Craig Mulholland believes Scottish football can create “something special” by developing young players if clubs come together.
Scottish clubs are facing increased competition from English sides for the country’s best young talent in the wake of Brexit, which limited opportunities to bring in players from abroad.
But the young players that stay in Scotland are finding it difficult to break into Premiership first teams, with only about a quarter of those who start each fixture being homegrown.
The Scottish Football Association has invited every league club to a summit on the issue next month, and recently appointed chief football officer Mulholland believes progress is possible.
Mulholland said: “I’m definitely a poacher-turned-gamekeeper on that one because when I was at Rangers I was trying to keep all the kids in the country, and then you go to (Nottingham) Forest and I was trying to steal all the kids out of the country.
“So I’m probably as well-versed as anybody to understand both sides of that issue. But it’s not a simple fix. What we need to say is: ‘Are we giving our young players an opportunity at first-team level?’
“Because the first thing you need to tell a parent or a kid is, you stay at our club and actually you’re going to get an opportunity in the first team.
“Then we need to say: ‘Is the provision around that young player as good as the provision they’re going to get somewhere else?’ Because if it’s your son or daughter, you want your son or daughter to get the absolute best provision, don’t you?
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“And then I think there’s a really strong economic model that will help our clubs grow if we can keep our talent in the country and then sell them as first-team players, which then becomes a self-fulfilling cycle.
“We need to become a nation that wants to develop talent as opposed to being a nation that maybe trades in a way that the countries with big broadcast revenues do. Because we’re not that.
“I actually think we could create something quite special if we put all those bits together and get that right.”
Attempts to change Scottish football for the greater good have often come unstuck amid self-interest and short-term thinking, and the general financial pressures that clubs face.
Mulholland said: “I’ve been 23 years in club land, so I understand the other side of that. This can’t be about the SFA and the clubs clashing heads. We’re not here to fight with anybody.
“We’ve got a unique moment in time where we’re sitting near the bottom of minutes for young players across the whole of Europe. What Scottish person wants to see that? We don’t.
“But we know we’ve got some exciting talent. We know we’ve got some great clubs. So we now need to work with the clubs, not against them, to say, collectively, how can we make the Scottish game better?”
