Why aren’t Scottish clubs producing talented youngsters?
It feels like it’s been a perennial question in this country for far too long. But Cameron Campbell isn’t buying it. The Scot, who now works in RB Leipzig’s academy, has seen it with his own eyes when he was Rangers’ Under-18’s coach.
According to Campbell, the talent IS there. Ability-wise, he believes Scottish players can go toe-to-toe with any of Europe’s top kids. But there’s one thing they do lack. Opportunity. Even national team boss Steve Clarke talked about it before the Nations League clash with Croatia on Friday night.
And recent stats appear to back it up. The percentage of minutes given to Scottish U21’s in our top flight this season are alarming. Motherwell – who boast the prodigious Lennon Miller as their poster boy – are way ahead on 18 per cent. The rest? Kilmarnock are at seven, Ross County four and Dundee United three. As for our top three clubs, Celtic, Rangers and Aberdeen all sit at zero per cent.
It makes for depressing reading and follows an SFA report highlighting the dearth of youngsters making an impact in the Scottish Premiership. But Campbell says it has nothing to do with talent. He’s coached a Rangers team who beat mega-rich French big boys PSG in a foreign youth tournament. So, at a certain age, Scots kids can compete with anyone.
But it’s the failure to give these boys a chance at first-team level that appears to be holding us back. Campbell, who is the Leipzig academy’s head of player development, told Record Sport: “It all comes down to needing two things. Talent and opportunity.
“What frustrates me is when everyone talks about the gap (between youth and first-team) like it’s unattainable. It’s the academy’s job to produce players who are good enough. But you then need a whole club to buy into creating opportunities. Those players need chances. When I was a youth coach at Rangers, I saw how much talent there is in Scotland.
“Lennon Miller and David Watson are doing really well at Motherwell and Kilmarnock right now. But I would argue there are one or two at the top seven or eight clubs who – if given the opportunity – could probably do similar things.
“It frustrated me. These kids need a chance. We’d go to international tournaments with Rangers U17’s and beat PSG. So talent wise, player for player, we have enough to compete with them. But when they get to that age, they need a chance to play first-team football.
“Whether that’s at their club or through the loan system, opportunities must open up for them. One of the studies I’ve done at Leipzig is to look at the top 100 players in the world right now.
“Niney-seven per cent of them made their first team debut before the age of 20. When you look back at their journeys, most were involved in men’s football at some level from the age of 16. It’s no coincidence. It’s about creating opportunities.”
There’s an argument that the lack of a proper development structure beneath first-team level isn’t helping Scotland’s cause. The Old Firm’s ‘B’ team idea has been largely rejected by other SPFL clubs.
While the absence of a workable reserve team league set-up has widened the gap between playing U18’s football and making a top team breakthrough. At Leipzig, Campbell and Co are at least trying to come up with ways of solving the problem.
He said: “Rangers and Celtic are trying to create a games programme. But it can be challenging in Scotland, especially when you look at the recent B team debate. At Leipzig, I look at our U19’s programme and that’s effectively our B team.
“We compete in the youth Champions League, the U21 Premier League International Cup and the U19’s Bundesliga. Across the season, the amount of challenges we have are really high level. Obviously, it can also come down to finance.
“But we’ve started a project called a ‘training loan’ with some of our young players. Rather than send them to another club, where we lose the control of his development because they might fall into bad habits – we’ve created a connection with a fourth tier club in Germany.
“We send our best 16-year-olds there one day a week to train with them. So they still get that experience of playing against men and being in that environment. But it’s only one day so we can still control everything else around them. Could you do that in the UK? Maybe it’s just about trying something different.”
Campbell worked with likes of Robbie Ure and Rory Wilson at Rangers, who are now at Anderlecht and Aston Villa respectively. But the opportunity to join RB Leipzig was too good to turn down eight months ago.
Especially given their record of nurturing young talent – and selling them on for a profit. He said: “When Leipzig called me, I knew they had a huge reputation for developing players in a first-team arena then selling them on.
“The summer before I arrived, Josko Gvardiol and Dominik Szoboszlai moved to the Premier League for £150million. That’s incredible. We’re a Champions League club, so we can recruit the best young players. But the challenge for the academy is, can we produce players here who can compete with the ones we’re bringing in?
“When our scouts get a player and they go up against one of our own, hopefully the manager and technical director will side with ours. That means we won’t need to spend £3 million on a teenager from elsewhere. At the same time, we want to have the best talent here. So if that’s what it needs, it will happen.”