WITH time running out in the Edinburgh derby at Easter Road last month and Hearts trailing their city rivals Hibernian by a single goal, Neil Critchley pitched teenage striker James Wilson into the fray.
The Englishman was rewarded for his bold move as the youngster struck with four minutes of regulation time remaining to earn a draw which prevented the visitors from dropping to bottom spot in the William Hill Premiership table.
The substitution showed that giving youth a chance can bear dividends. Sadly, it is something that precious few top flight managers in this country are, due to the pressure on them personally and their club as a whole to get results, are prepared to do. It is a major issue in the Scottish game.
The “Transition Phase” paper which the SFA published back in May acknowledged this, identified the problems which are currently preventing talented young players from making the step up and laid out a number of potential solutions.
Co-authors Andy Gould, the governing body’s chief football officer, and Nick Docherty, their head of elite men’s strategy, did not, however, advise that clubs should start paying managers financial bonuses for promoting youth footballers from the age-group sides to their first teams in their wide-ranging report.
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But could “cash for kids” really be a route which it is worth chairmen and chief executives going down in an attempt to bring through more homegrown players who are capable of surviving in the senior game and possibly even representing the national side in the future?
Dr Bob McCunn, the head of performance at Hearts, believes it might.
Dr McCunn studied for his PhD in sports medicine at The Institute of Sports and Preventive Medicine at Saarland University, a FIFA research centre in Saarbrucken where his supervisor was Tim Meyer, the DFB and Germany team doctor, between 2014 and 2017.
But the Scot completed an Executive Global Masters in Management at the London School of Economics earlier this year and his thesis – which was entitled “Giving youth a chance: Addressing the agency problem in professional football” – examined the intriguing concept in forensic detail. He feels it is worthy of serious exploration.
“It's always been in my sphere of consciousness. I’m well aware it’s a challenge that the game faces. In the role that I'm in, I've been in the room when a manager has been weighing up who to include in a squad or in the team for a game.
“So I can appreciate the different challenges that they face when making those kinds of decisions. When it came to the end of the Masters I was doing and I had pick a project and write a dissertation, that principal agent problem that exists in management in all industries just seemed really relevant.
“The CEO, the board, the sporting director and the fans all want clubs to produce their own players. So you've got the principal, the CEO, saying we want young players to play and represent us and then you've got the agent, the manager, who is the sole gatekeeper of who plays in the first team.
“There's a lot of talk about whether the players are good enough and whether they are doing all the things they need to be doing to get in. There's really not that much attention paid to the managers, who ultimately are the gatekeepers. No matter how good the players are, if the manager is reluctant to play them, then that's what will cause the bottleneck.
“Yes, of course, players have to be good enough to contribute to senior first teams. But I don't really see that as the primary issue or hurdle that stops youngsters getting their chance. So often it is the manager who, for whatever reason, many of them legitimate, is just reluctant to actually take the risk.”
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Dr McCunn continued: “In other industries, it's very common practice to incentivise employees, line managers, whoever, to do certain tasks. Research shows that as humans we are actually very sensitive to that kind of incentive. You don't have to incentivise people that strongly to encourage them to do what you want them to do.
“It just strikes me that it's really unusual for clubs in the United Kingdom to actually offer the manager any kind of financial incentive. Most clubs don't do it when it comes to encouraging managers to pick young players. It's an obvious lever that clubs could pull that might help. It could, in theory, take many forms.
“It's not a panacea. It wouldn't solve all the developmental issues that come along with getting young players into the team, but it's a really obvious one that clubs are very reluctant to consider.
“When it comes to that principal-agent problem, as the principal you're trying to figure out how can you get an agent to carry out the task or perform the behaviour that you're wanting them to do.
“You can incentivise them, primarily financially, or you can try and manage them through performance monitoring, to use a bit of jargon, which is also a useful tool. But that is labour-intensive, that's easier said than done.
“In football, so often the principals, let's say the board members, the executive team, don't have the expertise, the background and the knowledge that managers do. They're typically business owners, lawyers, accountants, et cetera.
“They are really capable people, but not necessarily that knowledgeable in athletic performance, player development, coaching, the technical aspects of the game which managers are knowledgeable in.
There was an a bit of a stooshie at Dundee United back in 2015 when it emerged that their then manager Jackie McNamara had received bonuses following the transfers of Ryan Gauld to Sporting Lisbon, Andy Robertson to Hull City and Stuart Armstrong and Gary Mackay-Steven to Celtic.
The Tannadice hierarchy released a statement dismissing the figures which had been bandied about and stressing that McNamara’s remit was to develop young talent with a view to selling them for profits and reducing their debt.
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"The manager's basic remuneration package was reduced considerably, replaced instead by a performance-based contract, with several bonus initiatives, which included developing young players into actual transfer targets,” they said.
But United fans were, even though they went from being £5.6m to just £1.4m in the red when Gauld, Robertson, Armstrong and Mackay-Steven departed, less than enamoured with the agreement.
McCunn, though, found that it is a common practice across Europe when he spoke to senior club executives during the course of the research for his thesis. He is firmly of the opinion that a variation of it could be used to encourage managers to give first team game time to youth players.
“There have been a few examples over the years, both in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, of managers receiving a bonus linked to a player sale,” he said. “There was a fairly notable example of that in Scotland when Jackie McNamara was at Dundee United.
“There was a bit of a furore at the time. I think the fact that it caused such a backlash demonstrates why so many clubs are reluctant to do it. The incentive was maybe seen as manipulating the behaviours of the manager negatively towards the club.
“I would dispute that because the team was very good at that point and they made a lot of money. Everyone was a winner there. But it definitely highlights the reluctance in the football industry in the United Kingdom to do it.”
Dr McCunn added: “I found examples of financial incentives being offered outside the United Kingdom. The study was done under the premise of anonymity, so the participants were candid with me. There were mostly executives at clubs based in other countries. I did definitely sense a cultural difference.
“At clubs based here, there was a caution and a reluctance to adopt any kind of scheme like that. I mean, there was a fair amount of interest in the idea. But when it came to actually talking about cash and the numbers involved, I could feel some of the executives I spoke to getting a wee bit uptight.
“But at one club in one of the top leagues in mainland Europe, they did have a scheme where the manager received a payment based on player sales. The chief executive at that club was very supportive of the idea.
“They had had a couple of big player sales, you are talking eight figures each. It certainly hadn’t harmed the club in any way. The club was very happy with the arrangement. It seems to have worked quite well for them and brought in significant transfer fees. That's a bit different from the type of incentive I’ve discussed. But it's an example that that kind of thing does exist. It doesn't have to be controversial.
“Culturally, there is just a bit of an aversion to that idea here for whatever reason. But on the continent, that's not necessarily the case. It shows this is a thing. The incentive is for a percentage of the profit of the player that has been sold not game time. But it's a homegrown player that they've brought through, developed and got to a stage where they're selling them for a profit.
“So it's kind of the same thing. It's undoubtedly linked. You're not going to sell a homegrown player for that kind of money if they're not playing and they're not playing well. So I would say that's a roundabout way of doing it. Clubs which have implemented that do so to try and protect themselves financially so there's only a payment due when there's a large windfall received.
“There's not really any exposure to sort of financial risk for the club in that scenario. Maybe an executive might consider the type of scheme where a bonus is paid if young players accrue a certain number of minutes as a risk. If nobody actually comes in and buys any of them they still have to pay the manager and that leaves them a little bit exposed.
“The work that I did was proposing a different type of financial reward, one not linked to player sales because of the obvious conflict of interest that some people might perceive in doing that. I think there is an argument, if you want to encourage a manager to play young players, to link an incentive to appearances or minutes played.
“A club could go to a manager and say, ‘We're not going to tell you who to play or when to play them, but if you are able to accrue a certain number of minutes, say 5,000, from players who have come from our academy in competitive games then you will unlock X payment
“‘And if you manage to amass 7,500 minutes from said players over the course of a season, you'll unlock Y payment’. Then you're not dictating team selection directly. There's research in management literature that suggests a financial incentive wouldn't have to be that big to encourage that kind of behaviour.
“But there are other benefits. There are savings to be made playing your own players in a team. Every club that I spoke to was enthusiastic about developing their own players and playing them. Very few of them, not none, but very few, financially incentivised it. And very few were good at it. Not many clubs actually said, ‘We think we do a good job of this’.
“They all said they loved playing their own players when it did happen because they cost a fraction of the wages somebody who's been brought in externally does. It might even be as much as a tenfold difference in a weekly wage. So even if a club didn't actually sell many players and didn't develop a particularly strong player trading model, they might still be able to benefit financially and on the pitch.”
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McCunn believes that clubs could avoid the sort of outcry which erupted at United over McNamara’s deal by being open and honest about any cash bonuses they are paying to their manager for promoting kids.
“Undoubtedly there are people who would be averse to having any sort of scheme like this,” he said. “But my counter to that is that it happens in many, many other industries without anybody raising an eyebrow.
“Bonuses linked to performance outcomes are commonplace, absolutely commonplace. It's how companies often attract the best talent to work for them. So this really is no different in principle. It's just that football is very public, there's a sort of microscope on people's behaviours. But the idea, in my opinion, is not controversial.
“A club could counter that by being transparent about it, explaining it to fans, communicate that managers shouldn't be solely judged on the first team's results. If a club is committed to youth development and they've asked a manager to develop their young assets and play them in the team, then make it widely known. Don't be ashamed of it, or think you're doing anything wrong.
“It's fine and well for people to say managers should be doing it anyway, out of the goodness of their heart. There's loads of managers out there, and I've worked with some, who would love to do it, who are inherently passionate about giving young people a chance. But it doesn't necessarily mean they always do it.
“The road to a productive youth academy is littered with good intentions, but very, very rarely are people empowered and encouraged enough to do it. I don't think Scotland has a particular issue in terms of having good young players, not any more so than any other country may have its challenges.
“In the case of football, it is developing the tactical, technical, emotional, physical attributes of football players. Why should that be treated differently to any other performance outcome that a different professional may have? If that's in the job description, then why not reward that?”
