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Did The SPL Strangle Our Country’s Hopes Of Playing At Major Finals?

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Until 2013, the highest professional football body in the country was not the SFA but the SPL.

Now with the amalgamation of SPL and SFL into one body the Scottish Professional Football League rules that particular roost, although you wouldn’t know it to see the way the SFA disdained their request for an independent review last month.

The formation of the SPL was all about money.

It was formed in the aftermath of the first big EPL TV deal, as Scottish clubs in the top flight started dreaming of similar riches. It didn’t take long for that particular dream to die and in subsequent negotiations those involved in securing those deals overplayed poor hands and set us back years.

During the so-called glory years, when Scotland had two teams in the Champions League and there was a first splurge of the good TV cash, there were concerns raised about what it would all mean for the development side of the game.

Clubs weren’t particularly interested in rearing their own players if they could afford to go out and buy players from abroad, and that’s exactly what most of them did. Clubs which have traditionally turned out quality footballers, as if from a conveyor belt, started buying foreigners instead and so it began.

The one concession to development the league put in place – the Under 21 rule – was unpopular from the start.

The list of managers who condemned it is depressing; they include Martin O’Neill, Tony Mowbray and Gordon Strachan at Celtic. Walter Smith, at Ibrox, of course was dead set against it. Gus McPherson criticised it whilst at St Mirren and Jim Jeffries ranted about it whilst he was at Kilmarnock. Three of those men, of course, went on to be national coaches, two of them with Scotland. Looking at it today, you can see how we got here.

As club managers these guys could not have cared less about the future of the international team; this is particularly egregious in Smith’s case. When at Ibrox the first time he was especially vocal in resisting UEFA’s “three foreigners rule”, he saw the youth system there as nothing but a cash-cow and in his second spell had walked out of Scotland to take over and once there never once showed the slightest interest in developing home grown players.

At the same time, the reserve league system was tweaked it seemed every single year, until you might as well have mothballed it, as many wanted to do. It was allegedly for Under 21 players, but the rules allowed as many as five players over that age to take part in it; a sop to clubs who had accumulating too many crap foreigners as some said at the time.

That competition was won by three different clubs in three seasons; St Johnstone, Hearts and then Rangers, before Celtic basically came to dominate it completely, winning eight titles on the bounce until the league authorities ended that run before it became too humiliating for everyone else.

Since then, clubs have been allowed to drop out of the national youth system all together, mostly as a money saving measure.

I laugh when I hear the SFA talk about youth development now, with a plan that changes every year and seems to be as much about money spinning “glamour” friendlies as it is about anything else. Managers who were never interested in youth development have been allowed to have their way, and the results are clear.

Consider for a moment Gordon Strachan’s comments in the aftermath of going out of the World Cup, when he said that our players were too small to succeed in the modern game; these are the words of a guy not so much behind the times as rooted in ideas which need to be drummed out of the game altogether. He lobbied for years to have the Under 21 rule quashed. Smith’s tenure at Ibrox was a disaster for youth development at that club.

Yet it’s easy to understand those guys, and O’Neill, coming as it from the position they did. They wanted to be able to stuff their teams with as much talent as they could get and when they had the money they wanted to spend it as they saw fit.

It was selfishness, but of a sort we all kind of understood.

This has forever been the problem; short time thinking, with no eye whatsoever on the future. The EPL has the same problem, but they at least have realised it’s an issue and tried to deal with it by insisting that at least eight members of the club’s 25-man squad are “home grown.”

Scotland has never adopted any such rule, nor would many clubs support it.

It’s been that way since the SPL was founded, and no-one has ever been in a big hurry to change it. As teams filled up with foreign dreck the whole idea of clubs rearing their own players ended up in the bin. The financial consequences of this strategy finally forced some of them back to the youth academies, but the problem was that they’d already cut those way back in part because of the cash situation but also because in the crazy days they no longer saw any need for them.

It was a rare club who bucked this trend.

The SPL was founded in 1998; that, and not coincidentally, was the last time Scotland qualified for major finals. The downward slide in the quality of the national team can be tracked right back to it, as if it was a clear signpost in the road.

I won’t blame individual clubs, but to give you a hint of what was going on at the time, Rangers signed fourteen players in the league’s inaugural season. Only two of them – Neil McCann and Colin Hendry – were Scot’s.

One of the other clear problems was that the league system was one of the few in Europe whose promotion and relegation was not decided on merit but because of a ridiculous insistence on having a certain number of seats in a stadium. This disenfranchised a number of clubs and spared the blushes of a few others; Aberdeen were an early beneficiary, and Falkirk the notable victim. A rule like that should have been challenged by the Court of Arbitration.

We are not the first European nation to ache like this; England, Italy, Germany and France all suffered to one degree or another during the 90’s and the 2000’s due to television money enriching clubs who then went out and bought foreigners. They all took a hit. All had to regroup, most notably Germany in the aftermath of England beating them 5-1. France is just the latest of them to emerge on the other side of it, better for the experience.

Scotland seems to have learned less than almost all of them except England, who, in spite of rules which seek to protect home based players has seen its national team go backwards. Those rule changes actually mean that the huge clubs each buy a handful of the best domestic talent and the clubs beneath them have to compete in a bloated market to sign second-rate footballers at huge prices. That’s a policy that’s going exactly nowhere.

Am I drawing a direct line between the SPL’s greed and short-sightedness and Scotland’s failure to qualify for tournament finals?

The link might not be concrete, but it’s there.

We love naval gazing in this country, and more than that we love the blame game and it’s already going in earnest. Strachan deserves some of the flak, of course, and his backroom team with him, most of whom were at clubs during this period when youth was routinely ignored.

Any examination of where our national game is has to start in 1998, when the SPL was formed in a blaze of publicity, the novelty of squad numbers and names on the back of jerseys. We were seduced by EPL bling and tailored our national sport to suit it, and the results have been haunting us ever since.

In the aftermath we couldn’t stop tinkering around the edges, and we’re still doing it.

One person proposed taking a long term approach, and outlined a vision for how to do it.

Ironically, football’s governing bodies asked him to do this and then basically blanked the document he produced. When Henry McLeish published his quite superb report into football in Scotland people nodded their heads, expressed their admiration, and then ignored it.

We are where we are, and even looking back seems ridiculous when we should all be looking forward.

But Strachan’s statements after our side crashed out are worrying because they are indicative of an attitude in our game which I know, having talked to people, percolates all the way down through the youth systems of certain clubs. The modern game in Scotland, and in England, is still all about size and pace … which is why those inferior, dumb foreigners who’s clubs and training regimens still put their faith in skills and ball control constantly run rings around us.

There is something wrong in Scottish football, but it’s in the minds of managers and coaches, not the bodies of players.

Scottish football is failing at every level, and to fix it we have to understand where the slide began and how we got here. The value in looking back is to learn lessons.

But that’s something else we’ve never been particularly good at.

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