Tennent's Soccer Sixes Returns: Scottish Premiership Legends to Battle at Braehead
A indoor tournament that once packed Scottish arenas with fans cheering their heroes is coming back. All 12 Scottish Premiership clubs will enter a legends team into the revived Tennent's Soccer Sixes at Braehead Arena on the weekend of 3 and 4 October (BBC Sport).
The SPFL is backing the event, and Premier Sports will broadcast it live. For those who remember the original run, that last detail matters: the Soccer Sixes was a staple of the Scottish football calendar for nine years from 1984, when the Scottish Football Association organised it and Tennent Caledonian Breweries put its name on the trophy (STV News). Back then, clubs fielded many of their leading players, not just retirees looking for a kickabout.
The format is built for drama. Group stages play out on Saturday across three regionalised groups of four teams. The top two from each group plus the best third-placed sides advance to a knockout stage. Every game must have a winner, so drawn matches go to a penalty shootout, with the shootout victor picking up a bonus point. The sin bin rule, which temporarily sends players off for fouls rather than for the rest of the match, will also be in operation.
Six-a-side football is exactly what it sounds like: six players per side instead of the usual eleven, played indoors on a smaller pitch at a faster tempo. Goals come thick and fast, mistakes are punished instantly, and the crowd is close enough to hear every tackle.
Partick Thistle, who now play in the Scottish Championship, the tier below the Premiership, will not feature in the revived event. They do, however, hold a slice of the competition's history: Thistle won the last Soccer Sixes tournament in 1993 (BBC Sport).
For fans of a certain generation, the Soccer Sixes name carries real warmth. The original tournament turned indoor football into a proper night out, with supporters travelling to Glasgow's SECC to watch the players they followed every Saturday in a different, more frantic setting. The question now is whether the legends version can capture that same spirit with former pros who, in many cases, will not have played competitively for years.
October is still a way off, but the ingredients are there: rivalry, nostalgia, a format designed to produce goals and shootouts, and a broadcast audience watching clubs they love send out familiar faces in unfamiliar colours. If nothing else, it gives Scottish football supporters something to argue about between Premiership weekends.
