BRAVE NEW WORLD
Alistair Gray on what the SFA must do next to revolutionise the beautiful game
ALISTAIR GRAY’s consultancy firm is called Renaissance and Company, a fitting name for a man who has devoted much man hours recently plotting a long-overdue re-birth of Scotland’s national game. The independent chairman of the Project Brave working group will spend this week in the company of SFA chief executive Stewart Regan and performance director Malky Mackay, consulting with representatives of Scotland’s 29 Club Academy Scotland members, some of which may be more enthusiastic than others about the radical changes it envisages to how the SFA and the clubs develop young footballers in this country.
For the uninitiated out there, the document envisages a sizeable cut in the numbers of young players in academies, with resources targeted towards a select band – the best guess is now 10 – of “performance academies”. For Gray, the executive chairman of the Winning Scotland foundation, and a former chairman of British Basketball and British Swimming, sticking with the status quo is simply not an option.
The parallel he draws is with how more strategic, goal-orientated thinking transformed the Scottish Commonwealth Games team from 12-medal makeweights in Kuala Lumpur in 1998 to the titans who landed 54 medals at the home games in Glasgow in 2014. Or how Team GB went from a grand total of 15 Olympic medals in 1996 in Atlanta to re-writing the record books in Rio last year.
“At the last presentation we made to the Ladbrokes Championship clubs, we spoke about the UEFA ranking curve for Scotland,” Gray told Herald Sport. “If you look at it, we are going south-east, or it has done since 2004, while Belgium and Swizerland are going north-east in a consistent way. I told them that I knew another curve like that,” he added. “It was that of Scotland’s medal performances in the Commonwealth Games – following on from Edinburgh in 1986. I chaired the Scottish Institute of Sport from when it started in 1998 in Kuala Lumpur, and that was the pits, just like the Atlanta Olympics was for Great Britain. It has taken us since then to Glasgow in 2014 to go from a handful of medals to 54 at Glasgow.
“It has taken four medal cycles to make that change happen. But we have now got performance systems in place, backed up by an institute. An industry of people working full time, who are supporting every Scottish athlete and every chance of sustaining performances going forward.”
Gray has been involved much of the way as the SFA, from Henry McLeish to Brian McClair and beyond, have wrestled with revolutionising their methods but he retains an energy for the task. Project Brave is a complex, multi-faceted document and the biggest controversy – aside from a proposal for the inclusion of Old Firm colt teams in the lower divisions, an idea which is not integral to the scheme’s wider success – is trying to thrash out exactly how many teams will be granted this coveted “performance academy” status.
No number officially has been set for this top tier, with all academies invited instead to make their case for inclusion. Baseline standards like five full-time coaches, and top class medical and sports science facilities, will be prohibitive to many, though, with a complex matrix of Measurable Performance Outcomes (MPOs) also playing a crucial role.
While clubs like Motherwell have spoken of the dire ramifications for them should they be omitted, Gray for one feels that is the wrong way of looking at things. For him, this is simply an opportunity for all interested parties to raise their game when it comes to staff resources at their academy, playing time in the first team and ultimately international recognition. Some clubs may prefer the Brentford model, where they dispense with the academy altogether, and simply import loan players from the bigger clubs. Others will maintain their academy, but at a less exalted level, drawing on support from the SFA which is guaranteed for the next three years at least. But the status quo is simply not an option.
“Bigger isn’t necessarily best,” says Gray. “My own sport is hockey and some of the very best development work is done by Stepps, a smaller club without the same aspirations to play in Europe as others.
“There will be a number of clubs who cannot reach either the minimum criteria immediately for 2018 or are at a very low number of MPOs. If they can’t meet the criteria for a performance academy then they should propose what they can afford. But don’t propose the status quo, don’t propose a 14 or 16. It is difficult if you are No.9 and there is a top eight, or No.11 and there is a top 10. But if you want to be in that group, demonstrate that you are prepared to invest in making change happen, playing more young players in first teams, thinking more carefully about how you send players on loan, or take them on-loan. And hopefully give more young Scottish players the chance to play more football more often.
“There are clubs who are employing youth coaches, part time, below the minimum wage in academies. Are you telling me that is right? We have got to employ more full-time coaches”
Gray is hugely complimentary of how the various vested interests on the working group – club chairmen like Les Gray of Hamilton Accies and Old Firm heads of youth like Craig Mulholland and Chris McCart – have given up certain “sacred cows” to get their heads together on the subject. The end game is allowing the SFA to get a fuller picture of what they actually have to work with.
“We need to have a system which gives Malky and the coaches transparency of ‘who are our top 20 footballers in any age group?’,” said Gray. “‘What is their health like? What is their diet like? Are they getting game time?’ At the moment the SFA don’t even have that information.”