The Scottish Football Museum
what's the plan?
Completion or Closure?
That the Scottish Football Museum (SFM) is a good thing there is no doubt. No country in the World - and this is not an over-statement with the comparisons including England - has a football story as comprehensive and pivotal as ours. Globally "No Scots, no Soccer" is not an idle boast. Indeed the account should be a source of factual pride, if only it were told in full, and by that we mean the Association game from 1871 and the indigenous ones from far earlier still. And here the Scottish Football Museum has much to answer for.
It would be little exaggeration to say that the SFHG was founded in 2022 on concerns about the telling of the history of Scottish football, of football history in general and the role the SFM and ultimately its master, the SFA, have played in both. And those concerns have not gone away. In fact they have in the interim increased, even prompting a recent letter to the Chairman of the museum's Board of Trustees, cc-ed because of not just its national but also international implications to The Scottish Government, to outline some of those worries and to offer help and our expertise in overcoming them. The letter is "pictured" below. To read both pages of it simply download and enlarge in your favourite image editor.
And to the points made in the original letter and the questions posed a very polite reply was received, also pictured below. However, whilst it included a laudable commitment to more on the history of the women's game there was no answer to the vexing question of what has happened to coverage of the men's game before the Second World War and most obviously in its the Golden Era from 1872 to 1934.
In fact the response in its entirety is more remarkable not for what it includes but what it does not - real investment in the new possibilities digitisation offers to historical study and, in the future, of the scope of the Museum itself.
Which, of course, begs the question, is the real, long-term plan to shut the place, be it to the public or altogether? Certainly, if funding not just for day-to-day but beyond continues to be curtailed, the latter will be impossible, left to ageing amateurs like us or to perhaps exploitative charlatans. And the former too will come under pressure with it unlikely numbers through the doors will from Scotland alone be sufficient even to cover costs. But there is an alternative. Scotland gave football, its specific football, the foundation of the modern game, to the World. It thus creates the opportunity not for indifference and certainly not closure, tacit or otherwise, but, where the real thing actually started, not Zurich or increasingly Saudi, for a properly-funded World Centre for Football Research.
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