Two Chelsea academy loanees are two different kinds of failure at Celtic.

Paulina wrote a very good piece yesterday on the Chelsea academy striker we have brought to the club on loan. She is right. He looks like a very exciting prospect, a top-tier talent, and exactly the kind of player I am glad to see Celtic have on the books for a year. He will add something. I have very little doubt about that.

But we are not talking here about a player playing in the Lowland League.

Maybe that is what we should be talking about.

Two of Celtic’s signings in this window are Chelsea loanees. This comes as the club, along with every other club in Scotland, prepares for a major SFA meeting today about youth development and the future of homegrown talent.

That summit will bring all 42 SPFL clubs together in St Andrews, with Craig Mulholland and Ian Maxwell leading the discussion.

I have written about that meeting already. I have written about our academy already. But that summit, as well intentioned as it might be, will not bend reality into the shape people want. Look at Celtic’s signings. Look at those two Chelsea loanees. That is the reality.

Yes, signing two players on loan from Chelsea’s development system is a failure of scouting and a failure of club ambition in one sense, no matter how good those players might be. In the case of the left-back, I think that is particularly difficult to defend. Once again, we have decided not to make a permanent signing in a position which badly needed one, despite having other obvious possibilities we could at least have explored.

So yes, that is a failure, no matter how it is dressed up.

The striker is different, and I am much more relaxed about that one for the reasons already outlined. He is genuine quality and there are basically two routes when you are bringing in somebody who is going to start as a backup player.

You can go and get an experienced head who will cost a lot of money in wages and may not even give you what you need, or you can go and get someone young, talented, fresh and highly regarded, somebody who will run all day, cost considerably less and arrive desperate to enhance his reputation.

That is a good decision. It is a smart decision, and I have no problem with it.

Except for this: it represents a failure of another kind. An obvious failure. The kind of failure which will be discussed today at Hampden, and the fact that it takes an SFA summit to bring this whole subject back into the light is itself part of the problem.

It should not require a national summit. This issue should have been dragged kicking and screaming into the light at Celtic a long time ago.

Because ultimately this is also a failure of our own academy system. It is a failure of youth development at this football club, and this is hardly the first time we have had to solve these problems using somebody else’s young players.

Brendan Rodgers was given an academy left-back from Barcelona on loan to fill the same position and barely used him. Last season we brought in Benjamin Arthur, a young centre-back from Brentford, and he featured only sparingly before returning south.

Celtic were later linked with bringing him back, but that never seemed especially realistic to me because Martin O’Neill’s decision to prioritise Dane Murray, our own academy player, was almost certainly the right one. Arthur subsequently joined Portsmouth on loan instead. But that is because Dane Murray has raw materials worth working with.

He is not some wild shot in the dark.

For much the same reason, Colby Donovan is a player many of us have a lot of respect for, which makes it difficult to understand why Celtic then went out and added Jordan Lotomba on a short-term deal as well.

I understand some of the logic because Alistair Johnston is injured and Lotomba is an experienced Swiss international who gives us immediate cover, and there’s talk that he can also play on the left. But another part of me still looks at it and wonders what exactly the development plan for Donovan is supposed to be.

Then there is Joël van den Berg.

Celtic have paid around £3.4 million for a 19-year-old midfielder from PSV’s development structure. I have watched enough footage of him to think there is clearly a very exciting footballer there. He looks like an absolute gem.

But even that represents failure at some level within our own academy. Because there is no equivalent of Van den Berg in our system. There is no equivalent of the Chelsea left-back. There is no equivalent of Shumaira Mheuka.

That is why we have gone elsewhere to find them.

Between the permanent fee for Van den Berg and the various costs associated with bringing in these other young players, Celtic will spend millions getting access to footballers developed by other clubs because our own academy has not produced players the coaching staff believes can perform those roles at the required level.

That ought to trouble everybody.

People sometimes point towards La Masia and say that Barcelona’s academy costs around £5 million annually to run. There are older published estimates around that level, but the figure depends heavily on what is included. But what is not in the slightest doubt is this; elite youth development is expensive, but it is worth it.

Celtic has never taken it seriously.

Even if we did, we are not going to get La Masia-style results immediately. We might not get them for years. But we could also spend those same years doing what we are doing now, banging our heads against the same brick wall, pouring millions into an academy structure which produces very little first-team value and then spending millions more buying other clubs’ unproven young players because our own do not impress the coaching staff enough.

That cannot be the answer forever.

Once again, we hear pundits suggesting current academy players will look at these signings and conclude they have no future at Celtic. Well, guess what? Most of them do not have a future at Celtic. That sounds harsh, but professional football is harsh.

They are not currently good enough to play regularly for Celtic, and we know that because there is not a queue of serious clubs trying to borrow them, let alone clubs willing to pay £3.4 million for any of them.

A lot of these guys will still make careers in football, and good luck to them.

Some will play in the Scottish Championship, some in the lower leagues in England and elsewhere, and some may go further. But the idea that Celtic is currently sitting on a hidden generation of top-level footballers who would all flourish if only somebody opened a magical pathway into the first team is fantasy.

There is one important exception to the broader historical argument.

Ben Doak left Celtic at 16 for Liverpool and was subsequently sold to Bournemouth for an initial £20 million, rising to £25 million. But he was not somebody Celtic judged to be inadequate and released after failing to break through. He was an elite prospect another club persuaded to leave before Celtic could properly develop him.

That is a different problem.

But among the players who have actually gone through our system, failed to establish themselves here and then moved elsewhere because people insisted Celtic had denied them a chance, I still do not see a great body of evidence that the club repeatedly got those judgements catastrophically wrong.

Rocco Vata, for example, has made a respectable Championship career at Watford, but he is not currently demonstrating that Celtic made some enormous footballing error by failing to build the first team around him.

The problem is not principally the pathway. The pathway is what it has always been. As Aiden McGeady said, when you are good enough, the manager cannot ignore you.

No club willingly spends £3.4 million on another team’s academy midfielder if it already has a comparable footballer sitting in its own building. That would make even less sense than the policies we’re currently following.

The pathway is not the problem.

This is about everything else we are doing wrong at academy level.

It is about coaching. It is about development. It is about talent identification. It is about recruitment. It is about facilities. It is about sports science, data, individual development programmes and all the other things elite academies use to turn raw talent into top-class athletes and top-class footballers.

In other parts of the world, clubs do this stuff properly.

I have long said Celtic should be poaching staff from the best academies in England and across Europe. If somebody is doing extraordinary youth-development work at Chelsea, Manchester City, Arsenal, Ajax, PSV, Benfica or elsewhere, find out who that person is and make them an offer. Give them full control. It will be worth it.

Instead, there have been periods when Celtic’s academy staffing has looked far too parochial. Too many familiar faces, too many friends of friends and too little evidence that the club is relentlessly searching for the best people available.

There was a period when a remarkable number of our academy staff had come through the Motherwell structure. That does not automatically make them bad coaches, but it does raise an obvious question about the breadth of the recruitment net and the standards we are benchmarking ourselves against.

There should be no jobs for mates. There should be no comfortable appointments because somebody knows somebody. There should be ruthless measurement of what the academy actually produces relative to what it costs.

As ever at Celtic, the problem ultimately travels upwards.

Every major institutional weakness eventually lands at the executive level because those are the people responsible for building the structure, appointing the experts and defining what excellence is supposed to look like. The board does not know how to build a modern academy, and it refuses to hire somebody who does.

It does not know what elite youth development looks like, and it refuses to recruit people who have already delivered it somewhere else.

So, it produces mediocre results and pretends that another review, another working group or another summit will somehow fix the underlying problem.

So, yes, bringing in two Chelsea academy players is a failure. In the case of the left-back, it is a failure on several fronts: scouting, planning and ambition, especially when the manager had identified other possibilities and Celtic did not get them.

The striker I can live with because Mheuka’s talent is sufficient to justify the move. But even that remains a failure of our development system. If Celtic had an academy striker capable of doing what he has been brought here to do, Mheuka would not be here.

But we don’t, and under the present structure, I see little reason to believe we ever will. Ever will. Not that we won’t soon have it. We’ll never have it.

That is the hardest reality of all.

We are not waiting for some miracle generation of young talent to be discovered. That is not how this works. Even when those players exist, they have to be identified and developed properly. The only way you consistently produce elite footballers is by doing youth development in an elite way, giving players every possible advantage and using every bit of knowledge, technology, coaching expertise and sports science available.

Too often Celtic has behaved as though putting up a couple of shiny buildings means the job is done. It isn’t. The people running this club do not possess the specialist knowledge required to do this themselves, and that is fine. They are executives. They are not supposed to possess it. Their job is to recognise that fact and hire people who do.

There is no SFA summit which is going to make that better by itself.

This cannot start in St Andrews and it certainly cannot start with the dumbest possible response, quotas which force clubs to weaken themselves by playing footballers who are not ready. It has to start inside our own house.

And let me say what is blatantly obvious. The Scottish club which gets this right first will reap the benefits for decades. The Scottish club which gets serious, invests heavily and cracks elite youth development before everyone else owns the future.

If that club is not Celtic, it will be a disgrace. We have every advantage from infrastructure to money. We are better placed than anyone. So, if it’s not us, nothing is going to repair the decades of damage our neglect has wrought nor repair the reputations of a single person who worked in our structure and let that happen.

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