Celtic had better start getting ready for FIFA’s proposed new rule change.

Yesterday, we read about proposed FIFA regulations that could force clubs to field a homegrown under-21 player, possibly under-20, at all times. Not just Celtic. Not just Scottish clubs. Every club across Europe and the global game could feel the impact if this comes to pass.

Right now, this sits as someone’s mad idea, not settled law. Many leagues and clubs will oppose it loudly, and they should. But if it does happen, Celtic will need to stand in a far better place than we do now.

Because our academy is nowhere near ready.

It does not produce players of the required calibre. It does not produce players we can put into the first team without weakening it. Everyone knows the academy is failing. Everyone sees the substandard thinking and the substandard appointments that run through it.

Perhaps the possibility of this rule will give us the slap in the face we need.

But knowing Celtic, we might just decide not to bother. We might decide to let the chips fall where they may and carry on exactly as we are.

That is what worries me.

This is exactly the kind of policy that would allow other clubs to get the drop on us. If it passes, some clubs will use it as a spur to modernise. They will invest properly, plan properly and create clear pathways from academy to first team. Meanwhile, we will probably continue to flounder unless somebody inside Celtic Park wakes up.

This should be wake-up time.

Whether the club understands that in time is another question.

Look at our academy record. It is woeful at this moment. We are not ready for a policy like this. We cannot just throw academy players into this team right now, because too few of them are good enough.

The overall standard of the team would go down as a consequence.

Yes, this regulation may be a long way from being introduced. It may never happen at all. But because it is about youth development, I strongly suspect some version of it will eventually come back, if not now then later.

Think for a minute about the position that would put us in.

We would be required to graduate two, three or four players every single year. Remember, the rule being discussed is not simply that an under-21 or under-20 player has to be in the squad. It is that one has to be on the pitch.

You could not even sub one off without bringing another one on.

When you take rotation into consideration, you are talking about three or four of these players needing to be in the squad all the time. They would need to be ready to step up and play. Then, when they are no longer young enough to qualify, the next batch would need to be ready behind them.

Celtic cannot possibly go into that era with the same people running the academy that we have right now. They are not the brightest and the best.

Let’s not kid ourselves. Our youth academy structure is probably miles behind most clubs in the top three levels in England. Those clubs, and their national association, take this stuff seriously. We don’t.

You only have to look at the calibre of people we have brought in as coaches in the academy to see that.

This is what some of us mean when we say we want a modern Celtic. A modern club does not just respond to changes like this. It gets out in front of them. This one isn’t.

For a long time, we have got by with this mad policy of signing project players from elsewhere and developing other clubs’ footballers. That was exactly the complaint we raised when we brought Simpson-Pusey to the club. It was the same complaint when we brought Benjamin Arthur in.

There have to be players in our own academy who could have been introduced instead of developing other clubs’ players.

Not that we did much developing anyway, because guess what? They barely played.

Everything we do is incoherent.

This season, our signing policy caught up with us in a big way. It is only a matter of time before the mess we have made of the academy catches up with us too.

And it will come.

Even without this proposed FIFA rule, we still need to register eight homegrown players for Europe. We still need a core of developed players in the first-team squad. We are almost at the end of the current generation, with James Forrest and Callum McGregor both in the latter part of their careers.

There is no obvious sign that they can be replaced from within the club itself.

For years, we have got by on the talents of those guys and Kieran Tierney. But we are almost out of time there, and this proposed policy may accelerate our problems even more.

This is not something that can wait until the problem is standing right in front of us, staring us in the face. We have to prepare for it now.

This club is miles behind where it should be. The road is about to get a lot harder.

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