I own Scottish Football View which now has a 10,000 strong audience after only a few months.

We're looking to branch out and cover all of Scottish football.

We're looking for an East Fife fan with a keen interest in writing about their club. We feel it would be a good opportunity to raise the profile of lower league clubs especially.
Can contribute as much or as little as your time allows and you'd have your piece read by many Scottish football fans under your name.

This is the site
http://scottishfootballview.wordpress.com/

If interested drop PaulBand@Live.co.uk an email and we'll see what we can do.

You don't have to be professional or have exceptional English writing skills. I certainly don't. However, we have a growing team of keen fans & budding journalism students we want to add to.

Get in touch!

Took this from Paul Bands site....

East Fife – Not Another Gretna


East Fife have raised many an eyebrow this season with their transfer policy. New managing director Lee Murray has spent a few quid – but East Fife have no chance of ‘doing a Gretna’ as some suggest.


Former Rangers & Scotland star Stephen Hughes was the latest in the list of big name players the League One club has acquired this season along with Robbie Neilson, Gary Naysmith and Christian Nade. Most clubs at this level can only dream that players of this quality would sign for their teams, so why East Fife?



Kevin Drinkell was appointed assistant manager during pre-season. Drinkell has his own agency within football and has many contacts both at home and abroad. I feel that this is a pivotal part of why East Fife managed to sign these players – not major money. Sure, there will have been a fair portion of money involved but not to the ridiculous figures some are suggesting. Drinkell has now left the post – so was he there to get the players in? Only he will know.



East Fife are also a debt free club. Now in honesty, how many other clubs in Britain can say the same? Probably less than 10.
Murray doesn’t have millions to throw around as Brookes Mileson did, so the money that they do have will have been carefully and efficiently circulated. If it wasn’t, they’d probably be in dire financial straits already. It has also been said that East Fife have the smallest playing budget in the league. Untrue. Certainly in the lower half of the league, but there is no way EF have a smaller budget than Airdrieonians or Stranraer. The players in the squad would suggest this.



When Murray first addressed the fans at Bayview, he mentioned that a safe mid-table finish is the goal this season. Some bookies even had them down as favourites for the league (without Rangers bets). However, East Fife find themselves bottom at this early stage of the season.
Disappointing results and some poor performances acquaint for this, but there’s also been improvements of late. I’ve no doubt East Fife will stay in the division and finish around 6-7th.



East Fife’s next step is to become a fully professional football club. They are already working on this as they have some players on full time deals. More full time players would mean bigger financial investment – so a time frame of 2-3 years before East Fife can achieve this. Promotion to the Championship would certainly help them sustain this, and whilst it wont happen this season, there’s no reason to doubt whether they can do it in the next few years. With the exception of this season of course, League One (or division 2 as it was known) has been a fairly open league.



The players that have been brought in have raised the profile of East Fife football club. Even the local community is once again taking an interest in their club. They have been a talking point around Scottish podcasts and sports news channels as such. Attendance figures are up considerably on average whilst half of Scottish footballs have gone down. These players are achieving a lot of what they went there to do – Raise the profile of the club.


To some, eyebrows have been raised and doubts have begun to appear. To me, I’d say providing they improve on field results, they’re doing pretty well establishing themselves once again.


By Paul Band