Croatia doesn't have large immigrant communities. Iceland has 300.000 people living there ffs. Spain is hardly a multiethnical society.
This. We tend to have spattering of very good prospects but then they just fall away to nothing, even now there are good players about but for whatever reason they don’t get picked. We don’t seem to be able to put a team out.
Same here too man, we used to get chased off the local 5 a side pitches despite there being absolutely no one other than us there playing. Only other places we had were the two local Schools, which again the Janitor would chase you off of and phone the police (this was after hours of course, not like we played when Schools were in
). All that's left for you to do it felt at that age was to start getting a bevvy with your pals, which is obviously the problem all over Scotland.Speaking of Fraser, that’s another problem. It actually worked out for him, but he left Aberdeen after less than a full season in the first team to go down to England. A fair few have went down there too early and never made it. Far more value to sticking it out up here for a couple of years and then moving.
The idea is to build a joint project with the SFA and clubs. You don't solve grassroot problems by just building training centers, otherwise the arabs would have tons of world class players, which is not happening anytime soon.
True there is also a law in place here where you can only spend a certain amount of time training kids where the limits elsewhere in Europe aren’t as strict. I recall SAF saying it’s a lot harder to develop youth in Britain than it is in other countries due to that.
It's an odd law, I tell you. Kids love training sessions and nothing wrong with having your kid entretained for a couple of hours. What if clubs create partnerships with schools and have training sessions on school environment? Are school sports also included in that time limit?
A lot of the senior clubs won’t let their boys play for their school or local teams once they are part of the set up. Another ridiculous decision that does nothing to help players.
Football nowadays fits more in the entretaning industry than in the sports industry. Players and managers are treated by the media like actors or rocks stars, and even the doping control is much less tight in football than it is for other sports.
Yeah it really is, I think it’s tied in to child labour laws. It would be great if there was more structure involved from the schools up to the clubs but like Baxter said if you play for a club or are involved in training with them you don’t really get to play for your school.
Conversely, playing school football on some shit dirt field behind a school against some garbage kids who will be hacking at your legs does nothing to help players either.
Agreed. But there are clear systematic examples that kids aren't playing enough football - and restricting the time in which they can hone their ability hasn't helped at all. The bottom level is pretty crap because kids aren't playing enough - a couple of hours on an astroturf a week isn't going to compare with the 20+ hours any footballer from yesteryear grew up on.
I was about to challenge this and suddenly realised it has been decades
. I dont think we've ever been great(if we were it was well before my time), but at least we got to finals. It was the running joke, we make to the finals and make a big deal about it then get kicked out at the group stages. That last game of the group turning everyone into rain man trying to figure out how we could finally get out of the group, only for us to play shit anyway. The one time I remember us almost getting out of the group stage was in 96. We needed England to score 4 goals into holland, and feck me if they didnt go and do it as well. The one time we could have made it, and it would have been thanks to england playing a blinder against a very good holland side. Alas it wasnt to be as holland grabbed a goal and crushed scottish hearts. Here in Portugal we also have some limits in hours, probably a lot less than the UK. But there are turnarrounds. And the portuguese big clubs had made some interesting projects that could be done in Scotland.
Ryan Fraser from Bournemouth
Plenty of leisure centre halls, but only 1 or 2 full-size futsal courts in the country. The game doesn't have much pedigree here, although it has moved forward over the last few years.
That is quite terrible. Here at Portugal we have dozens of indoor futsal courts in each city. Those courts are also usually used for Rink Hockey, which is one of the most popular sports in Portugal.
), handball, rink hockey, etc.Harsh on rugby front. They've come on a lot in last few years tbf (and I'm not Scottish).
The lack of money is clearly a massive factor. The decline of Rangers made the league even worse, but even if Rangers get back to competing with Celtic - you have a league where only two teams are competitive. Therefore, it’s just not interesting, and those two clubs just hoover up any half decent player.
Pretty much this.
We did have a basketball team at one point in time. There was even a thread on it here:That is quite terrible. Here at Portugal we have dozens of indoor futsal courts in each city. Those courts are also usually used for Rink Hockey, which is one of the most popular sports in Portugal.
Usually a club is not only about football. It is quite common that a club has multisports teams. Benfica has a futsal team (who already won the equivalent of the Champions League), volleyball team, basketbal team (crappy one, but still
I guess in the UK is normal for clubs to play just one sport.
Scarp GAA and we'd have a pretty good standards here. As well as a good NT.
What's your point? I can only speak with certainty about Germany, but every single player of the current team was born, raised and trained in Germany, I think most if not all "immigrants" even have at least one German parent. Good youth work creates good players.
Maybe wrong here but I think almost all the players who plays for England, France, Belgium, Germany are either born in the same country or moved when they were very young and were graduated from the academies. It's not like Deco, Pepe or Diego Costa type situation.
Imagine if the SPL clubs got the TV money that the PL get currently.
At the end of the day, I don’t really care about the tv money. Yes we would improve the standard of football in the league. But that wouldn’t do anything for young Scottish players. We need to improve them first. That would lead to better players in Scotland. Which would then be sold for more money.
