Quote Originally Posted by Peevemor View Post
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We can hope but I can't see it in the long term. Even in the 50s & 60s crowds were normally pretty low for unglamorous matches. The 10 team premier league waas introduced partly because of this. If we take a 20 team top league, by the time we get 3/4 of the way through the season there'll be around 10 teams who have nothing to play for (with say 6 teams in with a shout for Europe & 4 scrapping it out at the bottom).
My experience of the days of bigger leagues was that the aim of many clubs was to avoid relegation. Once it became clear,usually due to at least one club becoming detached,that a club would be safe instead of a relaxation with good football being played in an effort to move up that in fact many meaningless games took place. Tom Hart was a driving force in smaller leagues. He reasoned that the more games clubs played against the OF the more used they would become to the pressure of playing them. Although Hibs didn’t get a huge amount of success Aberdeen certainly did as did Dundee United to a lesser extent. The only pity was that lack of ambition by owners along with poor financial decisions meant that eventually the OF re established themselves at the top of the Scottish game.