Celtic’s Queens Park hook-up is a small step, but it’s one in the right direction.

One of the common themes on this blog is that we criticise the governing bodies an awful lot—and they deserve it. When we do it, we do it because they deserve it. But when they get stuff right, when they do things that are progressive and genuine attempts to reform certain elements of the game, I think we should get behind it and give credit where credit is due.

We have epically failed here in Scotland to make youth development work. That’s why the national team is a mess. That’s why club sides no longer produce, with any kind of regularity, the sort of top-tier footballers that we need. And it’s not enough to say that our best players are all enticed south of the border.

Only Billy Gilmour, who graduated from the Ibrox academy and spent a brief time as a Chelsea backup player before moving first to Norwich and then to Italy, has in recent years proved to be any good at all. A lot of our top youth talent goes to play abroad now, and a handful of them have done very well in Italy—but they remain small exceptions to the rule.

Actually, sit back and think of a simple moment. The moment when the club from Ibrox was allowed an exemption from the rule that every club had to have a team competing in the reserve league. The moment they were granted that dispensation, other clubs followed them. The reserve league collapsed—and although efforts have been made to rebuild it over the years, the fundamental principle that all clubs in the top flight should be mandated to play reserve team football has never been restored.

There are also cultural problems in Scotland, where the coaching of youth players is miles behind what you find on the continent. It’s something I’ve written about many times, and I continue to write about it because it’s a serious problem. And we need, at some point, to find a solution to it.

That solution doesn’t look like it’s going to be the Lowland League—a level far too low in the pyramid to offer our players any kind of proper challenge. Why do I say that through gritted teeth? Because even accounting for that, we’ve yet to win the damn thing. Still, anything that gives players at Celtic’s academy a chance to play at a higher level has to be welcomed. And that’s why I have to congratulate the SPFL and the SFA for proposing a rule change which might actually do some good.

That rule change will enable clubs to formally link with other clubs, and that formal link will allow them to send several players on loan to them. Celtic doesn’t mess about when it comes to this stuff. We’ve formed an alliance with Queen’s Park, which is the best possible club we could have linked with. This is a major lift for us.

We can now send some of our players to Queen’s Park, where they can be blooded properly, assessed to see what they’ve got, play at a higher level in the Scottish game than they currently do—and hopefully return to the club at the end of their loan periods, where we can make a proper judgement on whether or not they’re going to make it into the first team squad. It’s not a revolutionary change, but it is a good one. It’s an important one.

It’s a progressive one.

On top of that, this club deserves an awful lot of credit for linking up with the right team. We have a good history with them, and they sit at a nice intersection between being too big and too small. If a club’s too small, you’re not going to get the full benefit. If it’s too big, you risk sending your youth players there just to sit on the bench anyway. So Queen’s Park lands nicely—it’s definitely a forward step.

There is a silly tendency among a lot of football fans to let perfect be the enemy of good. And this is not perfect. This is not the wholesale change we’d want. But I’m not going to knock progress in whatever form it comes.

And this is progress. It may be one step forward rather than the giant leap we all hope for one day in terms of our academy system—but it’s better than going backwards, which it seems to me we’ve been doing for a long, long time.