Ibrox will not catch Celtic with a “sign the best Scottish talent” transfer strategy.

Yesterday, Scott McDermott of the Daily Record decided to use his column to make some transfer suggestions to the club across the city. The player he was urging them to sign is Jack MacKenzie of Aberdeen, who will be available to sign a pre-contract agreement in January. McDermott thinks this is the first pillar of a brand-new transfer strategy based on signing the best young players in Scotland. This, apparently, is how they’re going to catch Celtic.

According to McDermott, ditching the policy of signing the best young Scottish talent is one of the reasons they’ve fallen behind Celtic. Now, I read questionable things in the Scottish media every single day, but you’d struggle to find a claim more questionable than that one.

There are only a handful of Scottish players in the last 10 years who you could say might have gone to that club and made any real difference. Some of those players were snapped up by Celtic, ruling them out entirely because they didn’t have the money to compete with us. Others moved to Italy, England, or elsewhere, again for fees the Ibrox club couldn’t afford.

I struggle to think of anyone they realistically could have signed who would have changed the game for them. It’s not as if they haven’t signed Scottish players in that time. They currently have Scott Barron and John Souttar, both signed from Scottish clubs. They also picked up Ryan Jack from Aberdeen on a free transfer during that spell, and he turned out to be little more than useless in the face of Celtic’s rampaging juggernaut.

The question that immediately comes to mind is the one Steve Clarke has already asked and nobody has answered: where is all this great young talent supposed to be coming from? Readers of this blog know I keep a close eye on Scotland’s best up-and-coming players because Celtic has always made a point of having at least a couple of them in the squad at any given time. They’re not the foundation of the team, but they’re valuable squad players and sometimes grow into bigger roles. They’re handy for European registration and squad depth. Yet we’ve lamented repeatedly on this blog that Scotland no longer produces these players in the same numbers we once did.

If there had been high-level, game-changing talents available in the past decade, we would have signed them first. Celtic would have been first in the queue for those players. Look at the ones we passed on, like Aaron Hickey, Scott McKenna or Ryan Porteous. Would they have been better than the players currently in the Celtic team? No. In McKenna’s case, he had an offer from the Premier League, so even if we’d been interested, we’d never have gotten near him.

Neither McDermot nor anyone else can tell me who these players are, the ones they missed out on who could have made a dramatic difference. I’m all ears.

Maybe he’s thinking of two specific players. One of them is Josh Doig, whom they passed on because they already had a Croatian international left-back and a promising Turkish youth international left-back at the club. We passed on Doig as well.

Would Doig have signed for either of us, given he had an offer from Italy on the table? I doubt it. And at the time, I don’t think it was crazy for them to stick with the players they already had, even if both of those players were ruthlessly exposed whenever they came up against Celtic, Barisic to a degree that still makes me laugh whenever I think of the roasting he got at the hands of Liel Abada.

The other player McDermott might be thinking of is Lewis Ferguson, also of Aberdeen. Ferguson is an undeniable loss for them. He would have strengthened their midfield, locked down a place in their engine room, and probably stayed there for 10 years. Celtic also looked at Ferguson and passed. But would Ferguson have made as much of a difference to us as he would have to them? Absolutely not. He might not have gotten into our team. He would certainly have walked into theirs. But he’s one player and could not, himself, have closed the gap.

I like Jack MacKenzie at Aberdeen, and it just so happens that Celtic might be in the market for a left-back if Greg Taylor departs. So, here’s my question: if MacKenzie is good enough to play for them and be a cornerstone of their new strategy, if he’s a player capable of helping them to close the gap, does that mean he’s good enough to play for us? And if he is, what happens if we make a move for him? Where does that leave them?

If he’s not good enough for us, then how are they planning to build a league-winning side out of him and players like him? Their strategy seems to be about signing players who are good enough for them but not good enough for Celtic. As strategies go, you can see the problem with that one—and I can definitely see the problem in selling it to their supporters.

The theory that they can rebuild their entire club by signing the best young Scottish talent is structurally flawed. Any Scottish player good enough to play at the top level will be a target for more than just Ibrox. Celtic will be interested, for starters. Then there’s the inevitable interest from England, and both Celtic and English clubs can outspend them easily.

This theory sounds good—if you don’t examine it too closely. There’s a moment in Oliver Stone’s JFK where Jim Garrison mocks “theoretical physics” by pointing out that it theoretical physics can “prove” that an elephant can hang from a cliff with its tail tied to a daisy stem. That’s how suspect this particular theory is. On paper, it looks perfect. You could read it and think, “Yeah, that’ll work, definitely.” Then you apply common sense, and it all falls apart.

This club is already in a big hole, and they can’t even begin to think of a way to get out of it. This certainly isn’t it.