Mackay to lobby clubs on ‘two-tier’ Project Brave
MALKY MACKAY has begun a fourday campaign to garner support for the SFA’s Project Brave.
The governing body aims to reduce the number of academies included in its main youth programme from 29 to 16 and roughly halve the 2,500 young players involved in order to focus resources on star potential.
Plans for a two-tiered section of elite academies have come under fire from some clubs, most notably Motherwell, who believe they are a threat to their future as the best schoolboys would opt to move to clubs in the top division.
SFA chief executive Stewart Regan said that interpretation was a misconception but admitted there would be two tiers.
In an internal interview posted on the SFA website, Regan said: “The eight is a misnomer. There is no initial set of eight and second set of eight.
“There will simply be the successful clubs that qualify through the bid document and become Scotland’s elite academies.
“Currently we have 29 academies in Scotland for a population of 5.5million people and around 2,500 elite players in the system.
“When you look at Germany, in terms of what they call Das Reboot, when the DFB got together with the Bundesliga to restructure their performance strategy, they ended up with 54 academies for a country of 88million people.
“They focused on the very best and we need to focus on the very best players and the very best academies with the limited resources we have.
“So the recommendation from the working group was to have no more than 16 academies in Scotland to be defined as elite.
“And when the group decided how those academies would be structured when it comes to playing games, programmes against each other, they decided it would be much more efficient and effective to have two tiers of eight teams.”