When Scotland’s football clubs gather around the same table, a peace summit in the Middle East can seem cordial in comparison.
Next month, the SFA will summon the 42 senior teams to a St Andrews pow-wow to discuss the current reality of Scottish football. And the verbal hand grenades should be left at the door.
Stage one of fixing a problem is acknowledging its existence in the first place. And, despite the mounting evidence, some of the egos overseeing the national game might find it easier to open the Strait of Hormuz than they would to admit making a pig’s ear of things.
Bereft of invention, technique, pace or athleticism, the displays of Scotland’s national team at the World Cup raised the awkward question of whether that really is as good as it gets? The Premiership might be raw and authentic. No one should confuse all the passion and mayhem and long throw-ins and players getting wired in for quality.
Wage-conscious clubs are importing job lots of overseas players every year, aided and abetted by a Governing Body Exemptions scheme which hands out work permits like lollipops. And every time it happens, the victims are academy kids between the ages of 17-21 who find their path to first-team football blocked by jobbers and journeymen.
The next manager of Scotland is likely to be named by the end of the month. Regardless of whether it’s Roberto Martinez or a left-field candidate, the new man will likely hail from England or overseas because the nation is no better at producing world-class coaches than it is at producing players.
Hold their hands up to all of that, and the clubs can get to work with the SFA on a plan of action. Disagree, and they might as well pack up and go home. They’ll be deluding themselves. Watching Hearts ship six goals to Benfica felt like deja vu for anyone who watched Celtic ship seven goals in Dortmund, Rangers thrashed 6-0 in Brugge, or Aberdeen annihilated in Athens.
There is still time to delay this season’s angst-ridden inquest a little longer. After a grim start to the season, Rangers really need to take care of Polish opponents who sound more like a wifi password.
Buoyed by a huge win at Ibrox, Hibs have a narrow lead to take to North Macedonia, but even if they win, the Easter Road side play IFK Gothenburg or Gent next, and no one would bet the mortgage on David Gray’s side winning that one.
Motherwell’s ‘reward’ for beating HJK Helsinki would be a play-off against last season’s Europa League runners-up, Freiburg. So much for UEFA dreaming up the Europa Conference League to give smaller nations a shot at glory.
Scottish teams might do less to help themselves than Europe’s governing body. They repeatedly live down to expectations in European qualifiers and every time they fail, the excuses over a vast gulf in budgets, injuries, an undercooked squad, a 12-team Premiership, the stewardship of the SFA and Neil Doncaster are wheeled out before everyone shrugs and forgets all about it.
Four days later, they’re back playing an SPFL game, and that play-off exit to a team from Kazakhstan is quietly swept under the carpet. If nothing else, the St Andrews summit is an acknowledgement from the SFA that ostrich behaviour is no longer an option.
While Scottish football can still draw comfort from the days when Celtic, Rangers and Aberdeen lifted European trophies, it needs a few lines on the forehead to remember that far back.
If history shows anything, it’s that Scottish clubs fared best in Europe when they produced – and fielded – their own players.
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World-class footballers like Kenny Dalglish, Denis Law, Jim Baxter and Jimmy Johnstone did not tumble from a magic tree. They were nurtured and grown and developed and, at some point, clubs wasting seven figures a year on academies which produce no first-team players might pause to ask if there’s a better way to spend the money.
Former head of men’s elite strategy at the SFA Chris Docherty co-authored the report which ushered in club co-operation agreements.
In June, Docherty moved to become the new technical director of MLS side San Diego, a club owned by the renowned Right to Dream academy network.
Frustrated by the persistent self-interest and denial of clubs, he expressed the view that Scottish football has made just five per cent of the changes needed to mirror other small nations like Norway and Croatia.
Yet, during his three years at Hampden, he met people in youth development roles who laboured under the delusion that they were doing just fine. Until the happy-clappers and flat-earthers own up to the existence of a problem, nothing will change.
Clearly, it doesn’t help that young players are being poached from Club Academy Scotland by cash-rich English teams. Or that the stragglers left behind are given little or no opportunity to stake a claim for first-team football by managers looking out for their own jobs in a 12-team league.
While Docherty acknowledges these issues, he regards them as excuses and covers for a more fundamental problem. More often than not, players are being starved of first-team football because they are simply not good enough.
It’s hard to say for sure unless they are given a chance. Yet, when Billy Gilmour, Ben Gannon-Doak, Kieran Tierney and Aaron Hickey left Scotland young, they acquired first-team experience because they bore an above-average talent.
While Scotland can still produce good footballers, finding them is like searching for pound coins in a haystack. The numbers are low, and the special talents are the exception and not the rule.
So long as that’s the case, clubs will continue to fill their squads with cut-price average Joes from Macedonia, Slovenia and the third tier of French football.
Scotland managers will limp on, struggling to find goalkeepers playing first-team football.
Middling central defenders will carry on making a mess of things at major tournaments, assuming they get there in the first place.
Strikers who don’t score goals will carry on earning caps they don’t deserve. The top clubs will carry on losing in Europe, and the coefficient will continue to slide lower than a rattlesnake’s belly.
When the great and the good of Scottish football gather in St Andrews, clubs need to show willing to conduct a root-and-branch review of the way they turn promising young talents into elite footballers.
They need protections put in place to prevent English clubs pinching them for buttons. After that, they need encouragement and incentives to give players like James Wilson and Findlay Curtis a chance to flower and bloom.
Scotland’s dismal display at the World Cup can’t be written off as a blip. Years of dismal club results in Europe show that a reset is necessary and overdue.
If clubs can’t afford the players they need to hold their own in Europe and feed the national team, then there really is only one alternative. At some point, they need to roll up their sleeves and make their own.
