Over half of football clubs in the Scottish Premiership employ staff who are paid below the "living wage", an investigation has found.
Aberdeen, Celtic, Dundee United, Hamilton, Motherwell, Partick Thistle and St Johnstone were found to be paying less than £7.85 an hour, the informal benchmark regarded by many as the minimum required to cover the basic cost of living.
All of the clubs pay the statutory minimum wage of £6.70 or above.
Hearts is the only Scottish club which is an accredited living wage employer, and BBC Scotland was unable to establish what the pay rates at the remaining clubs were.
The Scottish Professional Football League (SPFL) has complained that its clubs have been unfairly singled out by the BBC, which also questioned 50 of Scotland's biggest employers.
Peter Kelly, director of the Poverty Alliance, said: "It's really unacceptable.
"We would say the same about the majority of businesses in any other sector not paying the living wage, we really think that they can.
"These are clubs that are leaders very often in their communities. They need to be showing leadership in terms of pay as well. There's a lot more they could be doing."
The clubs named declined to issue a comment to the BBC individually and referred the survey on the SPFL.
SPFL chief executive Neil Doncaster said: "The SPFL - speaking for its member clubs - feels strongly that Scottish football is, again, being very unfairly singled out for scrutiny.
"Can I ask, why is football the target of focus here and not any other individual sector?
"Our clubs and their staff carry out huge amounts of positive work in their communities and through charitable initiatives of which the SPFL is very proud and we feel these activities are richly deserving of attention and focus.
"In addition, the survey seeks commercially sensitive information such as average player wages, which we would expect no club to volunteer on this basis.
"However, this response is not about player wages or the issue of the living wage, which in its own right is a deserving topic for balanced investigation. It is about Scottish football and SPFL clubs being treated fairly and refusing to be singled out as a sector.
"This is something which has occurred regularly in recent years and our clubs, rightly, feel less encouraged to complete surveys such as these which only seem to lead to negative reporting with no sense of balance."
The findings will be broadcast on BBC Scotland Investigates: Low Pay For Life at 8.30pm tonight on BBC One Scotland.
ends
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article