A Scottish Cup winner at the age of 17, Paul Lambert’s path to first-team football at St Mirren was uncluttered by overseas obstacles or players plucked from the reserve teams of English Premier League clubs.
“I made my debut when I was 15,” he recalls now. “And I had brilliant coaches. Alex Miller came in with Drew Jarvie and Martin Ferguson. I had two years to prove to Alex that I could play first-team football before I was offered a YTS scholarship.
“I went in and did all the jobs you did back then. Cleaning boots, doing the kit, helping other guys, and we would play on Saturday for the reserves.
"If St Mirren were playing Celtic at Parkhead, I would play for St Mirren reserves against Celtic reserves at Love Street, and you would play against men. Maybe they weren’t getting a game for their first teams, or they were coming back from injury.
“You learned quickly in that environment, and I think we’ve lost our way in Scottish football since then.”
The Sat Navs will plot a course for St Andrews on Friday morning, with Scotland’s 42 senior clubs gathering in the Fife town for a summit called by the Scottish FA to discuss the crisis in youth development.
Hosted by chief football officer Craig Mulholland, invitations have gone out to the club owners and chief executives who dictate strategy. There will be no finger-pointing or lectures or browbeating; no discussions on league reconstruction or summer football. To capture hearts and minds, Mulholland will lay out the brutal reality of just how bad the situation has grown.
On Monday night, Five Live debated figures showing that just 27 per cent of the players who started in the SPFL Premiership last weekend were eligible to play for the national team.
In Norway, where Erling Haaland and team-mates stormed to the quarter-finals of the World Cup, the last round of top-flight fixtures featured a homegrown quotient of 64 per cent.
Since Hamilton Academical, no Scottish club has made any real, concerted effort to give academy players a first-team chance. While Mulholland can’t force change, he can show them how some of the best teams on the continent do it and hope the penny drops.
Clubs might also look closer to home, where Motherwell have raked in millions from the development of players such as Lennon Miller. The economic case for growing their own is undeniable.
Lambert left St Mirren to continue his own development at Fir Park, and that pathway served him as well as the likes of Miller or Elijah Just. Moving to Borussia Dortmund, he won a Champions League medal in 1997. Returning to Scotland, he won four league titles, three more Scottish Cups, four League Cups and captained Celtic when they made their last appearance in a European final in 2003.
As manager of Norwich, Aston Villa and Wolves, he gave first-team debuts to the likes of Jack Grealish, Morgan Gibbs-White and current Aberdeen player Conor Ronan. When he looks at Scottish football now he sees no kids with the explosive talents of a Grealish waiting in the wings. Scant evidence of a battalion of young Paul Lamberts waiting to burst through.
“I worry for the game in Scotland a wee bit now,” he admits. “I look at Celtic and Rangers, the two biggest teams up the road.
“How many Scottish players are actually playing there? I couldn’t tell you.”
Celtic’s starting XI for the 3-0 win over Aberdeen featured two Scots-born players, while their opponents had three. Rangers started with just three Scots in Falkirk and, despite captain Lawrence Shankland being the matchwinner, the pattern is repeated across the top flight.
While champions Celtic were scrambling around to draft in new signings in the final days of the window, their B team were battling back from 3-1 down to beat League Two Stranraer 4-3 in the KDM Evolution Trophy thanks to a hat-trick from striker Lucas Clearie.
While the 17-year-old has now scored 13 goals in 10 games – claiming a strike or an assist every 53 minutes – the club still signed 18-year-old England youth international Shim Mhueka as cover for the rest of the season. A Chelsea teenager will be given first-team football while one of their own prospects will ply his trade in Scotland’s Lowland League.
Capped 40 times for Scotland, Lambert worries about the impact of all of this on a national team which struggled to make any impact at the World Cup finals.
A patchy and ageing team will require a revamp under Sebastien Pocognoli and, while the game still produces technical players, there is no golden generation waiting to burst onto the scene. A lack of first-team minutes stunts their growth.
Those who show up well in academy football are snapped up, between the ages of 16 and 21, by English clubs with deep pockets to pad out an academy system decimated by Brexit visa restrictions. Few go on to play first-team football at the clubs they join.
Those left behind stagnate while clubs in the SPFL Premiership import job lots of English and overseas players. The millions spent on expensive Danes, Croatians, Colombians and Serbians do little to improve results in Europe, and the coefficient is plunging fast.
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The SPFL argues that the situation is improving. The implementation of club co-operation agreements sees youngsters move freely between Premiership clubs and lower league teams and allows them to play for both in the same week. As a result, players eligible to play for Scotland have managed 94,229 minutes during the 2025/26 KDM Evolution Cup – up from 21,489 minutes in the previous campaign.
The SPFL have also relaxed the rules so that 15-year-olds can play first-team football in the KDM Cup and the league. Aberdeen’s Andrew Fasanya became the youngest player in the club’s history in July, and while Lambert approves of the efforts being made, he feels that the SFA and SPFL can do more. Like everyone else, he is not entirely sure what.
“If you don’t get homegrown players coming through, then what on earth does the national team do?” he asks. “I don’t know enough about the guys running the SFA to know if they have enough about them to make a difference.”
Chosen as the replacement for Andy Gould, Mulholland led the pursuit of Pocognoli and now has the task of persuading clubs to think more strategically.
Possible solutions include the introduction of a set number of young Scots in matchday squads, incentivising clubs financially to give kids minutes, allowing clubs to put young players under contract before English clubs get there first, making it harder for middling overseas players to gain Governing Body Exemptions (work permits) and exploring ways to give young players more competitive games against grown men.
While he can lead a horse to water, he can’t make it drink. Even if clubs reach a rare agreement on what to do, the implementation could be grudging and patchy.
Towards the end of Lambert’s time at Celtic, the old SPL introduced a stipulation between 1998 and 2013 that clubs had to name three under-21 players in their matchday squad. Most became jersey-fillers, shoehorned into squads to make up the numbers.
Prisoners of a rule book, the former Celtic midfielder worries that the St Andrews summit will generate more well-intentioned policies which fail to alter the culture. “They were trying to force 21s into a squad where they had not really earned their stripes yet.
“Yeah, they could say, ‘I was on the bench for Celtic.’ But does that make them a Celtic player? No it doesn’t.
“Maybe after 300 games, yeah. But not because you are sitting there due to a rule brought in by the SPFL. That’s crazy.”
Youth development is a subject close to his heart after 15 months spent working in Australia for Borussia Dortmund.
Over the years, the Bundesliga club has found and developed Erling Haaland, Ousmane Dembele, Jude Bellingham, Christian Pulisic, Jadon Sancho, Achraf Hakimi, and Robert Lewandowski. They also gifted Lars Ricken, Mario Gotze, Marco Reus and Antonio Rudiger to the German national team.
Lambert returned to the club where he won the Champions League as Asia-Pacific technical director and worked with partner club Wynnum Wolves to integrate Dortmund’s youth coaching methods as part of a five-year development partnership with the Australian government.
“Dortmund don’t buy superstars these days,” he says, “they make them.
“It’s such a big operation, and I was in Brisbane while travelling to Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Japan, Thailand, India and Vietnam.
“I saw some great, talented kids, and the aim was to implement the Dortmund philosophy.
“It’s very difficult to be a footballer; not many make it. So they try to train them to be good people first and foremost, and if they don’t make it there then maybe they can make it somewhere else.”
During his time Down Under he remembers a 10-year-old boy in Brisbane as good as any he had seen at that age. While youth development is a worthy and important role, he worries that the creativity, flair and instinct of the young are coached out of them by mentors auditioning to be the new Guardiola.
“That boy was so free to just go and play. And that was the most important thing for me – he was free. When I started out I was a centre forward, and then I made my debut for St Mirren on the right wing.
“By the time I was 16 or 17, Alex Smith had moved me into the centre of midfield. So I played three or four positions before I became a central midfielder. I never played with straps around my shoulders. We were told to play like it was street football.
“When I look at it now, I think the clubs up in Scotland need to strip it right back now. Don’t give young players rules, just give them freedom.
"Get back to basics.”
