GORDON STRACHAN believes youth football in Scotland needs a complete re-think if this country is to start producing world-class stars again.
On the eve of another World Cup qualifying campaign, the former Celtic and Scotland boss says young kids are being over-coached and forcing them to travel all over the country to play is “bonkers”.
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The ex-Aberdeen, Man Utd and Leeds midfielder believes Kenny Dalglish and Danny McGrain were truly the last world-class players this country produced.
And Scotland has stopped developing players “who can eliminate the opposition” and “score goals out of nothing”.
As Steve Clarke’s side look to qualify for the first men‘s World Cup in almost 30 years, starting with Denmark on Friday, Strachan, now technical director at Dundee, says the pool Scotland has to choose from has shrunk and the coaching system is failing youngsters.
He told The Warm Up: “It’s bonkers how we bring up kids. Just for instance, Dalglish, McGrain, they were world class players.
“They never came out of Glasgow to play football. They were never in an academy.
“In 1953, there were 53,000 male kids born that year. In 1993, there were only 27,000 male kids, so that’s 50 per cent away already.
“Add obesity, we’re top of the league in Europe for that. That’s 25 per cent away from that as well, so you’re down to 20,000 when it was 53,000 before.
“The pool has got less and less but there are other factors in there which actually takes time away from mastering the ball.
“People say it’s a passing game, but you can’t pass it unless your first touch is in the right place.
“To be a player you need to be at one with the ball. We don’t get that first.”
Strachan questioned the need for state of the art facilities and making families travel up and down the country to play.
He said: “Well, do we need as much facilities to flourish or do we need two walls we can kick a ball back and forward off?
“For instance, if you travel from Ayr to Aberdeen on a Sunday it takes you four hours to get up there, maybe eight hours for the journey.
“You go up there and, if you are a midfield player, the maximum touches you will get is probably 55 touches after eight hours in a car, so that’s seven touches an hour every time you travel.
“I know for a fact that if you give me two walls I can get a thousand touches in half an hour, so that’s nearly 18 games of football with these touches.”
After leaving the Scotland set-up in 2017, Strachan says he developed a passion for youth football and travelled around the world to see how other countries produce young talent.
Asked if he thinks coaching in this country has gone too far, he said: “Absolutely, I think school football should come back. I think youth football should come back.
“At Athletic Bilbao the maximum their academy goes on is 50 minutes maybe 55, that’s it. They are finished on the Saturday morning so they can go and play golf in the afternoon, play more football.
“Sunday they are with their family, be more rounded kids, play any sort of sport you want, enjoy yourself.
“What we do? We take them eight hours in a car with the siblings and the mum and dad up to Aberdeen, Inverness, it’s beyond my understanding.
“If you cannot master the ball, you will never create these players we are talking about.”
Strachan also thinks young kids are over-coached and the enjoyment of just learning to play football is taking out of them.
He added: “If you put a coaching session on with eight or nine-year-old kids and you put the cones down, they’re asking you, ‘when are they playing’.
“That’s what they want to do they just want to play.
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“There’s a long time before you need to talk about systems and all the rest of it.
“Within the system if you don’t pass the ball and are not able to create things, then your system is never going to work.”
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