ANYONE who was in attendance at the official opening of Hillwood Community Trust’s new sports hub in Priesthill in the south of Glasgow yesterday morning would have come away with the distinct impression that grassroots football in Scotland is flourishing.
The magnificent facility - which took, from conception to completion, 25 years to build, cost nearly £2m and comprises four changing rooms, a multi-purpose hall, a fully-equipped kitchen and synthetic and grass pitches - provides an impressive base for their 16 age-group teams and hundreds of players to train and host matches at.
A couple of their celebrated alumni - David McCracken, who turned out for Dundee United and Falkirk, and Peter MacDonald, who had spells at St Johnstone, Morton and Dundee - returned to show their gratitude to the outfit which provided them with a launchpad to careers as professionals.
Hillwood have certainly come an awfully long way since their chairman Willie Smith, who was made an MBE in the New Year’s Honours list last year for his services to the Pollok area, founded them way back in 1966.
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“I was an officer in the Boys Brigade and I took their football team,” said Smith. “But there was a religious element in football at that time. Things have changed for the better since I am pleased to say. Anyway, I had a dispute with someone. I wanted to play a young lad who was a Catholic and I was told I wasn’t allowed to. So I said, ‘No, I’m setting up my own team’.”
The first player he signed for Hillwood Boys Club, as they were originally known, was a local kid called Kenny Burns. He would go on to win the European Cup twice with Nottingham Forest, be named FWA Player of the Year in England and make 20 appearances for Scotland.
Many more outstanding talents followed in the Burns’ sizeable stud marks in the years which followed as the club grew in both size and stature. Alex McLeish, Tommy Coyne, Bobby Hutchinson, Owen Coyle, Sandy Stewart and Ross McCormack, to name just a handful, all came through after him.
Peter Lawwell, the former Celtic chief executive and current chairman of the Parkhead club, was another who donned their colours as a youngster who went on to, albeit not in a playing capacity, make a name for himself in football.
So was Lawwell a bit of a ‘baller back in the day? “Peter was a midfielder,” said Smith. “He was a good player, a very good player, before he went away to university to study accountancy.”
Smith does not, it is fair to say, have a great deal of admiration or respect for certain others who occupy positions of power in the Scottish game. He believes they have presided over a decline in standards and a reduction in participation levels in grassroots football.
He is particularly scathing about the impact which the pro-youth system in this country has had on clubs like Hillwood in recent years. He is adamant it has cut the number of professional footballers we are producing and been detrimental to the quality of both our leading club teams as well as the national side.
“The first thing the senior clubs had to do when they started up pro-youth football was to set up teams,” he said. “So they just went out and completely raided, and destroyed, boys clubs.
“There was a deterioration in both standards and in numbers at Hillwood and in boys club football in general when this started all those years ago. The deterioration in standards has not just happened at our senior clubs and at international level, it has happened right down through the game.
“When pro-youth clubs took your players they used to have to pay your club £50. It was in the rule book. But it is just £10 now. And they don't pay it anymore anyway. They just ignore the rules. But the real tragedy for me is that the majority of these kids are eventually released, without any qualms, by these clubs and left in no man's land.
“I argued with Neil Doncaster [the SPFL chief executive] about this once. I asked him, ‘What have you produced? Where are the Billy Bremners? Where are the Kenny Dalglishes? Where are the Ally McCoists?’ Their fancy training development programmes have produced nothing in comparison with boys club football.”
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Smith was put in touch with another coach who shared his deep concerns about what was happening to his club and others like it across the country, Scott Robertson of Musselburgh Windsor, by a mutual acquaintance who was involved with the Scottish Youth Football Association.
They formed an organisation called Real Grassroots together and lodged a petition at Holyrood entitled Improving Youth Football in Scotland in 2010 after securing the requisite 10,000 signatures.
The Public Petitions Committee praised the SFA and SPFL for the changes they had implemented during the years the petition – the longest running in the Scottish parliament’s existence– was being considered when they released their report after 10 years in 2020.
But they were damning about professional clubs getting children under the age of 16 to sign 30 month registrations and recommended “very strongly” they should be scrapped.
“We had every member of the Public Petitions Committee and the Health and Sport Committee supporting us. We had three full debates in Holyrood itself. It must have cost millions of pounds. And do you know what the Scottish government did after all of that? Nothing.”
Smith continued: “What we were really pushing for, first and foremost, was for a child to be able to leave a club at any point in time during their registration. Because a registration is not a contract. It is not legally binding for a minor.
“But clubs were putting parents in a difficult position by saying, ‘Well, if he wants to play for this club he's got to sign for three years - and he doesn't get released until we say so’. And stupid parents were signing it. It's just ridiculous.
“Four sports ministers in a row tolerated that and ignored the advice from the Public Petitions Committee, the Health and Sport Committee, their own MSPs and MSPs from other parties.
“They ignored them and refused point blank to force the SFA to do away with them by introducing legislation. The SFA have tweaked things a little. But nothing has really changed. It is scandalous.”
The Game Changer series which has appeared in these pages this month highlighted a concerning trend - professional clubs in England increasingly luring talented kids from their Scottish counterparts down south because Brexit prohibits them from signing players aged 16 and 17 from countries in the European Union.
One executive at a top flight club warned that academies could be forced to close down – something which Smith and many others in his position will doubtless not mourn - because they are no longer developing players who can represent the first team and then be sold for a seven figure profit and are operating at a significant loss.
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The Transition Phase paper which was co-authored by Andy Gould, the chief football officer at the SFA, and Nick Docherty, their head of men’s elite strategy, and published back in May suggested that contracting players under the age of 16, something which happens elsewhere in Europe, could be a potential solution to the problem.
But the Children and Young People’s Commissioner Scotland has claimed multi-year registrations breach six articles in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child – which MSPs voted to incorporate into domestic law back in 2021.
Smith and Robertson have no intention of admitting defeat in their crusade. They continue to agitate for change despite the brick walls they have hit. “There is more to come,” said Smith. “I am not finished yet.”
“There are a lot of different things which annoy me,” he said. “It is absolutely bonkers. I'll tell you something, the SFA's intervention in our game has been a disaster in terms of quality, it's been a disaster in terms of the coaching. They admitted themselves in their report that what they are doing is not working.
“It's all been money oriented as well. Our coaches are duty bound to do their online training and development courses or they can’t coach kids. I challenged Stewart Regan [the former SFA chief executive] about this once.
“I asked him, ‘Can you tell me whether you take profits from the training and development courses to subsidise professional clubs?’ He said, ‘I can't tell you that’. Apparently, it all gets put into one pot. To my mind, that money should be put back into the boys clubs.”
Despite his grievances, Smith stresses that providing an opportunity for countless boys and girls to play football as well as a focal point for his local community during the past 58 years have been, and continue to be, enormously rewarding.
“It's fantastic, absolutely fantastic,” he said. “We've got a great following in the area. A lot of people come down and watch the games when their kids are playing.
“I decided to form a charity, the Hillwood Community Trust, in 1999 because I wanted to go further out into the community with other activities. Then I had the idea to build a hub so we had a home and didn’t have to constantly hire pitches. It was just a picture in my mind at that time. It’s been a fair old journey.”
