The SPFL want to spend £2m of your money turning football into a Philip K Dick novel

SPFL meetings can always be relied upon to produce pointless debate fuelled by grievance and jealousy, and a fair few daft ideas for the future of the game, and today hasn't disappointed.

Usually the bad schemes tend to fall in two categories: "Let's mindlessly copy England because they're successful, and pay no heed to the differences between the two leagues" or "Let's do something insane, brag about how we'd be the first in the world to do it, and not stop to consider why that might be." Today manages to combine both of those, by asking the Scottish government for a grant of £2m to help install facial recognition technology to ban supporters from doing naughty things, like singing songs or using pyrotechnics, which we're constantly told might one day even increase on their current tally of zero injuries and fatalities (one wonders if at times the SPFL is secretly run by the maws of the men in charge. "You'll have somebody's eye out" is the stock reaction to anybody trying to enjoy themselves, so we can probably expect demands for summer football to be met with "you'll warm up once you get running around.")

Never mind that folk can easily use scarves, sunglasses, hats, and other high-tech devices to confuse the cameras, or that facial recognition technology has failed to work to an acceptable standard by institutions far bigger and more important then Alloa Athletic. There's also talk of points deductions for clubs who don't weed out their troublemakers, a move which we're sure will see peace and fraternity reign across the land for fans of different teams.

As usual, the only real block in the way of these plans is that everybody loathes this sort of shite, and it's hard to see the Scottish government providing funding here. We've written about how fans need to come together to deal with exactly this sort of thing recently. With elections not far away, it might not be a bad idea to pester some important folk over this and make it clear just how bad an idea this is.