Last week, we published an article looking at the debate around/case for a restructuring of the senior Scottish Leagues. A key part of the argument for doing this is that many people, myself included, believe it will give more youngsters a chance to come through the ranks and thus, in time, will strengthen the Scotland international team. The SFA’s recent report on young players considered this and, as part of the debate, the SFSA is now reproducing, with permission of the publisher, an article from the current issue of the Scottish Football Historian* which looks at the decline in the number of Scots playing in Scotland and the level at which they are playing in England..
We used to say that Scotland were world champions at finding ways to fail to qualify for the knock-out stages of finals competitions. They arguably found another way of doing this in 2024 – with the fewest attempts at goal on record. The surprisingly emphatic qualification campaign may have given cause for optimism for the German finals – although a 12 month record of two wins (against Cyprus and Gibraltar) in ten matches surely signalled a warning – but the manner of failure was quite sobering.
The consensus was that there was a lack of quality in the squad, and the reasons for this are not hard to find. Celtic and Rangers once again shared the domestic honours amongst them, with the rest trailing a distance in their wake. It is 20 years since the League was won by someone other than the Old Firm. Of the 22 players who started the Scottish Cup Final, only three were eligible to play for the national team. It took a 74th minute substitution for Rangers to field a Scot.
David Thomson, in SFH 169, pointed out that only 31% of the players who appeared in the Scottish Premiership on the weekend of 2nd/3rd March 2024 were Scots. Those few who are allowed to play in the country’s top division are hardly learning from the example of world-class imported foreigners as signed by the Old Firm twenty-to-thirty years ago. What is more alarming than the lack of first team opportunities being given to native players is the calibre of those who are being preferred to them.
It is now obvious that the principal quality of an imported player is that he is a full timer, and the top division Scots clubs are effectively signing full time professionals that clubs in other countries do not want, or youth team graduates that are being sent to Scotland for first team action that they would not receive in their own League.
Last season, Aberdeen signed players from Wigan Athletic, Forest Green Rovers, Vancouver Whitecaps, NK Radomije (Slovenia), Hapoel Beer Sheeva, Central Coast Mariners, Novi Fazar (Serbia) and KV Kortrijk.
Dundee from AFC Wimbledon, Correcaminos UAT (Mexico), Atlante (Mexico), Hartlepool United, Forest Green Rovers, Bangaluru (India). Hearts – Peterborough United, Western Sydney Wanderers, Herediano (Costa Rica) and a player on loan from Charlton Athletic.
Hibernian – Charlton Athletic, Wycombe Wanderers. Kilmarnock – Colchester United, Mumbai City, Orlando City. Livingston – Harrogate Town, Accrington Stanley, Rochdale, Pro Success and TS Galaxy (South Africa). Motherwell – Colorado Rapids, Wellington Phoenix, Aalesund (Norway), Walsall, AEL Limassol, Morecambe. Ross County – Redditch United, Salford City, Grimsby Town
St Johnstone – Plymouth Argyle, Cambridge United, Charlton Athletic, Crewe Alexandra, MK Dons, Hapoel Tel Aviv, Warrington Rylands, SK Vorwarts Steyr. St Mirren – Maccabi Haifa, Glentoran, Plymouth Argyle, IBV (Iceland)
The dearth of talent in Scottish football, manifested in the poor standard of International players, has been self-inflicted by its top clubs and endorsed by the SFA and SPFL; we’re not in the European Union any more, so registration restrictions can be applied.
The SPFL put out a tweet at the start of the tournament detailing the number of matches played by squad players in all four of its divisions. A comparison with the squads of yesteryear, when Scotland seems to qualify almost by right from 1974 to 1996, would be a more truthful statistic. Given the manner of failure this year, it is hardly a ringing endorsement for the SPFL. Another telling statistic would be how many players from the other finalists play for Scots clubs, surely an all-time low since the finals were expanded.
The SFA, with every squad announcement across all age groups, indicate which players are “Scottish FA JD Performance School graduates“, yet have done nothing to encourage, or mandate, a pathway through to first team club football in Scotland.
Celtic, in the meantime, have amassed a bank balance of obscene proportions. Rangers? Well, they did prevent 10-in-a-row, and routinely roll over their other opponents in the SPFL, so their fans are happy on all but a handful of weekends each season. Perhaps the bonus arrangements for those in charge could be amended. Instead of giving them a cut from the money generated to perpetuate this circle of competitive failure, where most of the money is going on wages to short-term, non-Scots players, they should be incentivised to improve the quality of the product (the Cup Final was a desperately poor advert for the Scottish game).
This is fixable, although it will not be a quick process. Where are the people to drive the necessary changes?
An opportunity for some statistical analysis down the years of World Cup qualification was prompted by a tweet from the SPFL, celebrating the appearances in their competitions by players in Steve Clarke’s final pool of 26 players. The SFH ran an analysis of the comparative figures for the 22-men pools for the 1974, 1982 and 1998 World Cups, the first two of which saw Scotland narrowly avoid qualification to the knock-out stages.
A few preliminaries before we get into the numbers. Scotland-based players in Willie Ormond’s squad for the 1974 finals in West Germany all played before the introduction of the 10-club Premier Division. The SPFL totals were from the formation of that organisation in 2013, when they subsumed the SFL, thus ignoring appearances in that competition, and indeed their own previous SPL. We have included all appearances in Scottish league football for the 2024 squad. We have ignored the Challenge Cup figures, as that competition was not available to players in 1974 and 1982, but we have included Scottish Cup appearances, to give a better comparison across domestic football in Scotland. For a direct comparison across the four competitions within the last half-century, we have reduced the 2024 figures by 22/26ths.
So does the SPFL have something to crow about? Only in comparison with 1974 when most of the experienced players in the squad were Anglos; Danny McGrain, Kenny Dalglish and third-choice goalkeeper Jim Stewart had only two seasons of first team football under their belts. The consequence was that there were just 2700 domestic appearances to look back on for the 1974 squad, compared with 3802 for 2024. That latter figure includes 465 substitute appearances, compared with just 47 for 1974, so the difference narrows.
That is particularly a factor in comparing 1982’s 4049 appearances, with 2024’s 3802. Taking starting appearances alone, the respective figures are 3958 and 3337. Knocking all other years into a cocked hat was Craig Brown’s experienced squad in 1998. They had played a total of 5,524 domestic matches in Scottish football by the time they arrived in France, putting the SPFL’s 2024 boast well-and-truly into the shade.
There is an interesting trend in prior experience in the lower divisions (League matches only). There were 169 in 1974, 307 in 1982, 388 in 1998 and 580 in 2024. This is indicative of the increasing use of lower division clubs in farming out young players on loan, whereas up to 1974 Junior and Reserve football fulfilled that purpose, with Reserve football continuing through 1982 and 1998. International performances would suggest that this has not necessarily been a positive development.
In terms of interesting career paths, Tommy Hutchison (Alloa), Erich Schaedler (Stirling Albion), Gordon McQueen (St Mirren) and Jim Stewart (Kilmarnock) from the 1974 squad had all played in the lowest Scots division. Hutchison finished third bottom with Alloa before his transfer to Blackpool.
Stevie Archibald (Clyde) and Allan Evans (Dunfermline Athletic) were former basement boys in 1982 and Gordon Durie (East Fife) and Darren Jackson (Meadowbank Thistle) in 1998. In the 2024 squad, a big shout-out for Queen’s Park, who launched the careers of captain Andy Robertson and Lawrence Shankland, both of whom developed in the basement division before the formation of the SPFL in 2013. The other five League Two-experienced players were on loan.
Eight players spend the season before this year’s World Cup in domestic football, one fewer than in 1974 and 1982, compared with 12 of Craig Brown’s 1998 squad. There were five non-Scots in the 2024 squad – Tommy Conway, Liam Cooper, Scott McTominay, Angus Gunn and Che Adams, the last two having represented England at Under 20 and 21 level. Craig Brown took three in 1998 (Jonathan Gould, Matt Elliott and Neil Sullivan) and David Harvey was the lone Sassenach in 1974. Jock Stein’s 1982 squad – like his Lisbon Lions – were all born in Scotland.
There is a school of thought that says that Scotland’s international decline had its roots from 1969, when English clubs were no longer allowed to compete for the best scholars. That could be borne out by this exercise – six of the 1974 and 1982 Scots-born spent their entire playing careers south of the border; there were only two in 1998 (Colin Calderwood and Scott Gemmill, and Craig Burley had not yet played in Scotland) and just one in 2024, Grant Hanley, although former Ranger Billy Gilmour did not play in a domestic fixture.
In terms of graduating from under age international football for the Scots-born players, only Erich Schaedler leapfroged straight into the full squad in 1974. Half the squad played for the Youth team and four of them were Schools internationalists.
No fewer than 15 of the 1982 squad played for the Youth team and only three players had not won Under 21 or Under 23 caps (a similar number to 1974 and 1998), one of whom, George Wood, followed Schaedler’s example.
There were six Schools Internationalists in the 1982 squad, and seven in 1998. Once again half of the 1998 squad had played for the Youths, and only Colin Hendry (one of 12 B internationalists) was a late developer.
There were no discernable changes to these ratios in 2024; only three of the squad had not played for the Under 21s, with Zander Clark and Jack Hendry the only leap-frogers. Again, half of the squad had played for the Youths.
Apart from 1998, the majority of each squad were Anglos, the major difference this year being that nine of them played in the English Championship, Jack Hendry was in Saudi Arabia and Lewis Morgan in the USA. Only five of the squad played in the English top division and out of all this analysis, this is the one historical comparison that jumps out. The concern for domestic football in Scotland is that the English second division is now considered to be superior to Scotland’s top League, an unthinkable proposition for Willie Ormond, Jock Stein and Craig Brown.
The conclusion to this exercise is that not only is the present League system in Scotland, primarily at the top level, not producing the same number of internationalists as in previous years, nor is it producing players for the top division clubs in England.
