Football might be Scotland’s national game – but it has been extremely badly served by politicians, local authorities and even the professional football fraternity for over 25 years. An investigation by In the Winning Zone shows that youth football in Scotland is only now recovering from a deep-seated and shocking period of maladministration. The youth game has been riven by in-fighting, hampered by poor facilities and spoiled by poor leadership and mediocre coaching.

Only since the turn of the millennium has the sport, which is enjoyed by tens of thousands of youngsters, begun to regain its prominence and a sense of direction. But now there are other barriers to deal with including a battle for recreational space and the disillusionment of many adult volunteers, deterred by regulation and by the misbehaviour of young players, parents and organisers.

Meanwhile, the infrastructure of football pitches and changing rooms in Scotland has been under attack from rapacious developers and vested interests that have denied local community clubs the chance of expansion and building on their legacies. Youth football has survived – only just – in spite of the most awful lack of funding and political support.

Journalist and youth football organiser Ian Mackay, now in his 70s, has been one of the stalwarts of youth football in the East of Scotland. What he has witnessed has angered him and he has many people who have supported his campaign for young footballers.

“I just want to see fairness and equality of opportunity for young people playing football in Scotland. I want young footballers to be the best that they can be. But I’ve been angered and disillusioned by the way publicly-owned facilities have been run-down and then sold off to developers without any commensurate benefit to the communities. There is a lack of clean, modern, hygienic facilities. It is a national scandal.”

David Little, the full-time National Secretary of the Scottish Youth Football Association, based at the national stadium in Hampden Park, shares many of Mackay’s concerns. But he has done much to reshape the national and political situation in Scotland.

“I think part of my function and part of the challenge of being national secretary is that it gives you the ability to try to influence and change in a positive direction. I set myself a ten year target on 11 May 1999 that in ten years time I could look back and say I made a difference.  At the minute I could rest on my laurels and say ‘Yes, I have’, the Scottish Youth FA have made a difference because we have introduced mandatory coaching education and first aid provision. We’ve got mandatory insurance cover for personal accident and liability insurance.  And then we’ve got child protection which basically installs a safe environment for kids to participate,” he says.

What Little has had to deal with is a rapidly changing environment. But Little is far from complacent. He has heard the comment of Ian Mackay and many others who have campaigned vociferously for better conditions.
“We’ve still got a lot of work to do.  In 1999, you sat down and you had three squads, with 20 players in each squad.  So we have 60 players.  But out of 40,000 players I thought we could do more.  We’ve changed it from a matches programme to a coach’s programme.  If I’ve got 20 players, and instead of saying we could have three squads, we could have 50 coaches trained to that level.  So that is 50 times 20.” 

“So when they go back from their coaching weekend at Inverclyde, they can go back to their region and they can put a session on there for 40 more coaches.  The multiplication factor comes in.  With the coaching weekend we can give them a flavour of coaching at a slightly higher level.  I’m hoping that the logical progression is that they take that forward to their club and that they have coach development programmes for their kids.  And that they network.  They remember people they met who were experts in certain fields and they ask them to come down to help at their club. So effectively we’re upping the ante.”

Upping the ante is important. Although Mackay believes this is only part of the battle.
“I spoke to one senior figure who said to me: ‘We don’t need better facilities, we need better coaches’. But what we have seen is the loss of many excellent sporting grounds over the last 25 years – with the remaining ones hugely neglected.”
He cites Alyn Smith, a SNP Member of the European Parliament, who has said that there has been: “ a gross mismanagement of publicly-owned facilities in Scotland.” Mackay says he is apolitical but he firmly believes there are some appalling footballing facilities.

And he says that community clubs with proud records of inspiring young footballers are finding it harder to find proper pitches in Scotland’s cities. For example, he says in Edinburgh, the council-owned Saughton Enclosure, a popular venue for young teams, has not been available to youth football because of a deal done with a major amateur side.

David Little is reluctant to become too involved in the facilities argument, saying this is a case for the local politicians and authorities, although he would like to see money ring-fenced for leisure facilities. But he does see the whole issue of health and fitness as one of the youth federation’s priorities.

Little sees the value of young players who continue to play football throughout their lives.
“ If we take simple things like Chris Hoy [the Olympic gold medallist] knowing what to eat and when to eat, when to drink and when not to drink, if we can feed that type of information out to our 40,000 kids through our 3,000 odd clubs, we might not develop a guy to run in the Olympics or for Alex McLeish, but we may just develop a human being with enhanced life skills, and they are the type of people we are targeting to get back in, to get the good things to the next generation.”

Little recalls an old Scottish Sports Council equation which said: £1 spent today saves £100 in ten years, because the hospitals aren’t clogged up.

But Little is not prescriptive about football, he is keen to promote any kind of physical activity. “I also believe in athletics coaching.  We had a guy up from England about six years ago, and I asked: ‘What do you do?’  And he said he taught children how to run.  I didn’t believe him and he said, ‘Let me show you’.  Because children don’t have the same lifestyles as they used to, and some of them genuinely don’t know how to run.  There are lots of positives for sharing ideas.

“Football has the tag of being snobbish – that we are old-style Marks & Spencer and we refuse to move forward.  But there’s been a wake-up call. There was an article with Walter Smith in the Herald where he said he was bringing sports science to Murray Park.  Now this was light on the road to Damascus.  I personally believe the SFA should have a sports scientist.”

The Scottish Youth Football Association emerged less than ten years ago when several other bodies were brought together. It ended regional feuding and has put in place a national structure for youth football. Under Little’s astute direction, it appears to be working. It has raised its own finances and it has been greatly supported by the Dunfermline Building Society who have sponsored the Scottish cup tournaments and the national coaching summer schools for young players.

“There was a belief that football in Scotland was all about the professional clubs.  But like the iceberg, the bulk of football happens beneath the surface.  Youth football, women’s football, adult amateur, semi-pro, then the leagues,” he says.

“I remember a debate about eight years ago where we raised the five-a-aside phenomenon with Goals and the Pitz.  We told the SFA it was an expanding market, but they said it was about old guys with beer bellies, and it will never affect the game.  I now believe in England  that 40% of the game is regulated to the FA, and 60% of it is external.  They realised that there is nothing underneath the professional game supporting it.”

David Little talks about the typical football fan. “Willie Smith is never going to be a professional player, but he is going to be a youth player, a Saturday afternoon amateur player until he is 30, and he may well be the next generation of coach or supporter.  He could be buying tickets to come watch Scotland, buying merchandise.  He could be a referee.  There are all these possibilities.  We are now thinking along those lines.” 

Amateurs who are playing at a decent level are training twice a week and playing on a Saturday.  There is a commitment there.  But there is a difficulty if the teams can’t get training pitches and the players think they don’t need to train. Little says that eventually the commitment falls away. 

“You’ve got to instil dedication and competitiveness, but you’ve also got to instil within them this ‘train to train’ period, that you are training the body to be a training function. 

Does he see the Scottish Executive showing enough interest in the issues of health and fitness and how youth football can help?

“I believe Holyrood has put in a very worthwhile investment in terms of Active Schools Coordinators.  But what I would like to see is that the Scottish Institute of Sport could go along to independently audit the Active Schools Coordinators.  I think they have made the positive step by bringing them in, but let’s see if it’s working, because the idea of Active Schools was to marry up with the community at large.  Just working with kids for an hour isn’t going to make any difference, they need to get the community involved to participate further,” he believes.

So how can Scotland increase the competitive desire in young people – and build a winning culture?

“I think first and foremost we organise the leagues and volunteers, which essentially puts the infrastructure in place.  Once we put that in place and up to the age of 11, we concentrate on skills. At the age of 12 we’ve got a transitional year between small sided games and elevens, then at age 13 we start to introduce competition, and I feel that’s right. 

“But I also feel that within the non-competitive environment of soccer sevens, we need to look at the competition, not in respect of team A versus team B, but in terms of Willie Smith the athlete versus Willie Smith who may become a non athlete.  And that is what is essential about the train to train period, and the Active Schools Coordinators have to win the battle there.” 

Little also points to a breakdown in discipline in society and how football needs to engender respect and sportsmanship. He said he has run teams at all levels when there was never any trouble, until they started an under 15s from scratch. 
“They were up for disciplinary action every week, because they had never had they discipline.  They need that early.  And the other person you need to catch early is mum.  She’s the one that goes to Asda and drives you to training.  Mothers, in some instances, can be the real role models.  Dads are a wee bit pushy, whereas mothers tend to be supportive.”

The lure of football will ensure it will always be the number one sport in Scotland.  But I have no problems at all with a young person playing under the Scottish Youth FA, and turning round and saying ‘this isn’t for me’.  Where my preference kicks in is that their second pick is athletics or hockey or badminton, not computer games.

Should there be a structure in place for kids who don’t make it professionally?

“The English FA statistics say that 80% of kids who were rejected a pro contract never competed in sport again.  That is quite a damning statistic.   All the kids come into the SYFA at the small sided game and are then cherry picked by the professional clubs.  And they go into the Youth Initiative Programme, which is fine.  The only way you can sharpen your skills is by playing against better players.”

But Little says they are only just starting out on the professional path – and some never make the grade. “We had a presentation evening at Hampden in 2000, and the guest speaker was Terry Butcher.  He said to the young professional players who were getting awards at 18, ‘Guys, you have done well, you’ve got these cracking medals and all this acclaim.  But let me stop you there.  There not one of you who is a football player.  You have the potential to possibly become football players, but you are not football players at this stage.  Hard work has still got to be done.’  He spelled it out.”

“Sometimes, especially with the extremely talented Scottish players, there is less of a pot to pick from.  And maybe the problem that we have is that Rangers, Celtic, Hearts and Hibs have a few good players at 16 years old.  But these players are automatic first picks for their youth sides.  They have never had the indignity of not being picked, and as such they have lost that edge and determination.  And when the get dropped they whinge about it rather than doing something, like revisiting their game and improving, working harder.”

Does David Little think there a way to ensure that this doesn’t happen?

“Yes I do, but I think it needs to happen at eight years of age.  And I think politicians have got to do that. I have listened for a number of years about changing the curriculum to have two hours of PE a week.  That debate has been running for years.  If there was a political will it would actually happen.  The new curriculum would be 2 hours.  That’s why I think that starting at age 8 is so crucial.”

“One of the positives from my ten-year plan is that we’ve sent coaches to Denmark in the last year, and they come back with their blinkers removed, having seen a different side. “

The SYFA wanted to step up its coaching to take it to a higher level, but along came another blow to its funds and limited resources. The issue of child protection: an important issue certainly, but one which nearly swamped the association.

“ It has taken up 70% of our workload.  In this financial year, I will spend £41,000 on it on behalf of the association.  That’s not going on coach education or first aid.”

So how important is it to have good facilities in place for these young people?

“There is a club in the SFL that was training over the winter in a public park with car headlamps as lighting.  The last two studies that SportScotland did were on pitch training facilities and the other was on swimming pools.  To rectify both would cost almost £6billion.   I think that highlights a situation whereby it is a recent problem.  You are talking about a lack of long-term investment in sport.  I think it was convenient when Scottish football teams were conquering Europe in the 1960s1970s to say everything at home was hunky dory.  It wasn’t.”

“I believe that when you look at Ibrox, Parkhead or Hampden, at a professional our facilities are comparable with anywhere in Europe for a country of our size.  But I believe that coming away from there, we have problems with pitches for games, but I don’t think that is the core problem. I think the core problem with all sports in Scotland at a recreational level isn’t the playing of the game, it is the coaching of the game.  That’s when you need good facilities, you need indoor facilities for training.

But youth football and its recreational value has a very low priority within the set-up. The Scottish Football Association has a board of directors with an annual meeting. 
“Each member club has a seat: SPL, SFL and regional leagues.  There are 78 clubs who each have a vote.  And then there are the women, the amateurs, the welfares, the juniors and ourselves.  And we’ve got one vote each,” he says. 

“The Burns report, commissioned by the Football Association, is interesting.  It basically says that there is more to football than the clubs.  There are other coaches, fans and players out there.  And they are restructuring the game in England now to have an equally split board between pro and recreational.”

Little is too diplomatic to say this is what must happen in Scotland, but he implies that this might be a worthwhile way forward. Either way, the future of the youth game in Scotland depends on committed people such as David Little. It also needs the thousands of volunteers who turn out week in, week out to help and coach the young people. It need better coaches and a commitment to making the game as good as it possible can be. It requires an injection of money to improve facilities – and it needs young people who love and enjoy the game and keep playing throughout their lives at different standards.

KK

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