This weekend’s Scottish Cup shocks prove it’s time Scottish Premiership was expanded – and now, writes Bill Leckie

IT’S time for some of Scottish football’s most famous clubs to stop waiting for an invitation to the game’s top table.

And start DEMANDING it.

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Because if we learn nothing else from yet another weekend littered with cup upsets that shocked no one, it’s that a bigger top league is long, long overdue.

This is no new message from me. I’ve been shouting about it for decades now.

Difference these days is that more and more within the game itself are warming to the idea.

Livi boss Davie Martindale, for one, was back on his soapbox about it on Saturday and I’m with him when he argues that opening up the Premiership would be good for all involved.

Everyone outside the Old Firm, Hearts, Hibs and Aberdeen would welcome having the threat of relegation and potential financial disaster diluted by the arrival of another four teams.

On current form, that’d be Dundee United, Raith Rovers, Partick Thistle and Airdrie — and they would be relieved of the horrible dilemma they currently find themselves in.

The one over whether to risk their future by chucking money at a system that’s loaded against them, or living within their means and being accused by their fans of lacking ambition.

I wrote last week about United’s perilous situation, caused not least by them being a textbook yo-yo club. Not quite good enough to establish themselves in the Prem but far too heavy on wages for the second tier.

Do we want to see them follow the likes of Hearts, Motherwell, Dundee and Livi down the road to administration for want of a set-up that works against its own member clubs?

Surely not. Surely we should be looking to encourage those clubs for whom full-time football is feasible to be able to plan long-term rather than from season to season, as the likes of United have been for too long.

Is financial mismanagement at play in their situation and others who have flirted with complete meltdown? Course there is.

But that tends to stem from a desperation to be part of a league that the SPFL, and the SPL before them, afforded some sort of fantasyland elite status.

The blazers nested in the main stand at Hampden have this lofty concept of Scottish football as a marketable product, but the income they drag down tells its own story.

Fact is, we get sponsorship and telly deals because we have Celtic and Rangers — and let’s be brutally honest, if the SPFL could sell the pair of them as a two-team division all of their own, they’d be happy as Larry.

But being pragmatic about this isn’t the same as simply accepting that no one else matters, that everyone else is just there to make up the numbers.

Which is why, for me, we need to do more for the clubs on either side of a Premiership-Championship divide thinner than this morning’s paper.

We need to remove the jeopardy of worrying that three defeats might cast them adrift at the bottom of one or leave them out of the play-offs in the other.

We need to do away with the fakery of a play-off set-up that’s there not to encourage new blood, but to protect those who are already there.

And when we see results like Partick Thistle going up to Ross County and winning 3-0, when we see Airdrie beat St Johnstone and Raith push Livi to the wire — the kind of performances and results that are being repeated season after season — we surely need to realise that an extra four clubs would make the top flight better as well as bigger.

If we went to 16 teams, it would mean Dundee derbies, Motherwell v Airdrie derbies, not to mention the novelty of Glasgow derbies where away fans were welcome.

What’s not to love about all that? Who wouldn’t look forward to this injection of something new and fresh?

You know, apart from an SPFL hierarchy who seem to regard ambition and excitement as qualities to be squished like annoying little bugs.

Neil Doncaster and his crew are the problem here, not the people running the clubs.

The people running the show are the ones who put all their energies into keeping the Old Firm happy — and how’s that working out? — rather than seeing the big picture of what the game as a whole needs.

Yet if only they opened their minds, what downside could they possibly see to expanding the Premiership?

I can’t see one. All I can see are opportunities, such as BBC Scotland and STV dipping into their pockets for rights to matches not involving the Old Firm, the way TNT and Amazon screen the ones Sky don’t take first dibs at in England.

Well v The Diamonds on a Friday night? Now you’re talking.

Play each other twice, then split into two eights.

Bin the play-offs and get back to a simple two up, two down.

Regionalise the lower leagues so part-time clubs save money.

Whatever we do, let’s just shake it up, because our week-to-week domestic game isn’t just stagnating, it’s going backwards.

And nothing throws this into sharper relief than a weekend when the Cinderella clubs finally get to go to the ball.

What a shame they’re back on pumpkin duty this morning.

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