The Scottish Football Association has put forward radical new proposals to give more playing time to home-grown under-21 players, with the country's top clubs asked to vote on them by the end of the year. SFA chief executive Ian Maxwell believes Scottish football might need a total reset to get back to producing future stars.
Maxwell accepts that managers, clubs and supporters might need to show more patience for the long-term benefit of the national game.
Joined-up thinking needed
Maxwell stated: "I think that goes back to everybody, every part of the club being joined up."
"If you go into any academy, they'll talk about developing players. If you talk to any academy manager, he'll tell you he's got players ready to play."
"If you talk to any first team manager, they'll say they're happy to play players. There's not the buy-in."
"There's a bit of going to supporters and saying, right, see if you want us to be better. We're going to have to do this. This is what the evidence shows. This is what the best clubs across Europe are doing."
Debunking the myths
Maxwell addressed the belief that playing younger players leads to losing games, calling it a myth.
"The Twenty First Group (data) showed us that actually had the opposite effect when they came on later on in matches," he said.
"We can't because we need to change the mindset."
Scottish DNA problem
Maxwell knows Scotland and its football are creatures of habit and adverse to change.
"It's a Scottish, maybe a Scottish DNA problem. It's certainly a Scottish football problem," he added.
"The first question is, I'll tell you why I can't. It doesn't matter why you can't because this is what we need to do or we're just going to end up sitting here, with another chief executive in 20 years' time, in the same meeting, having the same think tanks and the same reviews."
Lennon Miller example
Maxwell also knows Scottish football must create more Lennon Miller-type stories to show the next wave of talent that they don't have to go elsewhere to reach the top.
"Lennon Miller's a really good example," he said.
"You're not telling me that some agent didn't come to Lennon and his dad and family, sat them down and said: 'I can take you down south for this, even after a season at Motherwell.'"
"They've obviously made a decision that says, 'You know what? No, we're staying here.' He then moves for five million pounds and earns whatever he's earning at Udinese."
"He could have gone for £200,000 three years before that and earned five grand a week. I'm going to make these numbers up, whatever the salary is. But he's earning four or five times that now. So that's actually the pathway."
"That's what we're trying to say to players. If you stay, that's where you end up. But they can't just see as I want on."
Agents and the pathway
A lot of Scotland's talent drain has been pointed towards money and agents.
"So I think the agent thing is a difficult one," the former St Mirren defender claimed.
"I think we need to probably try and get a bit closer to agents and get them to understand that there's a pathway as well and get them to understand that we are making changes because there's a financial business model that's linked to that."
"If you're an agent, are you better moving a player at sixteen, seventeen for X or are you better wait until he's twenty-one and getting four or five times X? So there's benefits to them as well."
