Another tweak to the ever-changing face of Scottish football: the League Cup Final is moving back to Autumn.

As a club which both won and lost League Cup Finals in both Autumn and Spring, Aberdeen are well placed to evaluate the benefits of the earlier date absent of any bias about the result of the match.

For it goes without saying that the best time of the year to play a cup final is the time when you win it. The joys of Parkhead in March 2014, emerging into daylight at the end of a long, long tunnel, and Hampden in November 1995, dark and raucous, were not markedly distinguishable, and to the extent that they were it was only in response to the tortuous and painful wait which separated them. Similarly, though the extra hours of daylight may have made it easier to navigate away from Hampden after Springtime final defeats than ones at the tail end of the calendar year, it didn’t make the journey back up the road any more entertaining.

But for the Scottish game as a whole, and the League Cup competition in particular, the move is a good one. Our game now operates, even inside its own national borders, as a niche product within a saturated global football market, and in such an environment it is essential to innovate and exploit every possible unique selling point. It is a self-defeating exercise to try to present ourselves as a scaled-down facsimile of the English game, copying wholesale their league structure, division names and fixture calendar, because by so doing we automatically delete the ‘something different’ which punters are inevitably looking for when faced with four live matches from four countries all being beamed into their digibox simultaneously.

By reverting to the short and sharp format, the League Cup becomes, in essence, a self-contained competition with its own stream of narrative, a concept which is proven to work in broadening the appeal of sports beyond their natural realms. It is why people watch, for instance, the massively successful Indian Premier League cricket event, for even though they have no allegiance to any of the franchises involved they are able to follow the fortunes of teams and players from one game to the next without any breaks to dim the interest.

Countless sports now attempt to copy the blueprint – Sky Sports even broadcasts daily highlights from the Pro Kabaddi equivalent, and eminently fascinating they are too, thus proving the point. Hopefully the League Cup will now regain that continuity and momentum.

It will also be able to re-establish itself as a competition in its own right, with its own space and resonance: something which has been rather lost by having it split between two ends of the season. It was always better when the League Cup was over before the Scottish Cup began, because having the two ongoing concurrently diminishes the relevance of both; constantly switching between competitions inevitably blurs the focus on each.

Not to mention the absurd situation experienced last season where two players who contributed significantly to Dundee United’s passage to the League Cup final were then not allowed to play in it because they had transferred to their opponents before the day arrived.

Packaging the League Cup as, effectively, the cup competition of the season’s first half gives a more logical raison d’etre to a tournament which, of late, has been rather stuffed thoughtlessly down the back of the SPFL sofa, and allows Scotland to put a series of compelling and meaningful fixtures onto the table at a time of year where most others in Europe are in a holding pattern.