Source: Team_Talk
Smith: SPL chiefs should have gone
Smith believes the SPL's decision two years ago to snub Sky in favour of the Irish broadcaster accelerated a downward spiral which has led to Scottish football suffering a succession of humiliating results in Europe.
Rangers, Celtic and Aberdeen were the only three clubs to vote against what was a more lucrative four-year £125million deal with Setanta, favouring the bigger exposure and greater security provided by Sky.
Smith said: "The people running our game knocked back Sky - in my opinion one of the best football broadcasters in the world - and took Setanta, a newly-formed company.
"They lost a fortune doing so and they are still all sitting in their positions. How can that be? We cost ourselves a fortune by bad decisions. And at the end of that, we (the clubs) go and suffer."
Setanta's UK operation went out of business this summer and the SPL clubs were forced to accept a vastly-reduced deal with Sky and ESPN.
Most top-flight clubs, including Rangers, have therefore been able to spend only a paltry sum on recruiting players this summer.
Motherwell, Falkirk and Aberdeen all crashed out of Europe before the SPL season kicked off and Hearts look certain to follow this week.
Hearts and Aberdeen suffered particularly chastening results in the Europa League qualifying rounds, while Celtic are close to going out of the Champions League before the group stages.
Despite pointing the finger at the SPL, Smith believes the Scottish game's problems run deeper than that.
He said: "The problems in Scottish football are not new.
"The higher level of our own domestic player has dried up, and we can't afford to get the higher level of player in, so we are being hit on two fronts at the same time.
"And that situation has brought it around to what we have now, where some seasons we can look all right, and other seasons we don't look so clever. This is one of the years where we haven't started too well."
Smith believes one way to arrest the decline - for the Old Firm at least - is for them to leave the Scottish game altogether.
He said: "Rangers and Celtic are ready to play in a big European league.
"Last season, I was criticised when I said that Rangers and Celtic bring in a level of football to Scotland which is higher than we have at the present moment.
"It might save football in Scotland, because if it continues the way it is going just now, we will have a problem. We will have no higher rated teams at all. That to me is the biggest problem of the lot."
Meanwhile, Smith has revealed Nacho Novo could make a shock return to action next week.
It was feared Spanish forward Novo would be out until November after a recurrence of his shoulder injury but the problem is not as bad as first feared.
