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Date: 14th August 2026
What is critically important?
By Donald C Stewart
On the 4th of September, the Scottish Football Association are calling together what they claim is a critically important summit on the future of Scottish football. In a memo which has been seen by the BBC, the objective allegedly is to focus on the current reality, “facing Scottish football”.
In particular, they want to talk around improving the prospects for homegrown Scottish talent and increasing revenue streams for clubs.
Hosted by SFA Chief Executive Ian Maxwell and the Chief Football Officer Craig Mulholland, it is clearly an incredibly important summit to which everybody who has some kind of stake in the future of Scottish football ought to be present.
It also should not be a single event.
The issues facing Scottish football are well debated on a Saturday afternoon on Sportsound or on the pages of the Daily Record, The Sun, The Mirror, any footballing organ online and in print including Pi e and Bovril and on A View From the Terrace.
We should be well versed in what is wrong with Scottish football, but as always, if you put 10 pundits in a room, you will end up with a dozen opinions.
Many ways forward have been tried.
The academy structure was put in place and schools created to bring the best of local ability together to learn together and develop together: that has been scrapped.
The McLeish Report looked at regional football teams; that has been scrapped
Various debates tend to look beyond our shores for inspiration.
People talk about the type of football being played in one country or and infrastructure that’s in another such as Iceland or the rights that have been claimed by the likes of Norway for their TV deal which dwarfs the one that we have negotiated. Some of those are quite rightly important but one of the things that I hope will come from this summit is what is really actually critically important.
I’m going to go way back when Rangers were put into to the third division and there was a passionate debate over the future of Scottish football around what should happen with the Ibrox club. The then chairman of Aberdeen had lots to say. It was the chairman; I think of Brechin City who pointed out that he ran a club that did not have a deficit whereas the chairman of Aberdeen was running a club that was close to bankruptcy. Why was the chairman of a financially failing club having any say in the placing of a club who fell foul of financial rules over any chairman who happened to run a tight fiscal outfit?
We tend to hand to big clubs the big decisions. People need to listen to them, they know what they are talking about, they have been doing it for a long time etc., etc., etc, blah, blah, blah…
Often because the amount of money that big clubs spend on their own talent programme dwarfs the type of money that’s being spent elsewhere. It is believed that with that amount of investment that they should have a big say because they are throwing money at the issue. What is lost is how many of their players go on to become come huge stars. If you look at the likes of Ben Gannon Doak, Andy Robertson, the former began at Ayr United before getting to Celtic and then being released, Robertson released by Celtic but picked up by Queen’s Park as youths.
The development of Scottish homegrown talent requires players to get game time, and many of these developing players are getting opportunities at smaller and lesser clubs because instead of having to compete against players who have been brought up to shore up a manager’s job, they happen to develop in the context of being the best on the park. Not being put into a pressured situation where every touch of the ball could cost millions, they are given the opportunity to shine in front of an appreciative supportive local home crowd.
Supporters are fickle. They can be hugely in your supporters’ club one minute and then in the next minute they can end up being your greatest critic. I get that but what is also critically important and maybe missed out here is if the largest investors in Scottish football are potentially not going to have a place around that table.
The summit will be called and the clubs will be brought in and academies potentially will have their head of youth there, I hope, or what they will attempt to do is to talk to all of the coaches, a huge amount of whom are spending every single hour of their waking day thinking about how to develop this player or that player the length and breadth of Scotland. But could we start to look at smaller academies who are having local success and examining how that’s happening?
And the biggest investors with massive skill and experience in huge matters of life and development – the fans. Where are they in all this?
Would a successful business develop new products without reference to the people who might buy it? Would a charity launch a project without first identifying the need? Would fitba keep going listening to the same failed voices?
Let’s regroup on the 5th of September…
Posted in: Fan's Blog, Latest News
Tags: Hampden Park, oor Donald, Scotland, Scottish fans, Scottish football, SFA, SFSA, SPFL