Stephen McManus did not present a convincing case for Celtic’s academy system.

The other day, Graham Spiers put up his latest podcast, and the subject was how few Scottish players get to play in the Premier League.

The number of Scots playing in our top flight has been going down for years, and that’s a trend not helped in any way by the influx of cheap players from all over the place—either in transfers or on loan. But the real problem, of course, is that Scottish football just doesn’t produce enough good players anymore.

If it did, clubs wouldn’t have to go abroad to find them. I’ve written about this subject countless times.

The problem is systemic. It’s not rooted in one club. It’s not confined to a single organisation. It’s a problem with Scottish football as a whole. It’s a problem of ambition. A problem of governance.

The fact that clubs are not obligated to field a reserve team as a condition of playing in the top flight has been a major impediment to the kind of structure which once produced homegrown players in abundance.

And I don’t like doing this in the context of an article like this, but again, it comes down to something that happened at Ibrox which has now impacted the entire national game. Once upon a time, at the height of another Ibrox financial crisis, they were granted a dispensation from fielding a reserve team.

From there, all the dominoes fell. Other clubs quickly sought similar exemptions, and the Reserve League, which had served Scottish football well for years, collapsed. No structure has ever been built to replace it.

The Reserve League wasn’t the only problem, of course. It’s not the only issue. Although I can’t help but think that the humiliation felt by a certain club at watching Celtic win Reserve League after Reserve League played more than just a passing role in its eventual demise. But its loss has impacted every corner of the game. It has harmed Scottish football immeasurably. And while not the sole issue, it remains a real bugbear of mine. This is a crisis for which there’s one very simple fix: mandate a reserve team for every club in the top flight.

It won’t solve every problem, but it’s a step in the right direction. Because the mess we’re in has now led to our B team playing football in the Lowland League, which is one of the most backward and retrograde moves we’ve ever made. It is just one symbol of the mediocrity we accept in our own academy structure.

For all that this is a Scottish football problem, we’ve done nothing to make our own circumstances better.

Darren O’Dea has just left the club to go and join Swansea. He’s been at Celtic Park a long time, and he’s been promoted in that time—although nobody can really show me where there’s been a measurable improvement in our standards. The other day, Stephen McManus fronted the press conference to promote the Newcastle game, and I thought the way it was done was farcical.

He talked up Kieran Tierney as an example of what the Celtic academy system can produce. But I know too much about Tierney’s time at Celtic to be impressed by McManus’s words.

The truth is, our academy staff had largely overlooked Tierney during his development. It took a complete outsider—Ronny Deila, someone from a continental coaching culture—to identify Tierney as the top-class footballer he was. Deila also saw the potential in Callum McGregor. Without him, neither player would have remained at Celtic for much longer… and neither would be at the club now.

I’m not saddened to see the back of O’Dea. I only wish he were taking McManus with him. I found McManus’s recent comments to be absolutely preposterous. He talked about how winning isn’t necessarily an indicator that we’re achieving our goals.

You know something? That’s what losers always say.

“Don’t look at the scoreboard.” But the scoreboard is a way to judge progress. It’s a way to chart accomplishment. And since the remit of everyone at the academy is to produce first-team quality players, that’s another metric by which we measure success—or failure. So, by any measurable metric, he’s failed.

Everyone in the academy team has failed in recent years and all the talk in the world, all the hyping up of certain players—as McManus did the other day—doesn’t impress me one bit, and it shouldn’t impress anyone else either.

It reeks of desperation. Promoting players as future first-team stars based on performances in the Lowland League convinces no-one. The best thing we can do with the players he named is ship them out on loan as soon as humanly possible, so they can play at a better level.

One of the very best things we can do overall is to rebuild the entire academy coaching structure. That means the feather-bedded guys like Chris McCart and Stephen McManus need to be shown the door on the same day. I’ve got no confidence in these people at all. Sitting in front of the media and saying “winning isn’t everything” sums up the whole mentality we’ve allowed to fester under our roof.

We need to bring in continental coaches to revolutionise the way we develop players. Bringing that continental mentality to the club would be the best move we could make by a country mile.

Emphasise skill and technique rather than physicality and brute force. The departure of O’Dea is a chance to start fresh—to bring in new thinking across the board. Because Scottish football is in crisis. Player development is in crisis. It’s obvious. It’s everywhere. You can see it from a mile away.

But those of us who watch Celtic closely at every level? We’re already ahead of the rest of Scottish football in recognising this, because it’s been so long since our academy regularly produced players for the first-team squad.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Our definition of insanity is employing the same people, asking them to do the same things, and expecting a different outcome.

One brick has fallen out of the wall. Instead of lamenting that, we should tear the rest of the wall down. All that money we’ve got sitting in the bank—we should be using a significant chunk of it to bring our academy system up to a genuinely world-class level. There is no better use for it than that. But it won’t do a bit of good while the same failed leadership is in place.

We’re not the whole problem here. But our failure is a contributory factor in the wider failure of Scottish football. It’s a failure of leadership. A failure of imagination.

It’s not as if there aren’t clubs out there who could teach us how to do it. Tommy Burns visited the best of them when he was manager here—and we all know how long ago that was. His vision and his ideas were never realised. Because instead of building a ruthless drive to be the very best, we created a culture of feather beds.

It’s high time we said no more to that. It’s high time we seriously upped our game. Yes, Scottish football would be a sideways beneficiary of that. But the real beneficiaries would be us, of course—the club and the fans. Because there’s nothing better than seeing a homegrown player scale the heights.

That’s why it felt so good to welcome Kieran Tierney back to the club. Because he was the last one to actually do it. And I’ll never forget that it was in spite of, not because of, the so-called geniuses running the show.