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Date: 14th October 2024
In recent transfer windows, Scottish football fans must feel that every day is a Groundhog Day, with news of each signing of a Premiership player provoking the reaction: “He’s come from WHERE?”
Untried teenagers may arrive from English Premier League clubs, but more seasoned professionals appear to be signed from lower and lower divisions of the Football League, and increasingly from the National (ie non-) League.
The new signings don’t just come from England. Your editor used to joke that it was bad enough not recognising the name of the new signing, worse still when you weren’t familiar with the name of their previous club, but when you hadn’t heard of their native country ……
David Thomson, former Assistant Secretary of The Scottish Football League and as the editor of the Scottish League Reviews for 26 years a man to whom every Scottish football historian and statistician owes a great debt, analysed the nationalities of all the players who took the field in the SPFL Premiership over the weekend of 2nd and 3rd March 2024.
His work is tabulated here, and shows the number of Scots-born players, non-Scots-born, and the percentage of Scots-born players per club, who started the match plus those who came on as a substitute.
Three clubs started with only one Scots-born player, and brought on another as substitute; Celtic (Greg Taylor and Danny Kelly), Rangers (John Soutar and Scott Wright) and Hibernian (David Marshall and Chris Cadden). Only one club, Motherwell, fielded a majority of Scots, thanks to both of their substitutes being native-born. Their starting eleven contained only five Scots, a “feat” also achieved by Dundee and Livingston.
Less than a third – 31% – who appeared in Scotland’s top division over that weekend, were Scots-born. There were 49 other nationalities. Comoros? Me neither.
Contrast that with the the picture of Scottish football 61-and-a-half years earlier, when your editor attended his first football match on 26th October 1963. There were no substitutions then, but a larger top division, so the sample size was 18 x 11 = 198, of which 99.5% were Scots. Just one player, St Mirren’s Icelandic defender Thorulf “Tottie” Beck was born outside Scotland.
In the years that followed immediately, Celtic won the European Cup, Rangers reached the Cup Winners’ Cup final, Dunfermline Athletic the semi final of that competition, and Kilmarnock and Dundee reached the semi final of the Inter Cities Fairs Cup.
October 1963 was also, admittedly, before the “Viking Invasion”, led by Morton, Dundee United and Aberdeen, but that was a short-lived phenomenon, and non-Scots were a rarity until Graeme Souness arrived at Ibrox.
We are beyond the stage of welcoming players of the calibre of Paul Gascoigne, Brian Laudrup, Paulo di Canio or Henrik Larsson, top-drawer players who undoubtedly enhanced the viewing experience of Scottish football fans.
There is a worrying tendency for all but the Old Firm to sign players that are simply not wanted by the vast majority – of not all – of English League clubs. It appears that the criterion is not how good the players are, but simply if they are full-time footballers.
Even the Old Firm are signing players who struggled to get a game in the second tier in England and worse still, they are shining in Scotland’s top division in comparison with their team-mates and opponents.
The Scottish Football Association has invested a vast sum of money in its “Performance School” programme (only two graduates in the pool named for the March friendlies, in Billy Gilmour and Nathan Patterson) having dismantled the old process, but has done nothing to prevent 69% of the first team spaces in the top division being filled by non-Scots.
Some years ago, BBC Scotland produced an excellent series of programmes on the recent history of Scottish football, and interviewed the late Craig Brown, who recalled that the late Gerard Houllier, effectively in charge of French football following their failure to qualify for a major finals tournament, put measures in place to restrict the number of foreigners permitted to play in Ligue 1. Craig made a similar proposal to the SFA, which was immedially blocked by the Old Firm. France went on to win European and World Championships.
The standard of football in the SPFL Premiership is in steep decline; even the (two) biggest Scots clubs can no longer compete in what-used-to-be-known as the European Cup; the other clubs routinely make their European exits before the leaves turn brown ; a third of the International squad play in the second tier of English football.
Who at the SFA or SPFL is going to do something about this?
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Tags: youth development