Psychiatrist Dr Peter Rice said the Dundee United stadium would fill up with 14,000 people who rely on more drink to stop alcoholic trembling.

“If you take the number of people with significant alcohol dependence, drinking in the mornings, shaking and having to use alcohol to settle that, the number of people would fill Tannadice,” said Dr Rice. “That’s 14,000.”

Health boards across Scotland are grappling with booze problems. NHS Tayside has been granted over £7m of extra cash to be invested in tackling the problems of excessive drinking locally.

Dr Rice told NHS Tayside’s strategic policy and resources committee meeting in King’s Cross Hospital how he and his colleagues planned to spend that cash.

A lot of work is now going on in surgeries to try to identify people with alcohol problems, through a screening programme that aims to pick up these at an earlier stage and offer help to prevent them becoming more serious.

Dr Rice outlined plans to make these screening and brief intervention programmes available more widely in both healthcare and non-healthcare settings, including ante-natal clinics, police custody suites and housing and homelessness services.

There was also a plan to follow up people who were identified as having alcohol problems and might not attend for appointments or take up offers of help. This could include sending text messages or phoning people at home.

Non-executive director John Angus said he’d want to see this time next year a measure of the effect the changes had made.

Dr Rice said he was happy to do that.