A Lesson In Player Pathways

WE CALL THEM “The Lost Boys” - the Scotland Under-16 Football team who were crudely and cruelly denied the World Under-16 title when, back in 1989, they were cynically robbed by an over-age Saudi Arabian team, who beat them on penalties at Hampden. The boys – with the exception of David Hagen, who passed away in 2020 after contracting MND, are now men aged either 52 or 53 – listed here in squad number order, they are :

Jim Will, Billy Dolan, Jim Beattie, Eddie Conville, Kevin Bain, Gary Bollan, Neil Murray, John Lindsay, Craig Flannigan, Kevin McGoldrick, Paul Dickov, Martin Dickson, Brian O'Neil, Tom McMillan, Ian Downie, Andy McLaren, David Hagen, Scott Marshall.

They were, as their Manager, the late Craig Brown always admitted, the best-prepared Scotland squad ever. They were expected to do well, were given every opportunity to do so and they answered every challenge. But, of the 18, only three: Dickov, O'Neil and McLaren trained-on to win full caps. Of these, Dickov won 10, O'Neil 7 while McLaren is a member of the “one-cap wonder” club.

Elsewhere: Bain (4), Beattie (4), Bollan (17), Hagen (8), Marshall (5), Murray (16) and Will (3) graduated to the Scotland Under-21 team; so, 10 players, just over half the squad went on to have a reasonably-distinguished career – the rest were tossed-out with the garbage.

That was a squad assembled and managed to succeed in a one-of event, yet only 16.7% achieved the ultimate goal of a full cap, while only 55.5% trained-on to a high-achieving career.

Received wisdom has it that “The Lost Boys” under-achieved. Over the years I have written one or two articles on that squad and I maintain they actually over-achieved from the normal progression of an Under-16 squad towards Under-21 and on to full cap status.

I remember an interview with the great former Arsenal Manager Arsene Wenger, in which he revealed, if the club got one first-team player out of an intake of apprentices at Under-16, that was considered a good crop. The Gunners had three players in that Scotland squad: goalkeeper Jim Will never made the first team, and returned to Scotland, to join Dunfermline Athletic, before joining Grampian Police – where he advanced through the ranks to Chief Inspector, while playing in the part-time Highland League. Paul Dickov and Scott Marshall did make it to the first team, however, to emphasise how good a squad this was. Both are still involved in football.

Five of the squad were in what was then a prolific youth development programme at Dundee United, yet only two – Gary Bollan and Andy McLaren made it into the United first team, with Bollan going on to have a lengthy career as player and later coach. Celtic, another club with, at that time, an impressive youth development programme, provided three players: Brian O'Neil, Billy Dolan and Jim Beattie, O'Neil had a fine career, both in the UK and Germany; Beattie was allowed to depart to St Mirren, with whom he won his Under-21 caps, while Dolan never progressed beyond the Celtic reserve team, before, after an unsuccessful spell with St Mirren, becoming a postman.

Rangers provided three players to the squad. Neil Murray benefitted from the “Three Foreigners Rule” to feature in their squad which enjoyed a stellar Champions League campaign in 1992-93, he then played around Europe, before finishing his playing career with Ayr United. A qualified accountant, who represented Great Britain at the World Student Games, while a student at Glasgow University; he later worked as an agent and had a spell back on the back-room staff at Rangers.

The late David Hagen also made it into the first team, before enjoying a decent career elsewhere and while the third player, Craig Flannigan never played in the Ibrox first team, but played down the leagues with the likes of Clydebank he retrained as a Strength and Conditioning Coach and is back at the club as a Sports Scientist.

Others have forged impressive business careers after Football and I loved the comment of one of their fathers, who ruefully revealed: “my son made one fatal mistake in his football career – he decided to share a flat with Duncan Ferguson.”

Football has had a recognised career pathway for over a century – where Scottish Schoolboy Caps, on leaving school at 14, then 15, then 16, went south, to work on the ground staff, or – in later years to become an apprentice professional with a top English side – or perhaps to fill the same role with a Scottish club.

But, the sorry fact is, for every Billy Bremner, George Burley or Denis Law – who never won a Schoolboy cap incidently – who went on to become a huge star in England, many more were back up the road before they could sign professional forms at aged 17.

Player Development is an inexact science – many wonder-boys had peaked by their mid-teens, surpassed by the later developer who perhaps took the scenic route to the top. I have in this post, unusually for a Rugby Union thread, so-far concentrated on how Football, which has been professional for far longer and a sport which, you might think, with all the money involved, might have worked-out a player development pathway which worked. Yet, as the above has shown, it's still as much if not more a matter of chance as of working within known KPIs – Key Performance Indicators – as to whether or not a promising boy is ever going to deliver.

So, if that game, with over a century of profesional player development work, is still admitting it's a lottery whether or not the 8 to 10-year-old they take into their development programme will progress all the way to their first team, how much harder is it for Rugby Union, a long way further back in player development, to look for and expect results?

So, while experience has taught me, if Murrayfield has to make choices as to how to run a player development pathway – chances are, they will make the wrong one, we should perhaps give them a bit of leeway with the new approach they have come up with this past week. This approach, parroting an old Murrayfield Junta favourite: “fewer but stronger” might not work, but, the truth is – we honestly do not know which approach will best help us succeed.

Or, as Football has been demonstrating for so long, maybe we Scots are simply not programmed to get it right.