Yesterday’s SFA summit produced the expected answer. The stupid one.

So yesterday all 42 SPFL clubs gathered in St Andrews for the SFA’s big summit on youth development, and out of it came the proposals for academy-player minutes which could eventually apply across the Scottish Cup, League Cup and all four SPFL divisions.

I think these ideas are dead on the vine. Top-flight clubs will not vote for them, and they should not vote for them.

They are not going to improve the standard of our youth players. They are going to weaken teams and create the illusion that Scottish football is actually doing something about a problem which requires far deeper and much harder work.

The one idea which was never going to work here is precisely the idea the SFA has gone for.

That is no surprise whatsoever.

Put the onus on clubs. Limit their freedom of selection. Shoe-horn young players into teams through an artificial system which demands that youth gets a chance whether youth is ready or not, whether the players are good enough or not, and whether those players might actually be doing themselves more harm than good by being thrown into major matches and expected to cope.

The proposals are explicit.

Two Scotland-eligible Under-21 players would have to start every Scottish Cup match, with at least one remaining on the pitch at all times. The same rule is proposed for the League Cup. Across the SPFL leagues, clubs would be expected to give Scotland-eligible Under-21 players an average of 60 minutes per match across the season, with clubs which fail to hit the target losing 10 per cent of their final placing prize money.

There is £1 million being offered to incentivise the whole thing.

If approved, it would begin in 2027/28.

Let me give you one scenario. Just one.

And it is one of many which could happen exactly this way.

Say these rules come in. Say the two Glasgow clubs draw each other in a cup tie and one of the academy players shoe-horned into one of those sides has an absolute nightmare. I mean the kind of nightmare that a senior player who has been there, seen it and done it could survive although maybe not easily, but the kind which could put a permanent stain on a young footballer’s reputation.

Do not tell me that could not happen. Of course it could happen.

In fact, if you deliberately put an untested and unready young player into that environment because the rules force you to do it, you are practically begging for it to happen at some point. And it will not happen once. It will happen over and over again.

Young players will not necessarily be encouraged by being included in those teams. Some of them will be terrified of being included because they know exactly what happens if they fail.

What I am going to say next will surprise some people. People who know me well will not be surprised at all, but those who think they know my politics might be. I have never been a fan of quotas. I despise women-only shortlists and everything like them.

I have never been comfortable with shoe-horning people into roles on the basis of sex, race or any other characteristic rather than their suitability for the role itself. We live in a more enlightened era than we once did. I have sat in political meetings where women were the barnstorming speakers who united the room, people of obvious talent and quality who did not need somebody lowering the bar for them.

I have always found the idea that capable women require that kind of special treatment patronising. Positive discrimination is still discrimination.

Quotas, by and large, do not manufacture excellence.

There are laws against discrimination. There are protections against unfair treatment. There are review procedures, appeals procedures and all the infrastructure which is supposed to make sure people get a fair chance.

Once those things exist, I have never understood the enthusiasm for pretending that the next step towards meritocracy is abandoning meritocracy.

And in politics, all positive discrimination ultimately did was hand parts of the right a weapon which they have been pulverising the left with ever since. It did not magically raise standards.

Football quotas have the same fundamental problem.

They promote on an arbitrary basis which is not necessarily connected to talent. They can breed resentment among senior professionals who find themselves left out because their club is being forced into a box-ticking exercise.

Will they turn mediocre footballers into good footballers? Will they turn good footballers into great ones? Of course they will not.

People talk about giving young players first-team minutes as if minutes themselves are some kind of magic spell. They are not. They never were. They never will be.

Football is a brutally Darwinian business. It is one of the last genuine meritocracies.

You cannot hide out there. On the pitch, under the floodlights, who you are and what you can do will eventually be exposed. Even if you make it, even if the gods smile on you and you are good enough to become a professional footballer, that is still no guarantee that everything will go swimmingly.

Ask Luke McCowan. Reduced to tears on the pitch in Linz because he knew he had experienced one of those nights supporters do not easily forget.

That is a guy who has made it as a professional. That is a guy playing for his boyhood club. That is a guy who has been involved in professional football for his entire adult life. And that is a guy who, after one atrocious European night, had large sections of the Celtic support declaring that he should never wear the shirt again.

That is football. That is football Darwinism at its finest and its most horrifying.

Is it fair? Only in the same sense that a lion bringing down a gazelle is fair.

It is the environment. It is what elite sport is. That does not change because the SFA writes a little rule requiring clubs to put younger players onto the pitch.

Not a single footballer is going to discover previously unknown abilities because he has been given 60 minutes in the Scottish Cup.

You either possess the underlying qualities or you do not. Development can improve them. Elite coaching can maximise them. Sports science can improve the athlete. Excellent opposition can sharpen them. Experience can teach them. But none of that turns someone without elite potential into an elite footballer.

Quality will tell. It always does.

No matter which club you are at and no matter which environment you play in, if it is really there it will eventually become so obvious that nobody can miss it. Aiden McGeady may have spoken the wisest words I have heard on this whole subject.

When you are good enough, the manager cannot ignore you.

That remains as true as it ever was.

What the SFA is proposing is doing something for the sake of being seen to do something. It is not a solution. It is not a plan. It will accomplish little except infuriate supporters, annoy senior players and potentially harm the teams on which it is imposed.

And yes, it could harm careers rather than make them.

Put an academy kid into the kind of environment I described above, a Glasgow derby in a knockout competition, and imagine he makes the mistake which decides the tie. Imagine every supporter leaving the ground saying that the kid should never have been on the pitch in the first place.

Even before he plays, he is no longer being judged purely on his talent. Because everybody knows why he is there. And afterwards comes the killer line:

“You only got the game because the quota demanded it.”

What does that do for the player’s confidence? What does that do for the legitimacy of his selection? What exactly have we achieved?

Here’s the other unspoken truth; clubs forced to comply with rules like this are not suddenly going to change their baked-in policies and entire ways of thinking.

Fan protests have not changed Celtic’s tune one iota.

This club continues to do many of the same things, make many of the same mistakes and display the same shitty judgement it has for years. We were already short of locally trained players on our European registration. We remain short.

And one of the obvious reasons Luke McCowan retains value to the squad is that he helps satisfy those registration requirements. Even if that is not the sole reason he is still here, people believe it is part of the equation.

Right there is the heart of the problem.

It is not inconceivable that this time next year there will be no Callum McGregor or James Forrest at Celtic. Think about what that does to the locally trained picture. Our club-trained players could increasingly consist of players like a reserve goalkeeper we barely use, Dane Murray, Kieran Tierney and Tony Ralston.

At what point does UEFA registration necessity itself start dictating our policies in this area? All I know is it hasn’t so far.

And if that reality has not already forced a dramatic rethink of Celtic’s academy system, if it has not already made people inside our club sit up and ask serious questions, then some shitty little quota imposed from Hampden is not going to do it.

Clubs are not stupid.

They are not going to be the turkeys voting for Christmas.

I will be amazed, astonished and genuinely uncomprehending if the most intrusive versions of these proposals pass because at every club the same basic equation applies. Managers play players when they believe those players are good enough to play.

The idea that Celtic is deliberately blocking a pathway for brilliant academy players because the club simply does not fancy using them is so moronic that it should barely require an answer. This is a club willing to risk Champions League income rather than spend outside the boxes it creates for itself.

It is not a club paying £3.4 million for a PSV youngster although it has an equivalent player sitting in Lennoxtown whom it simply refuses to notice.

We have brought two young players on loan from Chelsea’s development system. I do not know exactly what Celtic is paying for those deals, but it is obviously more expensive than promoting somebody already inside the building.

Celtic is not spending that money as part of some deliberate strategy to keep its best academy talent away from the first team. It is spending that money because nobody currently in our academy is regarded as capable of giving the manager what those players can give him. That is the problem. Not minutes. Quality.

Development. Coaching. Recruitment. Facilities. Methodology.

The entire structure is rotten.

And everybody in football knows there is no number of first-team appearances which will transform somebody into a top-class footballer if the necessary potential is not there to begin with.

I did not have high hopes for this summit.

I rarely do when it comes to the governing bodies of Scottish football.

They are as capable of small thinking as some of the people running our club, and they are one reason the Scottish game continually narrows itself into a tiny box revolving around one fixture, a fixture which will not even have away supporters at it for the remainder of this season. That really sums up the state of the place.

I did not believe some grand strategy was going to emerge from St Andrews. I did not expect the long-discussed elite development infrastructure which Scottish football has repeatedly talked about and failed to create. I did not expect the SFA to announce a revolution in coaching education.

I did not expect any of the hard stuff.

But I wrote before this summit about the one thing I absolutely did not want to see. The thing which would do the least possible good while creating the greatest potential for unintended damage.

And of course that is the solution they have put forward.

The stupidest possible answer. The one which will not make a single coach better. The one which will not make a single academy better. The one which will not identify one extra talented kid. The one which will not create one additional high-quality training pitch. The one which will not improve sports science. The one which will not improve scouting. The one which will not produce better competition for academy sides.

The one which will not stop English academies taking Scotland’s best young talent.

The one which will not make any footballer technically superior.

But it will produce a number on a spreadsheet which somebody at Hampden can point towards and say: Look. Minutes are up. Job done.

That is the appearance of work rather than actual work.

It checks a box without addressing the reason the box was empty in the first place.

Scottish football exists in this weird fantasy land where people are forever searching for shortcuts and miracle solutions to problems which do not have shortcuts or miracle solutions. Building a proper academy structure in Scotland requires clubs themselves to put in the hard yards.

Celtic has choices. If we would rather spend money borrowing Chelsea youngsters and buying talent developed by PSV than spend considerably more upgrading our own development structure, poaching elite academy coaches, improving recruitment, applying cutting-edge sports science and revolutionising the way we identify and develop players, that is on Celtic.

The SFA has choices too. Give us a proper academy league. Find ways of creating meaningful cross-border competition with English or European development sides. Give our young footballers real opposition and serious tests. Work with the Scottish Government and the clubs on the structural problems which allow elite prospects to leave Scotland so early. Invest properly in grassroots coaching and facilities. Raise coaching standards. Improve the development environment from childhood upwards.

Then perhaps we might get somewhere.

But every one of those things is harder than writing a rule which says clubs must play more young players.

Imagine how much brainpower it took to come up with that. Imagine the working groups. Imagine the meetings. Imagine the presentations. Imagine sitting for hours going through every possible thing Scottish football could do differently.

And at the end of it: “Make clubs play more kids.”

If this is the best they could do, then it is not only the proposal which represents doing something for the sake of being seen to do something. You start wondering whether the whole process was constructed on that basis.

And yet this is Scottish football.

The clubs being asked to vote on this are the same clubs which keep the whole structure the way it is. Because the clubs themselves possess enormous power over how the game is governed and who governs it.

They continually choose not to use that power to demand something better. You get the leaders you deserve, and eventually those leaders give you the policies you deserve.

The only consolation I take from any of this is that self-interest should govern what happens next. The proposals go to an SFA General Meeting in October and the SPFL AGM in November.

If enough clubs look at these rules and ask the obvious question, “Why should we surrender control of our team selection to compensate for the failure of Scottish football’s development structures?”, then none of the worst elements will see the light of day.

And nor should they.

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