The first time I went to Hampden, the balls weren’t round. They were American footballs, which look like rugby balls that have been on a diet. Brown with obvious stitching, they were thrown downfield with the ease of otters swimming in a river. I was there with my dad to watch the now-no-more Scottish Claymores, just as we had previously watched them at Murrayfield. The sky was Glasgow-grey and I remember being underwhelmed, maybe even alienated, by the new venue. In retrospect, it seems an attitude was formed from which I’ve never been able to escape.
I’ve been to Hampden many times since then to watch Scotland. The results were typically disappointing but there was always something about the trip to Glasgow with a group of friends that redeemed the day or night. I’ve been to club games, proper games, at the stadium and generally, sometimes even gloriously, been on the right side of the outcome. I’ve sung ‘Hey Jude’ with Paul McCartney. And yet, somehow, the stadium is incapable of making an emotional claim on me.
The Scottish Football Association’s (SFA) claim on Hampden expires in 2020 when its 20-year lease agreement with Queen’s Park comes to an end. The original contract has an option to extend the lease for another 20 years on the same terms but the SFA established – at great risk of future embarrassment – something called Project Bright to consider the alternatives. Its findings were discussed at a SFA board meeting at the end of January, two days before Stewart Regan resigned as chief executive for unrelated reasons. The choice now is between staying at Hampden beyond 2020 or moving to Murrayfield. The final decision is expected in the summer when many football fans will be wishing they weren’t watching their team compete at a World Cup in Russia and many Scotland fans will be wishing the opposite.
Alan Hutchison, the president of Queen’s Park, said the club can’t maintain Hampden without some form of financial support. He indicated that talks had taken place with Glasgow City Council and the Scottish and UK governments. It seems no money will be forthcoming, meaning the future for Queen’s Park is uncertain. Reports that the SFA asked to buy the stadium for just £2m, coupled with insider threats about going to Murrayfield, suggest that desperation and ruthlessness characterise the coming months.
To suggest relocation is to cast a shadow on the memories Hampden generated in the bulging days of Real Madrid, Eintracht Frankfurt and the like. But it’s telling that the stadium’s happiest memories mainly date from the long-ago, a time before it was redeveloped, a time before Hampden lost its soul. Lost its soul? That wispy concept swirls around my own thoughts as it seems to swirl around the thoughts of others. In this case, soul is closely related to structure. The national stadium is an architectural nonentity, the equivalent of a council headquarters or a supermarket. The stands slope in a lackadaisical fashion away from the running track around the pitch – the running track which has the same effect as a moat around the castle of a medieval nobleman.
Talk about further redevelopment confirms that Hampden is unsuited to fulfilling its core purpose: allowing people to enjoy a football match. A recent survey, supposedly academic in nature, carried out on behalf of an excitable group called the Scottish Football Supporters Association, found that only 15% of the almost 3,000 participants wanted the national team to remain at the stadium.
The most obvious contrast is also the most painful because it involves looking south. The new Wembley is an exemplary stadium of the modern type. It is a stadium fit for a cinema-screen metropolis and its own place in the history of the game. It shines with electric, high-definition purpose, albeit acquired at great expense. Hampden is a stadium not worthy of its history. Redeveloped only two decades ago, it already feels tired, old in its bones, its facilities glaringly basic. It is, in its way, evocative of the dilapidated shop-front quality that Scottish football presents to the world.
This issue is being progressed according to the practicalities of finance and what passes for culture, of which Scottish football has too little of the first and too much of the second. The game has pockets filled with little more than lint, so the construction of a new stadium is unviable. Is a reverse-Claymore really possible? Could the national football team play at the home of Scottish rugby? A retreat from its formerly smoky old heartlands would say something about the so-called national game, if we still cared to refer to it as such.
The option to routinely play at club stadiums was rejected by the SFA, presumably on the grounds that this would only be feasible in a country without such easily activated manias. Choosing Ibrox or Celtic Park risked embroilment in the country’s most vexatious and intractable club rivalry. Like the Queen, the national team should be above the tribal stuff. The bleaters would have bleated: ‘Why them and not us?’
Alan Hutchison, speaking with the moral authority that comes from representing the only club in Scotland still loyal to football’s amateur first principles, made a more pertinent point: ‘If the SFA give money to Rangers or Celtic then they are arguably giving them a sporting advantage over the rest of Scottish football.’ The SFA has decided this will be an advantage denied so the two clubs will have to content themselves with the advantages already enjoyed.
All shades of fan opinion will count for the same – nothing – when the final decision is made despite the SFA’s claim to be considering ‘social, economic and emotional’ factors. It is hard to imagine Murrayfield prevailing over Hampden and the current arrangements have been endorsed by Alex McLeish, newly returned as national team manager. A reprieve will see Hampden struggle along as the digestive in the otherwise empty biscuit tin: plain and uninspiring, appealing only in difficult circumstances.
By Alasdair McKillop | 14 March 2018
