Christmas is a time to spare a thought for those worse off than ourselves.

While we are all marauding through Union Square wondering which make of smartphone our nine-year-olds might prefer, taking mental notes of things we'll be back to spend our gift vouchers on once they go into the January sales, and wringing the last few coppers out of our wallets to stretch to tickets for the match, we should reflect that there are many out there for whom such extravagances are a pipedream, who will be spending the festive season merely trying to make ends meet. Unless, of course, the Hearts squad has actually been paid by the time you read this.

While the world remembers a baby born in a byre for want of a decent hotel room, it is hard to summon up too much seasonal sympathy for players waiting for the payment of wages which they all already knew were fancifully unsustainable when they signed the contracts - some having rejected more reasonable offers from round this way - but the Dickensian tale of Christmas woe in Gorgie's footballing households is a stark reminder of the parlous state of the Scottish game, and a worrying hint that it is going to get worse still.

Over the last decade, the talent drain from north to south of the border has depleted the reservoir of quality in the SPL at a truly alarming rate. Players of the sort who would previously have spent their careers in our top domestic division are now negotiating their escape to the English leagues at the very first opportunity - take for example West Brom's offer to remove Scott Allan from Dundee United after fewer than ten senior games - or even, thanks to the compensation regulations and prohibitive overdrafts precluding Scottish clubs from offering contracts to anyone under 23, skipping the SPL stage altogether, such as Craig Forsyth. Hearts' salary budget has been unrealistic, but what now appears to be the end of big paydays at Tynecastle will hasten the exit of any talented players who still remain in Scotland - the likes of David Templeton, Ryan Stevenson, Jamie Hamill and Andrew Driver would already be plying their trade down south were it not for Vladimir Romanov's roubles.

It is hard to know where our clubs will, and should, go from here. The regulations have them caught between a rock and a hard place. They are increasingly disincentivised from rearing their own players as the days of raking in big fees for the best of their crop are as good as over - by definition, their recovery of "training compensation" for the eventual transfer of their youth players will only cover their associated costs, but for every kid brought successfully through the ranks there are at least a dozen more who never become a material asset and whose development expenses are sunk and lost forever. If players, like Allan, initiating their exit strategy as soon as they get a squad number becomes the norm, SPL youth academies instantly become uneconomic. But equally, because the majority of the SPL is o significant debt and continuing to trade at a year-on-year loss, they are unable to countenance signing any player off another club's roster unless he has been binned and commands no sort of fee. Gems can be found, but most players available without charge are worth not a penny more.

The lower leagues in England offer a scary vision of a potential future, almost all of their clubs having horribly transient squads with more loans on their books than Wonga. Their clubs have effectively been repositioned as a service industry for the Premiership, offering them training facilities and proving grounds for young footballers who will probably never make the grade - and even in that industry the SPL cannot compete, for we are too far away.

One sincerely hopes there's a solution other than the SPL getting progressively worse, but I'm not sure I can see what it is. So yeah, merry Christmas - sorry about that.