On the one hand, the media. This is always a difficult point to make as I can hardly suggest that the media don’t cover things and don’t report on things. It’s not the media’s fault that negative situations exist to report – though there is of course nuance over how things are reported.

It’s also something of a ‘turkeys voting for Christmas’ moment if you suggest that there’s too much coverage of football … and express that view in a newspaper column about football.

I still remember the days of “this match will not be available to viewers in Scotland, due to a complaint made by the Scottish Football Association”.

I’ve never enjoyed the placing of artificial barriers around things – and I think it may have made meeting my Slovak wife slightly less likely if she’d had to negotiate searchlights to ever get to Scotland in the first place – but the lifting of these obstacles has affected the way in which we view the Scottish game.

I remember working in my folks’ shop and somebody coming in to buy a glasscutter. I produced the three that we had. The person was buying it for someone else, panicked at having an option and didn’t buy any. If I’d just produced one, they would just have bought it and felt far less stressed by the whole process.

There’s a specific phenomenon called ‘fear of missing out’; it’s something that advertisers/marketers attempt to tap into. People who are presented with options or who are led to believe that there may be options enter into something of a state of anxiety. It’s why we keep checking our phones these days, in case we’ve ‘missed out’ on something.

What does that mean for football? Well, when I was a kid, the appearance of an English or European match on TV was a rare and exciting treat. It wasn’t an option or a choice that I had over Scottish football. Because of that, I didn’t compare it in the same way. It never felt like an, ‘either/or’. Watching football was a release, not a stress or something to be assessed against anything other than the previous match.

The thing is, you can look at the improved athletic standards in the Scottish game to have an easy example of something that has improved hugely from when I was a kid. Quality and safety of stadia? Yup. Quality of pitches? Much as there are still some howlers around, they’ve improved hugely too.

All of these things are verifiable and aspects that I’m conscious of. So why do I sometimes feel like things have slipped? We can point to the drain of Scottish players to the English Championship but Scottish players have always populated the English leagues.

For me, it’s the context in which we’re now viewing the game. I grew up with Friday Night Sportscene, Scotsport Extra Time, Saturday Night Sportscene. Scottish football was our world. Then the world got bigger and it made our game feel that little bit smaller.

For all the criticism that I – and others – level at those in charge of the Scottish game, that’s not their fault.

Agree or disagree with what Teddy has written? You can tweet him @RossTeddyCraig or online via his website, ascottishwriter.com