IF you walk into a half-decent university library and head for the business studies section you will be overwhelmed by the number of books on leadership. It is a buzz word that unlocks the many mysteries of management, or so consensus tells us.

What you will not find on an MBA programme is a single book on followership.

Business books are always about winning, never about being runner-up or finishing last or scraping into the finals via the playoffs. So books that analyse success can comfortably ignore Scottish football, let alone use it as a case study.

Last week a new television rights deal was secured. It was widely promoted as a triumph of negotiation, offering money beyond our wildest dreams and more opportunities for armchair fans to watch on television and ignore live matches.

It was, of course, none of those things, and within seconds of the deal being announced fans on social media had called its bluff. They immediately saw it as a deal secured by followers and not by leaders. Nothing about it was fresh, remarkable or groundbreaking, it was just more of the same.

It is difficult to identify a single area of football development where Scotland is a leader.

Belgium is light years ahead of us in producing world-class players. Israel is a world innovator in football media and has several companies who are imagining the future. Even the small Swedish side Östersunds FK are pioneers in community engagement, they have a daily session called “Fika” at which players discuss tactics with fans. They aspire to be the most community orientated club in Europe.

Scotland frequently lags behind best practice, and the extraordinary global power of our nearest neighbours, England, does not help.

Fans are sucked away to more glamorous teams, the bloated academy system in England sends players of questionable status to Scotland on loan and a besotted television culture managed in London barely knows how competitive the Scottish game has become.

To use a creaking cliché of management-speak, they don’t appreciate how exciting “the product” really is. We should always remind ourselves that small does not mean second rate, although when it comes to football leadership that is what we are expected to tolerate.

This week’s big TV deal is a classic case of false overstatement. It is flawed in three different ways and they happen to be the three pillars of good businesses – the strategic, the competitive and the innovative.

Although the deal will deliver more live games than ever before, it is not clear that’s what football fans actually want.

Sky was the outright winner in the deal, despite long-standing indifference to its coverage in Scotland. The subscription broadcaster seems tone deaf to Scotland. It is patently obvious it sees our game as a third-rate afterthought.

By default, it relegates our matches to the outer margins of its schedules, with a knock-on impact on kick-off times. It sees the rivalry between Celtic and Rangers as the only show in town, often to the simmering resentment of fans of Aberdeen, Hearts and Hibs.

Sky’s live match coverage is superb but its attitude to match analysis and to the unique culture of Scottish football falls far short of BT’s offering. It think it’s the best but in this context it is not,

BBC Scotland has rights to some cup matches but because the licence fee spend is unfairly distributed across the UK again the power cleaves to London. Only the exciting success of Scotland’s women’s team, BBC’s reach online, on radio and in Gaelic language saves its football reputation from fiercer criticism.

A new broadcaster has joined the frame – Premier Sports, requiring yet another subscription fee. The accumulated cost of broadband, the licence fee, Netflix, Sky and Premier make the cost of Scottish football on television extortionate. The deal is all but prohibitive to poorer families, the people who once sustained the game.

Deep pockets are now a prerequisite. Season books are around £400, Sky and BT subscriptions more than £330 each, the licence fee more than £150 and the new entrant Premier Sports at £130. That’s well over a grand to watch a game frequently pilloried as “a pub league”.

My major objection to the deal is not so much the winners or the losers, but the battle itself. What exactly was the strategy? Was it – to use teeth-grinding business studies speak – customer satisfaction or was it income maximisation? I suspect it was the latter.

Scottish football fans know from painful history that they don’t feature in debates about TV rights.

The whole process is cloaked in secrecy, the contracts and any compromising clauses are hidden away in corporate locked boxes only to emerge years later and under duress.

TV deals are never openly debated and offer no hope of fan involvement. Transparency is a foreign country and any probing question is met with the defence of “commercial confidentiality”, the last refuge of the wriggling football administrator.

Modern rights negotiations are not purely commercial either – what community benefits are on offer? What new innovations can we expect? What is the cost of production and how might it stimulate the production community in Scotland?

What stories will be told? What step changes in analysis can we expect? None of these things have been outlined because they were probably never discussed.

For the uninitiated, the deal making is not even exciting. Forget the idea of big beasts thrashing it out over a tense boardroom table where the other guy blinks. Deal making is delegated to a third party, namely IMG, the global sports agency.

This tells us two things. First, that Scottish football lacks a senior management capable of going head-to-head with Sky and BT and so timidly delegates deals to the “big boys” in London, the very people who do not fully respect Scottish football.

It also communicates to others that we lack the leadership, so the chances of Scotland walking away from a bad deal are non existent.

I worked very closely with IMG throughout the 2012 Paralympics and their professionalism is not in doubt. But they are part of sports-business elite, which is at times overly cosy and needs to be challenged by outsiders and indeed outliers. This time round there was no challenge – it was business as usual.

Leveraging media rights is inevitably a risk business, but neither the SFA nor the SPFL is a natural risk taker, so they play the system and ultimately the system plays them.

The deal is done now and the outcome was exactly as predicted. This is Scottish football following and never leading. In the words of Pedro Caixinha “the dogs have barked and the caravan moves on’’.