Project Brave is a numbers game for us, admits Gray
NUMBERS and spreadsheets are Les Gray’s life. That and youth football. Perhaps it is because both come together seamlessly in the SFA’s Project Brave plan that he is so invested in the subject. The Hamilton Accies chairman was just one member of the think tank which came up with the latest brainwave to revolutionise Scottish youth football. Chaired by consultant Alistair Gray, the strategy group also comprised his counterpart at Ross County, Roy MacGregor, Hearts director of football Craig Levein, the heads of youth at Rangers and Celtic, Craig Mulholland and Chris McCart, plus the heads of football operations at Hibs and Aberdeen, George Craig and Steven Gunn. SFA input came from Campbell Money and, for a while at least, from performance director Brian McClair. Now it is McClair’s successor Malky Mackay and his boss, SFA chief executive Stewart Regan, who are tasked with delivering the controversial scheme, which envisages a radical cut in the amount of children in the Club Academy Scotland system, with resources being targeted at a limited number of ‘performance’ academies. Underpinned by the mantra of ‘best v best’, the scheme will create winners and losers – Premiership sides such as Partick Thistle and Motherwell may struggle to make the top tier, if not also historically excellent youth schemes like Dundee United and Falkirk (Forth Valley) – so it is little wonder that Gray (left) has been painted as the devil incarnate in some quarters for doing everything he can to make sure that his club are on the right side of the split.
In fact, various criteria will determine which applicant clubs will be admitted, factors such as a credible business plan, the number of full-time staff, and a mysterious thing called Measurable Performance Outcomes (MPOs), an algorithm of sorts which scores you on what your academy actually produces. While it is legitimate to question what happens to the clubs, academies and children who don’t quite make it, it is hardly Gray’s fault that no other club of their size are as invested in providing playing top-level playing time to their academy products. In fact, Project Brave could be read as a challenge to the rest of Scottish football to show the same ambition as they do.
Those who think Hamilton play the system often forget that the points in question have always been rather unfairly been weighted towards big