Welcome everybody to Soccer one-O-1. My name is Taylor Rockwell.

Generally on Soccer 101, the breakdown is like I talk 30 to 40% of the time, and my co-host, Graham Ruffman, talks a bit more than that. This week, I feel like my number is going to drop to around 10% at most, Graham. Hello, Taylor Rockwell. Yeah. Perhaps, although I presume you're excited to talk about your favorite ever player Alfredo Morelos, because we're

talking about the league that he played in for like five seasons. That's it. That is, I have 45

minutes of talking points on him and nothing else as we talk about the Scottish Premiership,

not the SPL, not the Scottish Prem. What am I supposed to call it? Let's start there.

Yeah, so the Scottish Premiership. This is our

equivalent of the MLS, as people calling it. But the thing is, so many people in Scotland,

and in Scottish football, call it the SBL that we rebranded like 10 years ago, 12 years ago,

to the Scottish Premiership. Is this like a literally thing where like now literally can mean not literally in the dictionary? Like you've rebranded but it doesn't really matter. Yeah, no one took any note at all of the new name. So basically it's not been the SBL for a decade when there was a merger between the SPL and the SFL. It's crazy to me that we don't use the SPL name when that is a brand that people around the world know. And amazingly, it was ditched because there was this idea that the SPL brand had become too toxic, which in my opinion was nonsense, bring back the SPL in my opinion. But you have people who either call it the SPL or the SPFL, which is also incorrect because that's the name of the full league pyramid. So within the pyramid, you have the Scottish Premiership, the Scottish Championship, Scottish League 1, Scottish League 2, and those four divisions make up the SPFL. But you'll get a lot of people who just call the top division the SPFL or the SPL. So it's a branding nightmare. We've not done a good job with this at all. But for brevity's sake, what is the simplest name for it? What is the simplest way to refer to this top flight league? For brevity's sake, it's the Scotty Premi, I think. Oh, we don't have to use that term. We can just call it the Scottish Premiership. But see, that's still so many syllables. Like, SBL. So simple into point. But that then leads to the question, Graham. We're going to be jumping around, I suspect. Why was SPL deemed too toxic? What about, I'm assuming it wasn't the letters themselves. Yeah. So we are getting deep into the weeds right in hell here. So 12 years ago coincided with the financial meltdown suffered

by Rangers. That was a whole political issue. There was fallout from that. Basically,

Rangers believed that the SPL and Scottish football as a whole had basically sunk them down to

the, they had to start again in the bottom tier of Scottish football, which is how they ended up in

Stirling Albans League for a season. and we beat them, which was, it's still something

that we talk about to this day. But basically there was an idea that the infighting, the

politicking had become so intense and so toxic that the brand itself had become toxic SPL.

So there was this move to move to a new brand.

They then rebranded the league pyramid and the top division,

but then didn't do a good job of actually communicating that to people,

to the point where you will have managers still call it the SPL

and like interviews and press conferences.

So it's a nightmare.

How wild was it to play Rangers at that point?

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