It also showed, with a thumping majority, what the sport's customers did not want to see.
http://www.supporters-direct.org/news/item.asp?n=11881&cat=sd_sco
88% of the survey sample opposed a reduction in Scotland's top flight from twelve clubs to ten, and even taking into account margin for error, that's a big majority and a loud voice. This message should be heeded by our sport's leading lights.
77% of fans wanted a sixteen or eighteen-team top league, and more than three-quarters wanted play-offs introduced. Two-thirds were in favour of a winter break and seven out of ten wanted an earlier start to the season.
Unfortunately, many of the people who run our game are in favour of a ten-club league, and they show little inclination towards taking into account the views of 'customers'.
The idea seems to be that an elite band of clubs constantly playing each other is the way to go, but the Scottish football public is tired of this incestuous approach to the national sport. If this idea was taken to its logical conclusion, we'd end up with Rangers and Celtic clashing every week.
Why bother playing Hearts and Hibs et al when the Old Firm could attract bigger crowds and charge more money by playing each other every Saturday? The harsh reality is that the Old Firm fixture would soon become ordinary, indeed it is already a pale shadow of what it used to be.
The same clubs and the same players in the same grounds before the same fans is a recipe for monotony, and the paying public has called time on this model.
The supporters are right. We don't need or want a smaller league: we want a larger one. Regrettably, the advent of a smaller Scottish league in the nineteen-seventies has marginalised everyone outside the central clique, and the clubs left on the outside are thought to be permanently unworthy of a place at the top table.
On the contrary, a league with Dundee, Dunfermline, Raith Rovers, Partick Thistle, Falkirk and Morton added, to give a few likely examples, would be a better and healthier league: a breath of fresh air after years of upper-echelon staleness. It will allow these clubs to grow again, and be worthwhile participants in the top league.
As someone who has experience of a league of this type, I can heartily recommend trips to Kirkcaldy, Dunfermline, Greenock and Firhill. Fixtures of this nature add to the whole rather than detracting from it, and these clubs will succeed in taking points from all the rest, including Rangers and Celtic.
I miss the jaunt to Firhill, and I'll bet the Thistle fans would love to entertain Rangers and Celtic again. These derby-lite games were often passionate affairs.
We often wonder if a team outside the Glasgow giants could ever win the league. If clubs meet just twice a season, this will become more likely, although it may still not happen in the foreseeable future. Presently, an ambitious club like Hearts must play against Rangers and Celtic eight times in a season. If this was reduced to four fixtures, as it would with a larger league, the likelihood of a breakthrough would increase.
Our clubs have become slaves to television. We find it easier to chase the broadcast pound than to attract punters back to a sport that was once an integral part of their lives. The football public is not interested in silly kick-off times designed to suit television, and it won't thank the football industry for treating it like a second-class citizen.
Players, managers, broadcasters, pundits and agents all come before the most important group of all in Scottish football; the supporters, and this has to change.
If our game is to be shaped by broadcasters, it will surely wither and die, but if it is tailored towards those who fund it, it will at least stand a fighting chance.