Welcome to part II of Stephen McGowan’s observation of the life of a football club chief executive officer — Keith Lasley of St Mirren. Keith speaks ahead of tomorrow’s SFA summit which aims to work out how to encourage clubs to play young Scottish players. There are always competing interests to consider, but Keith believes there is now cause for cautious optimism.
By Stephen McGowan
By the end of tomorrow’s youth development summit in St Andrews, St Mirren chief executive Keith Lasley hopes to witness something as rare and unusual as a full eclipse of the sun. A unanimous show of hands among Scottish football clubs.
Between 9.30am and 3.30pm club owners, chairmen and chief executives will hear SFA chief football officer Craig Mulholland address the nation’s failure in the field of player production, before pitching their own views and ideas. Finger wagging, lectures or browbeating will be discouraged.
Recently promoted from the role of chief operating officer, Lasley has covered every base in Scottish football. He played over 400 games as a midfielder for Motherwell over two spells. Before he became a fixture in Premiership boardrooms, he did some coaching and, at the age of 46, he has been around the block often enough to know that persuading all 42 clubs to agree on anything at all is notoriously difficult.
The interests of Celtic and Rangers are not the same as those of St Mirren or Motherwell, just as the interests of St Mirren and Motherwell are not the same as Stenhousemuir’s or Stirling Albion’s. When club officials gather around the same table the question to the fore of most minds will be: ‘What’s in this for us?’
While a rule compelling clubs to field three under-21 players in every game might enhance Scotland’s hopes of reaching the knock-out stages of a World Cup finals, managers under pressure to reach the group stages of UEFA competitions might see less benefit to them.
In the Champions League play-off defeat to LASK Linz, only three Scots started for champions Celtic in a team filled with expensive Danes, Colombians, South Koreans, Germans, American internationals and Canadians. In their Conference League qualifiers, Motherwell started two, while Hibs started one. Unusually, Hearts won their play-off against Rapid Vienna with six Scots in Wouter Vrancken’s starting XI.
While most seem to agree that players between the age of 16 and 21 see nowhere near enough first-team minutes, doing something about it is fraught with difficulty.
“I feel — and maybe I am kidding myself on — that on the back of recent SFA reports and the new Scotland manager and European results there is a bit of momentum there to maybe find a consensus,” says Lasley, espousing an air of cautious optimism. “We need more of our own young players coming through for a number of reasons.
“So I want to come out that room and feel, firstly, that there is a general agreement that we need to do something here. And, secondly, that we have an action plan. A plan to say, ‘What are we going to do about it?’
“For me, that needs to be systematic. Whether that means mandating so many players in your matchday squad or incentivising clubs in monetary terms, we need one or two things that get all the clubs nodding around the table.
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