Celtic has the pieces in place. Now it needs a plan.

Over the weekend, I heard some good news.

The guy responsible for the drone footage of Barrowfield emailed me to tell me that his latest piece was going up very soon, and that he had done his final overflight, and that we were going to be ready to open very soon.

I’ve included the video at the bottom of this piece, and I can only continue to commend this guy’s work. He is excellent at what he does.

So the Barrowfield project is done and is now simply awaiting an opening. It’s good news. And it should be something that the club benefits from for years to come. But there’s a difference between having all the pieces in place and being able to make them work. We’ve talked about this often. Until our heads hurt.

Last week, there was talk that Darren O’Dea was getting ready to leave the club. Regular readers will know that I would welcome that development. They know that I would welcome that development and that I would hope it actually marks the beginning of a very big shake-up in the Celtic operation.

We can start by bringing in some foreign thinking, because the current thinking is not going to get it done.

We’re not going to progress with typical Scottish coaching. I’ve tried hard to talk with as many people with experience of having their kids at Scottish clubs as I can, and they all say pretty much the same thing: that the emphasis on size and physicality is far greater than it used to be, and that there is not so much focus on teaching basic skills on the ball. You can see where we’re going wrong.

So much of the thinking that surrounds coaching in Scotland is old school. Someone was trying to sell me the idea the other day that all of our coaches have top-class qualifications — but those qualifications are so easy to get now, and the schools to teach those skills are so plentiful, that most of them are just churning out chum. That’s a fact. It’s painting by numbers, pure and simple.

Coaches abroad have a different way of thinking. They’ve got a different way of looking at how coaching should be done. And the thing of it is, there’s nothing new under the sun. Tommy Burns went to study the academies at Ajax and at several of the German clubs whilst he was manager here.

He knew where the real quality was being produced, and he wanted to go and see how it was done. Dozens of coaches from across the UK have done the same. So why didn’t they bring back the ideas, the philosophies, the guiding principles of those academies and integrate them here?

It’s very simple. Those at the top of the clubs still want to do this stuff on the cheap and with the minimum of fuss. They don’t know what it is they’re being asked to invest in — and so some of them don’t want to invest in it at all.

One of the most unbelievable facts I found whilst looking into this subject was the one I talked about recently: Barcelona’s school of excellence, La Masia, costs them just £5 million a year. It has graduated dozens of players to their first team squad. I thought it would cost five times that. The investment is clearly worth every penny.

To produce just one footballer on the level of a Messi or a Lamine Yamal demonstrates its worth. We’re talking about next-level, world-class footballers. It’s all well and good to say that if we were capable of producing such players the big boys from the continent would swoop in — correct — but they’d also have to pay the fees that go with that. A project like that would pay for itself ten times over.

Now, I know it’s not as simple as saying, “Just spend the £5 million a year on a training academy,” because La Masia works amidst a gigantic system.

Those young players are playing against good players and good sides and well-coached teams all the time, even at the very bottom levels of the game. We have nothing like that here, and it’s something we have to lobby the SFA for, and we have to work with other clubs to create.

Because where La Masia really works for Barcelona is in the fact that it is part of an overall club philosophy. Barcelona is not, as Celtic is, a club made up of disparate little segments. It all works together in tandem. An overarching set of principles guides every level of development — from the youth academy to the first team. The club has a sense of identity, and this is what guides the philosophy.

And this all came from one person. It came from Johan Cruyff, who did exactly the same thing at Ajax and, between the two of them, created what has become known as the BarcAjax philosophy.

One of the first things that Cruyff did when he took charge of the club and started to restructure it into its current form was to tell the technical director that he wanted to abolish the requirement that the club would only sign players who were capable of reaching 1.8 metres in height. Because Barcelona, at that time, was a prisoner of the exact same type of thinking that is prevalent here in Scotland — the thinking that in order to be a good player, the physical attributes are most important.

He, in fact, was the guy who emphasised that the club should seek to sign smaller, more technically gifted players.

All La Masia players are taught that technical ability and the ability to read the game are the number one priorities. Not being physically strong. Not aggression. Technical skill and game intelligence. They bring in players from the age of 10 and 11. They house them. They educate them. And they work them hard on the training pitch.

And if it seems like a tough break to take these kids away from their families at that age, you know what? That’s how you build the right mentality straight away. That’s how you build strong mentality and how you find out who has that mentality. You give these kids a focus and a dream, and you tell them the way to that dream is excellence. And you drill that into them from the first. That’s what motivates them. That’s what gives them their energy and their push and their start.

This is not a new idea in sport. If you look at how the Americans train their tennis players, they do exactly the same. They have centres of excellence where players go and live and learn their craft at the same time.

In 2010, nine of the Spanish players who won the World Cup were Barcelona players who came through La Masia. Some consider that its ultimate triumph. If you want a triumph to challenge it, try this: that year’s Ballon d’Or? All three finalists were La Masia graduates — Xavi, Iniesta and Messi.

Two years later, after Guardiola had left and Tito Vilanova was in charge, they accomplished something almost without parallel. In a La Liga match away at Levante, a substitution early in the game saw them bring on a La Masia graduate — and that meant that every member of the eleven on the pitch was a homegrown player who had come through their academy. They won 4–0.

The first thing La Masia teaches all of its kids is the art of passing the ball. This might seem very, very simple, but in fact, it’s grossly underrated. And it’s incredible to note that from that very young age, they are emphasising pass and move, pass and move, pass and move. Tiki-taka football, in other words.

One of the things they teach their kids at the earliest stage is how to get their body into the right shape and position to receive a pass. It’s not about moving the ball from point A to point B — it’s about moving the ball to point B and then running to position C so that you can keep moving it forward.

One of the programmes they run is called La Masia 360. And what that involves is bringing in psychologists and sports scientists to work with the kids from an early age to make sure that not only are they able to cope with the day-to-day demands, but they are mentally prepared to handle the pressure and challenges that lie ahead if they’re going to go on and become top-class players. That is incredible.

But that’s how in-depth it all goes.

By providing the kids with all that support, with private tuition and everything else, they ensure that even those who don’t make it still go on to lead fulfilling and productive lives — and look back and thank Barcelona for making it happen. Their responsibility to these lads doesn’t end just because they don’t make it as players.

At La Masia, they even try to integrate the parents. They put on courses for them. They pay for the parents to do advanced education. They make the players part of the Barcelona family. They make them feel as wanted and important as the kids. It’s an all-encompassing, overarching philosophy — one that graduates one in ten of its players into the first team squad.

Their club teaches a philosophy to the players — of humility, and respect for themselves and for each other. If a player is really good, it’s part of his responsibility to help a player who isn’t as good to get better. It’s an incredible, mind-bending theory that stitches every element of the club together. And they do all this for £5 million a year.

Now no, I don’t expect us ever to build something on the level of La Masia. I don’t expect us ever to build anything that soars to the heights quite like that club’s academy does. But let me tell you something — it’s not impossible. They do it, and they make it viable. It’s not impossible. It’s a matter of will. You have to want to do it. You have to believe it will work. You have to want to create that philosophy for the club. And you have to have faith that the system will work.

There’s nothing new under the sun.

This isn’t Colonel Sanders’ secret recipe. Like I said, Tommy Burns went and studied the Ajax model — which the Barcelona one is based on — back in the 90s. And we’re still stuck with Stephen McManus and Darren O’Dea running our youth academy using the same ideas that have already proved to have failed.

We might not be able to build La Masia in Lennoxtown. But we do need to revolutionise the way we do things up there. La Masia shows what is possible. All it takes is the will and the ambition to aim high. Not to settle. Not to build something that’s all surface appearance and glitz without generating the results to justify all that spending.

It is great to see the Barrowfield project in all its glory. It’s great to watch that footage and realise that we’re not far away now from opening it up. And next season it’ll be fully functional and fully in use by the players in the B Team and the women’s team.

But none of it will work unless we have the right thinking and the right people, with the right level of imagination, in place to make it work.

That has to be next on the list.