Celtic needs to build a better youth setup … before someone else in Scotland does.

A question someone asked me yesterday has been ringing in my head ever since. I kind of thought I’d answered it already, but I realised I haven’t done so in any detail. So let me tackle that question now.

The question is this: is there any element of the Ibrox takeover saga which might give me later concerns?

And the answer to that is yes. There is one area where they could make such dramatic improvements that we would have real problems on our hands. And it’s got nothing to do with scouting or transfers.

The one area where they are ripe for expansion—and where we are ripe for expansion, yet aren’t doing it—is their academy system.

If they get the academy system right—if they can do what clubs in England have managed with theirs—if they can produce even two or three good players every four or five years—they could steal a march on us in an area where we should not be lagging behind. And that might, at some point, give them their opportunity.

It is perfectly clear that the Celtic academy system does not work. It is failing to create and graduate top-class footballers into our team. I don’t know all the ins and outs of what’s gone wrong, but I do know this: there are far too many feather beds up there. Too many parts of the structure where people seem to feel they’ve got a job for life, and nothing is really at stake.

Instead of filling this club with the Friends of the Man, it’s high time we did a full-scale strategic review of the club at every level. We need to ruthlessly assess whether or not we’re getting value for money from the academy—and whether the people at the top of it are pulling their weight and delivering results. And frankly, I don’t see how any external review could possibly conclude that they are.

Just look at our first-team squad. The evidence is right there. We haven’t graduated a first team player, or created a first team regular, in years.

Now, I have no idea whether or not the Ibrox club intends to make youth development a priority. I don’t know whether the new owners, if the takeover goes through, would even consider it a central concern. But I can’t see any way in which they wouldn’t believe that there are potential returns to be made by putting money into that structure—especially if it means producing first-team players.

Their club recently pulled out of the Lowland League and dismantled much of its academy setup. That was a financial decision and not part of some revamp. But if the Americans come in and want to spend money on it then that might turn out to be one of their better decisions. Their system wasn’t fit for purpose and wasn’t delivering. We, on the other hand, are still persevering with our Lowland League team—and this nightmarish experiment—for reasons that defy understanding.

It’s not working. It is obviously not working. You can tell by the simple fact that we are, by far, the best-resourced side in the Lowland League—and we still can’t win it. Until we have the players capable of winning that competition, there is no clear pathway from that setup to the first team. Even then, I would be loathe to move any player directly from competition at that level into our side.

Something fundamental has gone wrong at the Celtic Youth Academy. Back when Celtic trained at Barrowfield, before modern sports science and all the paraphernalia of the modern game, we were still producing good young players. Scottish football was producing them. Now it isn’t. And no one seems remotely interested in finding out why.

We don’t do things the way the continentals do.

We lack the vision and the boldness to emulate what many of these clubs manage. Some will say we lack the money — but we’re spending a lot of money on Lennoxtown. We have to be. And it’s not producing the goods.

So what does success actually look like? What kind of ratio should we expect? How many kids have come through the academy system over the years? Hundreds, right? Loads of them have gone on to professional careers elsewhere, and we hold that up like it’s some sort of badge of honour.

But very, very few have made our first team squad.

Now look at how the big boys do it. Look at Barcelona. Look at La Masia—the best youth academy in world football.

Since its inception, over 400 players have gone through La Masia. Over 40 have made the grade into the Barcelona first team. That’s a strike rate of one in ten. And that one in ten includes the likes of Iniesta, Lamine Yamal and Lionel bloody Messi.

That is what success looks like. And when you compare it to our grotesque failure, the contrast is frankly terrifying.

People assume La Masia must cost a fortune to run. But it doesn’t. It costs just £5 million a year. And considering we waste that kind of money every couple of years on signings that flop, you have to wonder what we could be achieving if we spent more of our money in the right places.

Like everything else in football, it comes down to whether you want to do it. Whether you’re willing to make that commitment. Whether you’ve got the bottle to roll those dice. Whether you’ve got the vision.

And someone in Scottish football will do it. Someone will see the value in not spunking money away on dud foreign signings, and instead investing a few million a year—peanuts in modern football—to build something else.

You could probably create a Scottish version of La Masia and run it on £2-3 million a year—and if done properly, you’d start graduating players of a far higher calibre than what we’re seeing now.

And because someone’s going to do it, and because the two most likely clubs to do it are us and them, it may well come down to something as simple as which of us wakes up and wises up first.

If they steal a march on us in this area, a lot of people will—quite rightly—be asking what in God’s name we’ve been doing all this time. And that’s not a question unfamiliar to regular readers of this site. We’ve been asking it for a long time.

Restructuring the academy is a long-term project. It’s not a quick fix. It won’t yield instant rewards. But it future-proofs us. It stops us from taking a short-term view and instead focuses the club on something that really matters.

I wish to God I could see some sign that we’re taking it seriously.

If the club across the city decides it does, they could be years ahead of us before the people in our boardroom even realise there’s a race on.

So yes, there is one thing that this lot could get right—one thing they could do better—and it’s not what their fans think, which is splurging it all on first-team ready players. If they funnel that money into a proper youth development setup—if they embrace continental ideas and bring in continental coaches—they could fix a lot of long-term problems.

And in that area, at least, we might just find ourselves behind.

That’s not something we can afford to be asleep at the wheel on. The problems in our own house are glaringly obvious. If we’re not fixing them, then we are asking for trouble somewhere down the line.