Today the BBC finally officially revealed what everyone already knew.

So now Scottish viewers definitely know where we stand.

The Corporation doggedly refuses to publicly reveal what it pays for its entire TV and radio coverage of Scottish football, presumably out of embarrassment, but we already know because the SPFL told us in 2015.

1/60th of £68m is a pathetic £1.13m a year – almost exactly half the £2.25m combined salaries of Gary Lineker and Alan Shearer.

We don’t begrudge either man their pay packet – Lineker especially is a talented presenter and entitled to take what he can get, the same as anyone else with a job, although we doubt Match Of The Day’s viewing figures would be substantially lower without him. But Scottish football fans pay the same licence fee as everyone else, and the entire point of a public-service broadcaster funded by a compulsory tax is that it’s not supposed to be affected by ratings.

It shouldn’t matter, under the terms by which the BBC operates, that Scottish football gets a lower audience (of course it does, it’s only shown to 8% of the country – it used to be actively blocked to the rest of the UK). Scottish viewers are entitled to expect the same service for their money as those south of the border, and that means getting a decent programme at a reasonable hour with a budget not measured in pennies, and the Scottish game being funded fairly compared to the rest of the UK.

(Saying that Scottish football should get less money because it’s of a lower quality is a bit like complaining that your dog is too skinny when you only feed it a couple of dog biscuits every day. On a per-capita level the BBC is underfunding the Scottish game by around 80%, and that’s clearly going to be reflected on the pitch given the shoestrings that most of our clubs run on.)

It wouldn’t matter so much if it was only football. But we know that the BBC massively underspends in Scotland in general, with Scots viewers subsidising the rest of the UK to the tune of around £150m a year. The country now gets just 35 minutes a week of dedicated Scottish political TV programming, for example – five minutes a day.

(Whether more BBC political coverage of Scotland would actually be a good thing is of course an entirely separate debate.)

A new £30m Scottish channel due to start in 2018 barely makes a dent in that. Viewers getting a second-rate service shouldn’t have to pay a premium subscription.