessed—genuinely—with some of the finest talent in world football at the time. We could’ve been contenders. But what happened? Peru. Iran. The same old tragicomedy played out again. Summer hits—and Scotland folds like a deck chair.

Why? Habits. Summer in Scotland? Football shuts down. Pitches closed. Leagues stopped. Competition over. Other nations keep rolling, especially at grassroots. That stasis seeps up the pyramid. And here’s where the psychology kicks in. For their entire childhoods, Scottish players have been conditioned to view summer as an off-season—a time for rest, not peak performance. This is a classic case of contextual conditioning—where players unconsciously link their peak performance to certain times of the year and settings—and state-dependent learning—where behaviours and responses learned during a traditional season can’t easily be summoned out of sync, like in summer tournaments. The body and mind are trained to down tools in June and July. You can’t just flip a switch at senior level and expect them to perform when everything in their developmental history tells them this is a time to switch off.

Meanwhile, players from footballing nations where summer tournaments and finals are a norm have ingrained habit continuity—they maintain consistent competitive behaviours across seasons, building a natural readiness to perform under summer tournament pressures. Their summers have always been about playing—competing, striving, winning. Ours? Pack the kit away, go on holiday, reset in pre-season. We foster a culture of start-stop, and it seeps into everything—preparation, resilience, expectations.

And football’s psychological demands are rooted in rhythm, momentum, routine. Break those cycles, and you break flow. Come the summer, when tournaments arrive, we disrupt our own growth cycles—again and again. It's learned helplessness in action—the more we repeat the pattern of falling short in summer, the more our players and culture internalise the belief that success at this stage is out of reach, no matter what we do. The players expect it. The fans expect it. The media even rationalise it. And so the cycle continues.

It’s madness. And it’s fixable. But only if we stop pretending the current system makes sense.

A Radical Solution

Radical Solution: Regional Championships every two years for kids.

In the area I live—East Renfrewshire—teams from villages of Neilston, Barrhead, and Giffnock and more are all competing against each other on wee pitches every week. The same is true in every city, town, and village across the land. Municipal pitches full of weans in multicoloured kits, running about in their element—while pushy das bark instructions in hope, and bored mas stand at the sidelines gabbin' away.

Now imagine this. You take the best of those teams from, say, under-11s and up, and select them for their regional team. Players qualify to play for their region by postcode—keeping it truly representative of local talent. Each Scottish council area or a grouping of them forms a regional team. These teams then compete against each other in a World Cup-style tournament.

Now, you might say this gives Glasgow City Council or Edinburgh City Council an advantage—sheer size and volume, right? But that’s the point. Scale it up to international football and the same dynamic holds. France has 90 million folk to pick from—we’ve got 5 million. The regional layout throws that population disparity into sharp relief, but it’s no an excuse for poor effort. Quite the opposite. We should want to beat the big boys. We should thrive on the chance to punch above our weight. Prove a point. Show that hunger matters as much as headcount.

So, every two years, a different Scottish city hosts the event, turning it into a true national festival of football. The reward for being the best? Glory, aye—but more than that. The finals get played in one of that city’s professional stadiums, under the lights, in front of a crowd, with media coverage and proper fanfare. Young players tasting the big stage early. Local communities buzzing. The city embracing its role as host. And with each rotation, different regions of Scotland get to feel like the heart of the national game—building pride, identity, and ambition from grassroots to grandstands.

Here’s what that does, psychologically. It imprints a few critical behaviours into young players:

First, they have to raise their game throughout the season to even be selected for the regional team. It is purely meritocratic—play well, show talent, and you get in. We could even award regional caps, just like the internationals. It would give the achievement weight, pride, and a visible milestone for young players to strive toward. There is clear motivation to perform and develop.

Second, once selected, they must leave their comfort zone—joining up with players they normally compete against, under a new coach, in a new tactical setup. That fosters adaptability and quick learning. It builds cohesion with unfamiliar teammates—a critical skill at international level.

Third, it normalises the big event in the summer calendar. The players travel to a new city, live together with teammates, and experience the pressure and excitement of a tournament format. Playing in the summer becomes the norm, not an anomaly.

Fourth, they get to play in a professional stadium. Under the lights. With a crowd. That early exposure demystifies the big stage and starts building mental resilience in high-profile settings.

In short—this is operant conditioning in action. You reward ambition, adaptability, teamwork, and resilience. You build players who aren’t fazed by big moments because they’ve lived them already, from a young age. The kids would love it. They would grow from it. And when they reach adulthood and enter the professional game, the rhythms of summer tournaments—the demands of raising your game when the season should feel over—would feel second nature.

You’re training the psyche, not just the body. And that’s where we’re miles behind.

I’m actually a full-throated proponent of Scotland switching to a summer calendar across the board. From grassroots to the top flight. Market it properly—less competition from English leagues, better weather, more punters through the turnstiles. Give folk something to do on long summer nights. Build the habit in the psyche that summer is when we peak, not switch off. Align player rhythms with international demands.

Embed the phenomena of habit continuity—sustained performance cycles—and seasonal flow—aligning physical and mental peaks with summer demands—into our footballing culture, from bairns to pros. habit continuity—sustained performance cycles—and seasonal flow—aligning physical and mental peaks with summer demands—into our footballing culture, from bairns to pros. Change the psychology of our game. Develop players who play on the front foot, not just ones who dig in and survive. Build mental endurance, not just physical. Stop breaking our own cycles and start building towards tournaments where we can actually turn up ready. It’s bold. But bold is what we need.

But this is Scottish fitbaw. The same SFA that slaps a £40 tag on friendly tickets while broadcasting them free on council telly. The same SFA that neglects the north and east fan base—half the Tartan Army—by hosting everything at Hampden. They are short-sighted, uncreative, and painfully reactive. Always scrambling to patch holes rather than building a better ship. They lack vision, they lack curiosity, they lack courage. They manage decline instead of fostering growth. Why not take these friendlies to Easter Road, Tynecastle, Pittodrie? Let those regions feel part of the national game. Grow the base. Build affinity. Build opportunity. Foster identity. Stop treating football as a transactional cash grab and start treating it as a national project with cultural value and long-term purpose. Because until that mindset shifts, we’ll keep spinning the same sorry wheel.

Anyway—this is just the start.

I’ll be writing more. About fitbaw as it is, as it was, and—crucially—as it could be.

And aye, the fossils, the blazered brigade, the hacks with the same five recycled takes—I know they’ll scoff. Let them. If the sound of old guard teeth grinding isn’t your fuel, you’re reading the wrong blog.

Because we need to think bigger. Bolder. Smarter. We need to break the old conditioning and stop raising another generation of players expecting to fold in the heat of summer.

So if you’re sick of the stale chat. If you want to see our game ripped apart and rebuilt with sharper eyes and a stronger spine—then stick around.

I’ve just kicked aff!

Ray x

Footnotes

Operant Conditioning — A learning process through which behaviours are shaped by rewards or punishments. When positive behaviours (like resilience or adaptability) are consistently reinforced with meaningful rewards (such as playing in big matches), those behaviours become stronger and more likely to occur.

Contextual Conditioning — When behaviours or responses become tied to specific environments or contexts. Change the context, and the learned behaviour may not occur.

State-Dependent Learning — The phenomenon where information learned in a particular emotional or physical state is more easily recalled in that same state.

Habit Continuity — The process of maintaining consistent behavioural patterns over time, leading to automaticity and resilience in performance.

Learned Helplessness — A mental state where repeated exposure to negative outcomes leads individuals to believe they are powerless to change their situation, even when opportunities to improve arise.

Seasonal Flow — Establishing and reinforcing behavioural and performance rhythms that align with seasonal cycles, creating peak readiness when it matters most.

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