THE best student job I ever had was selling programmes to people with tiaras and cumberbunds at the back of Glasgow’s Theatre Royal. You were only called into action during intervals and so you had a free season ticket for the sort of live classical music and drama which changes people’s lives. Never having seen a live orchestra wiring into a Beethoven symphony or big tenors belting out Puccini it was, as some of my co-workers were wont to say, les moustaches de chat.

You also got to know how the engineering of staging an opera or a production of Shakespeare worked. The singers and actors were merely the apex of a large and intricate machine with many moving parts. These were operated by an itinerant and skilled army of designers, craftsmen, artists and mechanics. When people question funding for the performing arts they often fail to see the 24-hour working hive underneath the stage that keeps the lights on. It’s a vibrant community operating a vast industry.

Rishi Sunak’s £1.57bn package of support to this sector which has suffered grievously from the predations of coronavirus is about a lot more than keeping Dame Judi Dench and Sir Kenneth Branagh in Bollinger for another year.

It was instructive to note just how quickly Mr Sunak’s largesse could be accessed, though. The chancellor and the UK Culture Secretary, Oliver Dowden CBE, spoke of “the crown jewels” of this sector. Thus, the language of the elite was stealthily introduced and a class pecking-order was quickly established.

I love the theatre but I view attending the odd play as a treat rather than an essential strand of my cultural DNA. While some of us responded to the work of the great playwrights in school many more chose not to for a wide variety of reasons. While Shakespeare observed the tragedies and triumphs of the human condition many people were often too busy meeting these challenges in their real lives to watch John Gielgud and Sybil Thorndike make costume dramas out of them.

In the little time they had to themselves each week they chose to follow a local football team, for this was where working people looked to for drama and escape. These clubs have carried their hopes and made generations walk a little taller when social inequality menaced them the other six days of the week. Now, many of them face extinction before the end of next season. In Scotland, they are much more reliant on regular paying customers owing to the limited values of television deals in a small country whose football is less photogenic than Europe’s gilded leagues.

I’m not suggesting that Albion Rovers and Queen of the South are more important than the Citizens Theatre but they are more vital to the overall health of their devotees. In Scotland, more people per head of population attend football matches than any other European country.

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Two thirds of Scotland’s senior clubs now operate a Community Trust to foster closer ties to their communities. They are integral to the social fabric of their neighbourhoods in normal times and have grown to become social champions during lockdown. Often, they have been the main source of help to their communities’ most vulnerable people by delivering food parcels and providing succour for those isolated and alone. Art and culture are vital to the health of these places too but local football clubs touch lives more profoundly.

These trusts have established Football Memories Groups for those whose light is beginning to fade. There is football for the disabled; inter-generational history projects and drop-in clubs for those living in supported housing. They provide volunteer opportunities for people seeking to make a contribution beyond football. They are active in schools and channel children’s fascination for football as a means of engaging them in the wider educational process. They are much, much more than just football clubs. If they are allowed to die it will destroy the heart of the communities they serve to a much greater extent than the closure of a theatre or the cancellation of Othello.

Yet, the Scottish football authorities and the Scottish Government stand accused of doing little to support these vital community hubs through the effects of coronavirus. Following a conference call meeting between football chiefs and the Scottish Government in May Joe Fitzpatrick, the Minister for Sport, socially distanced himself from any prospect of financial support. But he did locate the entire lexicon of Government euphemisms and take it out for a walk. Thus we had “importance of sport to many” and the “sharing of best practice” and his confidence in “further-partnership-working”.

As Mr Fitzpatrick was seeking grass long enough to lose any commitment to actually funding small football clubs the Scottish Government was preparing to establish a £10m theatre venues fund on top of the £97m already pledged to the arts. Scottish football meanwhile had to rely on the kindness of the mortgage fund specialist James Anderson who made a personal donation of £3.2m to support clubs through the health crisis. The SFA immediately set up a new department on the 6th floor of its sprawling Hampden Park headquarters (because obviously we needed this). Then they gave all football clubs, including the richest and best-resourced, £50k while leaving the 28 community trusts the chance to apply for £10k each.

The money cannot be spent on the basics small clubs require to stay alive such as paying wages and bills; meeting SFA licensing requirements and testing players before games. By the time paying customers are allowed to attend matches these local football stands will have been dark for around nine months.

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Government ministers and senior executives of grand associations love the soft power and upholstered seats of theatre-land. It’s good to be seen in these places and if their favourite thespians can be persuaded to appear in a wee party political broadcast, so much the better. Scottish community football clubs don’t really have the soaring rhetoric of Dame Judy and Sir Kenneth, instead they have Crawford Baptie and Alex Brash. But I know which of them provides a more valuable community service.

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