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It’s what Highland League representatives agreed to when restructuring took place. The League lost two Inverness clubs, Ross County, Elgin, and Peterheid when a restructure allowed this. Otherwise, there was no merit-based system for ambitious clubs to progress to a higher level. Your point is valid, of course, but Cove were desperate to climb into it, as are Winton’s Banks O Dee, Atholl’s Formartine, and before they burnt themselves out by crazy over-spending, Locos. I’d imagine the Broch would swither over it too. i’m afraid the comfort zone factor does weigh significantly, though. At individual player level, i worked with a number of SHFL players who were frequently offered trials and transfers to eg the Angus clubs, but who saw no advantage in this. Wages might have been slightly higher, but they all said that getting to training two evenings a week, having to sacrifice holiday entitlement to enable midweek away matches, and arriving back in the city at an ungodly hour from such fixtures before working next day made it not worth their while. Brora are now two matches away from promotion, and are the second most geographically-disadavantaged of the current SHFL membership. It’ll be interesting to see if they’re up for it.

Selling mattresses no?

Got you

Bloody depressing. But the funny thing was, that we actually started the season with a decent spread across the squad, then it stopped, and stopped big time.

It is not so much comfort zones but more that the pyramid system is great in theory but in practice just does not make sense. Why on earth would a team like Buckie want to be going away to places like Stirling, Annan and Clyde every other week. If you are a player working during the week you just ain't going to want to spend 6 or 7 hours of every second Saturday on a bus. If you chuck in the travel costs for the club of doing that, it is just a stupid concept for a wee Highland League team.