We’ve held off this particular piece for a while – we wanted to make sure we were correct, source our information and then go public with it.
As we all know, the disastrous SPFL vote ended in farce, recriminations, protests and potentially legal action, with Rangers, Hearts and Stranraer particularly vocal about the incompetence of it, and when even Aberdeen lend their weight to that, you know there’s something in it.
The SPFL’s big case centres on Dundee’s vote, and their allegation they didn’t receive it before the deadline.
This was the infamous 5PM we’ve all heard of.
However, the governing body made the bold claim as a result of an ‘independent’ investigation by auditors Deloitte that the reason they didn’t receive Dundee’s vote is it was redirected into their spam folder.
That the vital vote wasn’t discovered till later that evening, and Deloitte were able to time stamp when that message ended up in the trash.
There is, however, a massive, glaring, giant problem with this defence:
Why was Dundee’s vote the only one of 42 clubs to end up in the spam folder?
Why was the most important and deciding vote so curiously the only vote of all Scottish clubs to be mysteriously redirected to the spam/quarantine/isolation portion of the SPFL’s email server and not anyone else’s?
Did Dundee send a virus? Malware? A trojan horse?
No, of course they didn’t.
Instead, and we can only speculate – it appears one of two things happened:
1: Somehow, magnificent incompetence saw Dundee’s vote get magically accidentally transferred to junk in a pure bout of bizarre idiocy.
2: It was deliberately hidden or deleted but, in even more incompetency, not permanently removed.
The simple truth is if the SPFL sent out the same mass voting form to all 42 clubs, all 42 clubs would have sent back identical copies with the only differences between each being their choice of vote.
There is no way one of them would be mistaken for spam when the other 41 were accepted normally.
In short, the shenanigans here are obvious, blatant, and shambolic.
We couldn’t tell you if this was incompetency or deliberate, but there is no doubt that Dundee’s vote was put there by someone. And if it was deliberate, they weren’t even smart enough to make it go away permanently.
The case rests on whether they knew what they were doing.