Scotland’s teen talent drain to England and its impact on their World Cup hopes

Scotland’s World Cup introspection could start in a few places. We could recount the cornerstones of the Steve Clarke era: the goalless training games that built the defensive base; the speech that dampened eyes before the epic night that sealed World Cup qualification against Denmark; the final supper in Charlotte last month when he announced that his new four-year contract would torn be up after just four weeks.

We could talk about the requirements of the next manager and who is best placed to get the team to the 2030 World Cup. The nationality, the experience, the formation, the style.

But the more people you speak to about what is next for Scottish football, the more it becomes apparent that these questions are inadequate in both scope and urgency.

The real question is: where are the next elite-level players and what is the plan to start producing them again?

Andy Robertson, Kieran Tierney, Lewis Ferguson, John McGinn and Scott McTominay will all be on the wrong side of 30 at the next World Cup. Even Billy Gilmour will be approaching that milestone.

Who is next off the conveyor belt? The harsh truth is that no such thing exists. Simply put, hardly any Scottish teenagers are playing first-team football. The Scottish Premiership is not platforming nearly enough teenage talents and the very best ones are being gobbled up by English academies.

In December 2020, a month before freedom of movement was due to end following the Brexit transition period, The Athletic explored how the constitutional change would likely see Scottish academies become vulnerable to English advances since the latter would no longer be able to fish in European waters until after the age of 18.

The numbers have outstripped those fears. The database created by The Athletic below shows how the rate of migration to England has increased from 35 teenagers between 2012 and 2020, to 66 between 2021 and 2026. Thirteen have gone in the first seven months of this year alone.

“The interesting thing will be: is that a good thing or a bad thing? We won’t know that for another decade,” Scottish FA chief executive Ian Maxwell said to The Athletic in 2024.

“When you speak to the Croatian FA and even the Belgian FA, they were clear that, while they wanted performance schools, they also wanted their young talent to go over to England and be developed there.”

The picture is becoming increasingly clear. Rather than being propelled to greater heights and providing a template for how to produce future Scotland internationals, the majority are fading to part-time obscurity.

Discounting the 2025 and 2026 cohorts as they are still within their first scholarship contract, only six of the 71 teenagers to have moved south have gone on to earn a senior Scotland cap since 2012 — dating back to the establishment of Club Academy Scotland, the equivalent of England’s Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP).

Not reaching international level is one thing. For only four of those 72 players to make their next permanent move to a team in the top five leagues is another. 

Indeed, most are tumbling back down the levels after a few years of academy football. The data shows that, while 18 remain at the poacher club, 22 returned to Scotland (15 of those to a team in the lower tiers), 15 moved to the EFL, three to non-league England and two to Ireland. Two went to Belgium and one to the German second tier. Five were released, never to find another club.

Only seven have made more than 20 first-team appearances for the club that poached them, with 47 having never played a single minute for the poacher club.

Now, with many of the players in their mid-to-late twenties, ten are unattached. Eleven are in the Scottish lower tiers, and one is in Scottish non-league. Others are in Wales, Cambodia, the Czech second tier, Norwegian third tier, even the regional division of New Zealand.

Why are so few managing to sustain an elite professional career? The clues are in the research. In 2023, the European Club Association studied 1,223 players who left their home country before the age of 18 and found that 82 per cent had made no professional appearances before the age of 19. Only 10 per cent went on to play in any of the three continental UEFA competitions.

A study conducted by Ayr United also found that 38 per cent of Scottish-raised players in the Scotland national team squad had featured at some point in the professional pyramid below the SPFL Premiership, with a third making their debut below that level. It suggested that senior minutes at an early age are the pivotal indicator of future success rather than the level.

Perhaps, then, it is no surprise to see why so many have faded when 65 of the 102 exiting teenagers left before even making a single appearance for the club they had grown up at. Only 11 made more than 20 appearances for their origin club before moving.

“The next generation of Scottish talent is being lost, it’s as simple as that,” says a Premiership club chief, who asked to be kept anonymous to protect relationships.

Scotland’s failure to convert talent into elite first-team players is underlined by the fact that Scotland have also not even reached the Under-21 European Championship finals since 1996 and, of the team who qualified for the semi-final of the under-17 European Championships in 2014, not a single player has graduated to the senior national team.

In 2024, the SFA’s Professional Game Body committee commissioned a report into the transition phase and found that fewer than four per cent of minutes were played by Scottish players 21 or younger. Only 32 per cent of minutes were played by Scottish players of any age.

There is recognition from within the Scottish FA that this is a serious issue that needs to be addressed. It is why former Rangers academy director Craig Mulholland returned north as the Scottish FA’s chief football officer, following two years at Nottingham Forest. He will play a part in appointing Clarke’s successor, but arguably the most important remit will be to engender radical change in how Scotland develops talent.

There are clear pull factors: better money, a better games programme, better facilities and better coaching. Players are sometimes shown data by clubs in the Premier League demonstrating how likely a sustained professional career is if they join them.

The sad thing for Scottish football is that, generally, academy staff in England, who spoke under the condition of anonymity to protect relationships, concede that, in many cases, they are not buying these teenagers from Scotland in the belief they have discovered a future Premier League star. They are simply padding out their squads through the transition age, ruthlessly plucking players who represent an upgrade on what they already have to ensure the very top talents are surrounded by the best quality possible.

The economics are clear: it makes more sense to steal a Scottish youngster for €130,000 than a category 1 player in England for £400,000. If their presence helps develop a £40m player, these deals pay for themselves.

Some clubs accuse agents of pushing the players towards the exit door and earning hefty sums by doing so, but several agents, who spoke under the condition of anonymity to protect relationships, argue that the family always have final say and their job is to lay out the facts on what both options entail, including pathway and finances.

“In the absence of opportunity, why would you stay in the confines of Scotland where the provisions aren’t anywhere near the same?” says one agent, speaking under the condition of anonymity to protect relationships.

The pitch to stay in Scotland has to be an expedited pathway to the first team. Stay, play young, develop and then move straight into a first-team squad, having established yourself as capable of thriving in men’s football.

Unless FIFA hike up the compensation calculations, many clubs still feel helpless to stop the talent drain accelerating. English clubs only need to pay training compensation if they sign a player at 16 — usually around €130,000 — before they have signed a professional contract, meaning clubs are missing out on potential transfer fees into the millions. 

Some clubs took to banning scouts. Some clubs have even moved players around age groups and positions in a bid to throw off interested parties. There were attempts to guard against these raids by having early developers sign ‘pre-pro contracts’ at 14, essentially a commitment that they will sign when they reach 16. In practice, it was never more than a gentleman’s agreement and, when tested by English suitors, it was not defensible.

The Premiership’s 12-team format remains a limiting factor. Relegation is a present danger to over half the league, encouraging short-term thinking. However, Denmark is the same size and has two automatic relegation places, yet boasts more than double the homegrown under-20 minutes. Culture is clearly an issue.

The 2024 review concluded that funding 27 professional academies in a country of 5.5 million people was not effective in achieving a ‘best v best’ culture. Rangers attempted to remedy this by pulling out of the development league, creating a bespoke games programme which saw them travel across England and Europe to play against superior opposition.

It is one of many strategies to be attempted, then ditched. Seven performance schools were created across the country in 2012 to integrate specialist training for elite club players with their education as part of a £15 million elite player development strategy. It was announced in September that the current pupils will be the last cohort, as it is being wound up. 

In 2021, B teams were allowed into the Lowland League — the part-time, fifth division — with Rangers, Celtic and Hearts all entering teams. The hope was that it would eventually allow the teams to move up to a higher level, but Rangers lasted just one season before pulling out. The others have also now pulled out.

The latest trial is the loan Co-Operation System that allows Premiership and lower league clubs to mutually share academy players between 16 and 21, provided they are eligible for the Scotland national team squads.

Some argue for a regionalised national performance set-up with later academy intakes, which would allow for more concentrated investment in later teenage years. 

The diagnosis is clear. The best talent is not convinced there is a reliable pathway to the first-team and is bleeding south where, more often than not, they become lost in the richest league in the world.

Whatever solutions are proposed, Scotland has to become a hub for homegrown talent. Achieving that in a country famed for self-preservation is a mighty challenge but one that the Scottish FA must lead.