Last night, as you all know, Celtic’s young guns team swept aside those of Sevco to triumph in the final of the Scottish Youth Cup. It was a classy performance, one which cements the reputation of our academy as the finest in the whole country.
Celtic may not win this season’s Development League, but I have no problem making that claim. The reason we might not win it is simple; a lot of the players from our team are already out in the world playing first team football at other clubs.
We’ve produced such quality that we no longer want them to be competing at development level. That’s why the names on the Development Squad team-sheet most weeks are radically different to those of a year or two years ago. That’s all to the good, by the way, but this year it’s made a race out of it.
Last night, we completely dominated that game. There were four or five players in our side who just stood out head and shoulders above theirs, and of the rest I believe every one of them would have got into the Sevco team’s starting line-up.
And what that portends for the future of both clubs could not be more different.
All season long, we’ve been hearing about “the gap.”
The gap is so big now that the term itself seems inadequate to describe it; would you call The Grand Canyon “a gap” in the ground or the Marianas Trench “a gap” in the ocean floor? Because that’s roughly the size of what we are talking about here. This isn’t simply about the points differential in the SPL table, or the fact we’ve beaten them in two cup semi-finals. It’s not even about the respective earnings of the clubs and how far in front of them we are on that front.
This is everything. They are behind us in every department.
Over on one of their sites last night, one fan took succour from highlighting how close the two teams are at the under 14, 15 and 16 levels and there, he said, his team has even edged us in some ways. I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but it hardly matters.
At that age you’re hoping to see potential.
You are still developing a player’s skillset. It’s also where physicality tends to make players look more accomplished than they are, and it’s also the point where a lot of otherwise promising kids start getting distracted and don’t quite make it. You only know what you have then when you see what it turns into.
That’s what the Development Squads are for. They are the final staging post before a kid becomes a first team player. If our guys don’t quite make the cut does that make them bad players? No, because a kid has to be exceptional right now – Kieran Tierney exceptional – to make that step up. If their own youth academy isn’t graduating three or four players into their first team squad at the end of the season then something is wrong, something is very wrong.
This is the one area where they have a prayer of keeping pace with us, and they are just not up to the job.
If they had made a success out of their youth acadamy they might not need to spend millions on the first team squad; this is what many of us feared might happen at the start of “the journey.”
That plan is in absolute ruins.
I watched Beerman, Bates, Halliday and McKay at the weekend, as closely as I watched any of our own lads.
None of them is going to be a world beater.
If clubs were interested in spending £6 million on McKay I can only imagine that he has the same PR people who once convinced us to spend a heavy seven figure sum on the defender formerly known as Rafael. We call him by a different name, of course.
No club anywhere would pay that sort of money for this kid, and it’s a pipedream with some heavy weed behind it to imagine otherwise.
Halliday has nothing whatsoever to offer football at the top level.
He’s got by for years on being “a Real Rangers man” who “gets it”. You could pluck one of them out of the stand and stick him in a first team jersey and get heart and commitment and passion. His passion flared only briefly in the match, his commitment for just a second, one of thuggish recklessness.
Beerman and Bates, who knows? They looked hopelessly out of their depth, but they may have a future in the game. Whether it’s at Ibrox is a different question because their supporters simply aren’t going to tolerate mistakes or failure at the moment. It makes the job of any young player trying to break through almost impossible, but for two kids who look raw and pretty basic you can multiply the pressure tenfold. Anyone might crack under that.
Today newspapers breathlessly reported a story about how they want to buy Aberdeen’s Kenny McLean, for a reputed sum of £1 million or more. It’s quite baffling how the media can still not be grasping this stuff; that club does not have £1 million to spend, certainly not on a single player. In total, spread across three or four players maybe, but not on one guy. Aberdeen will certainly not be in any hurry to sell him to them. That is the very definition of a non-story.
But it’s the same non-story we get time after time.
Sevco set to spend money.
£50 million of it is needed, if you believe Willie Henderson.
I mocked that story earlier in the week, because it’s a sheer fantasy to suggest that there’s someone out there willing to give it to them … but in point of fact, he’s come close, at least, to grasping what it will take to start dragging them out of this morass.
It will take somewhere in the region of £50 million, spread out over several years, sustained spending on top of sustained spending.
And here’s the horrible part for their supporters; even if someone out there was willing to give them that kind of money, if they wanted to get the best value out of it then most of it would have to go somewhere other than the first team squad.
This club needs a massive investment in the future. If they bought ten players at £5 million each that money would be gone in one splurge and the attendant rise in the wage budget would eliminate any benefit they got from it even if they qualified for the European groups. They would be better off to sink £20 million into long-term youth development … Celtic’s academy system is a well-oiled machine but that’s because it’s been financed properly year on year.
Another £20 million would need to be spent on building a truly global scouting network.
That too, as Celtic has proved, would be money well spent.
They don’t have those tens of millions, but that’s what the job requires, spread over years, to construct the kind of system we have at Parkhead. Money and time and the patience to see the job through to the end. That’s what’s needed at Ibrox and nothing short of it will do.
The irony of this, of course, is that they had both of these things.
When Sevco was founded there was a plan, or we were told there was a plan. It was simple, and it was feasible. It was, in fact, absolutely within their capabilities. They weren’t going to overextend. They were going to spend “the journey” doing exactly what I’ve just written about, running their first team on a low-cost basis as they spent big money on scouting and youth. The results might have been incredible, had they actually saw it through.
But instead they allowed McCoist to squander it on second rate junk. Then, when it became clear his team building had been a high-cost farce, they compounded the disaster by allowing Warburton to do exactly the same.
Now the pot is empty, and the pressure is on.
Celtic is four years away from ten in a row, and there’s no time left to build.
Colossal failures in judgement and vision have led them to this. Nobody either inside or outside Ibrox can see how they get themselves out of it. And year on year, as we build on success and they continue to look for short-term answers, the gap is only going to grow.
Their entire future was out on that park last night. So was part of ours. And we owned them. Ten in a row isn’t the only thing in our sights here; all the records they claim to hold from the corpse of Rangers are in front of us here. We’re going to take all of it away from them.
I’m really glad my generation of their supporters enjoyed “the glory years.” Because that’s as good as it’s gonna get and it’ll never get that good again. This is the price they pay for focussing on short-term glory, with a club built on shifting sands.