How in-fighting and acrimony has led to Partick Thistle's spectacular summer meltdown

Daily Mail​

10 hours ago

You might be familiar with the concept of the SPFL Statement League, a running joke that's sprung up on social media in recent years keeping track of which are the most easily offended or dysfunctional Scottish football clubs at any given time.
In season 2025-26, though, there is no point in anyone outside Maryhill entering the competition. Partick Thistle surely have the title sewn up already, after releasing no less than five club statements between 10am last Monday and 2pm on Tuesday.
The first was an angry response from the Championship outfit's board to an email which fan ownership group The Jags Foundation (TJF) had sent to their members outlining concerns around how the club is being run.
The second, four hours later, announced that director Stuart Callison had resigned from the board, seemingly in protest at TJF's actions.
The third then landed at 10pm, saying that a meeting had been held between the warring factions, and peace eventually broke out the following morning with a joint TJF/board statement stressing that 'key concerns were properly aired and understood' and insisting 'there remains much to be optimistic about at Partick Thistle'.
Statement five, issued that afternoon, was the most shocking of the lot, revealing that sporting director Ian Baraclough had suffered serious injuries to his neck and back while swimming on his honeymoon in Mauritius.
This last sad incident is of course no reflection on Thistle, but considered alongside everything that preceded it, it validated the notion that the fan-owned Jags are living through one of the most disastrous summers seen anywhere in recent Scottish football history.
Or, as one scunnered fan eloquently put it on X: 'Have we p****d in God's Cornflakes or something?'
Faced with a choice between casting the net wider or confirming the interim management team of veteran striker Brian Graham and Under-18s boss Mark Wilson — who had steered the team to the semi-finals of the Premiership play-offs after taking charge in February — Thistle tried to have their cake and eat it.
The club spoke to a number of external candidates (including, controversially, Dougie Imrie, boss of bitter rivals Greenock Morton) then decided to offer it to Graham after all — only to be rebuffed and left with little choice but to appoint Wilson.
Chairman Richard Beastall's ill-advised comments about Wilson being the 'brains of the operation' and Graham the 'alpha male' were then followed by Thistle's goalscoring centurion cutting ties with the club completely and being snapped up by Championship winners Falkirk, where he will look to take his prolific form on to the Premiership stage.
Meanwhile, Thistle's kit launch has been delayed, an advert has gone out seeking a 'volunteer' finance director and a long-awaited squad update revealed a bloated group still containing 19 contracted players.
And if that wasn't enough, the club are also facing SPFL sanctions over a pitch invasion and the use of pyrotechnics in their play-off win over Ayr at Somerset Park last month.
You can just picture the documentary crew who spent last season filming behind the scenes at Firhill greetin' in the edit suite and wondering aloud why they didn't do it this season instead. But, first of all, let's spare a thought for ordinary fans like Matt Greer.
'It's just been bizarre,' sighs Greer, host of the Thistle fan podcast Draw, Lose or Draw. 'Obviously, what concerns me most is the wellbeing of Ian Baraclough, all the best to him in his recovery. But a couple of the club's statements on Monday were very poor. And one of the biggest things that came out of it was that the budget for next season still hadn't been finalised as of earlier this week.
'It was emphasised that this hasn't prevented any activity — but since we haven't actually signed anyone, it certainly hasn't helped.
'It feels like we're already playing catch-up with the other Championship clubs, despite having a sporting director in place since April. We've got a decent core of players signed up for next season, but at this stage it certainly doesn't look like we'll be any closer to promotion.
'I don't think Mark Wilson is a bad appointment, but he wasn't my first choice and he wasn't the board's either, so I'm not sure why we're pretending he was. I'm glad we haven't ended up with Dougie Imrie, but being knocked back by Brian Graham after he had just about pleaded for the job on national TV isn't a great look.'
The ructions on Firhill Road have came at an interesting juncture for the wider fan ownership movement within Scottish football. Plenty of fan-owned clubs are prospering; look at St Mirren's regular top-six finishes, or at Falkirk's double promotion.
But the counter-argument to that is provided by troubled outfits like Partick Thistle and Morton — who almost lost the popular Imrie to Thistle after accidentally incurring a FIFA transfer ban and not telling their supporters about it until a month and a half later.
In truth, fan ownership has been a bumpy journey for Thistle from the start, from the sudden death of EuroMillions winner Colin Weir in 2019, only a month after he bought the club with the intention of gifting control to the fans, to the fraught back-and-forth between the previous board, the Jags Foundation and the PTFC Trust (the body which controversially usurped the Foundation as the chosen recipient of the shares).
With the Trust and the Foundation vowing to work together constructively, the shares were officially transferred in the summer of 2023.
Since then, despite frequent cash flow issues, Thistle have managed to consistently push for promotion via the play-offs, whilst off the pitch they have hired a new general manager, commercial manager, head of media, sporting director and head of recruitment.
But if these appointments were designed to make the club a sleeker and more professional operation, so far at least, they appear to have had the opposite effect.
'There are certain things they've done in recent months that haven't made a lot of sense, then others where you think, 'OK, I wouldn't have made that decision, but fair enough',' a former Firhill insider tells Mail Sport. 'But right now, they don't seem to have a clue.
'I would have gone in private to TJF and said, 'OK, that's not helpful, we need to think about what channels of communication we have'. But to put out a statement… God almighty, Scottish football could do with a lot less statements!
'Brian and Mark did a good job, the team had positive momentum, and then you lose one of them because you p****d him off, and bring in the other one. It's like having an open goal in front of you and turning round, running the length of the pitch and scoring past your own keeper.
'Previously, the plan was very clear about getting to the Premiership and staying there in a sustainable way, but I don't feel there is any inspiration, or that vision is realistic now. It's not clear, beyond some warm words, what they are they doing about the youth academy, about a proper training ground or about the long-term development of Firhill.
'These are the things you want to be hearing about as a fan and they're not making statements about them, yet every two minutes they're making statements about this other stuff. I really can't see how this situation continues and how this board continues.'
Thistle are one of the biggest clubs currently playing below the top flight, with a pronounced community feel and a track record of fan activism (dating back to the Save the Jags campaign in the late '90s) few others can claim. So if they can't make fan ownership work, it would be a worrying precedent, at a time when the number of fan-owned SPFL clubs is almost into double figures. But, despite recent events, Greer remains convinced that it's the way forward for the Jags long-term.
'I'm still pro-fan ownership, I don't think it's fair to blame an entire model on a sticky few months,' he says.
'But I think it's pretty clear that we could be using some help off the pitch as well as on it, in terms of financial expertise and also in the communications department.'
'With fan ownership, it's easy to look at it from the outside and say it's a mess, but that doesn't mean it can't work,' concludes the former insider.
'I give a lot of credit to the Foundation, they've increased the numbers going to games, they've done an awful lot of good stuff and should take an enormous amount of credit for that.
'The problem is that it only works well when a club is fan-owned rather than fan-run, and at the moment Thistle are verging on being fan-run.
'You have to accept you need professionals in football, at any level — a proper chairman/chief executive/finance director/manager etc. Because if you haven't got them, you're doomed to failure.'