Mark Wotte oversees SFA setting up of seven new Performance Schools

For eight years from now, when the clutch of 12-year-old boys and girls who will be enrolled later this year in the seven secondary schools across the country chosen for the scheme reach the age of 20, Wotte hopes at least five of them will be making an impact at the highest level of the professional game.

The SFA Performance Director yesterday unveiled the seven coaches who will each be in charge of an intake of 20 pupils per year at the schools in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee, Aberdeen, Falkirk, Motherwell and Kilmarnock.

Chosen as the most talented under-12 players in their region, the children will receive elite football coaching in conjunction with their normal academic curriculum. Part of the SFA’s £15 million investment in performance strategy over the next four years, it follows a successful pilot of the performance school at Graeme High in Falkirk.

Wotte is aware that the value of the project will be judged in terms of the number of pupils who go on to fulfil their potential and help raise the standards of the Scottish international teams.

“In 2020, you can come and chat to me again about it,” said the Dutchman. “You can only see the end product of a player when he is 20 years old. By 2020, I hope more young Scottish young players will be playing in the Scottish Premier League. I hope we can extend the number of Performance Schools in the next four years from seven to 10 or even 12 across the country if more money comes in.

“But when we are in 2020, and we have four or five top players with a Performance School history, we will have done a great job. That is the goal. You never know what will happen with a young player’s development, you can never predict it at 12-years-old.

“You never know if the young boy who is technically very good at 12 will make it all the way to the top. There are other issues in youth development, he could pick up an injury, lose his appetite for football and maybe want to go out and have a good drink instead.

“But the average level of young Scottish players should increase after four, six and eight years of this scheme. We now get them when they are 12, so we can influence their behaviour for four years on a daily basis. So I would be very disappointed if one of those kids, when he is 16 and finished the programme, is found in the Corinthian club in Glasgow, half drunk.

“Having said that, we don’t own the players. You have the parents, the most influential people, you have the clubs and now we have the performance schools through the SFA. All in all, we are giving opportunities to young kids to develop their skills better than ever.”

Wotte had 66 applicants for the Performance School coaching positions which he reduced to a short-list of 12 before appointing the seven successful candidates, including former professional players Ray McKinnon, Greg Miller, Ian Ross and Brian McLaughlin.

“It was not easy and there were excellent coaches we had to disappoint,” added Wotte. “We were looking for football teachers. A first-team manager is not a youth coach. We didn’t want anyone without experience of working with the 12 to 15 age group. It’s just like a school. A university professor talking to S1 kids might be a very strange classroom situation, so we wanted to make sure the performance coaches are well aware of the ages and stages.

“These seven guys are excellent. We have seen them coaching and have started working with them under the guidance of Neil McIntosh, who is the performance developmenmanager and my right-hand man. He is preparing the boys for the start of next season. We are writing the curriculum and individual development programmes. We are not going to train these kids to win matches or to prepare them for one position in a team.

“We want to create an all-round football player. Whether he is a striker, defender, full-back or midfield player, they must all be able after four years to accept the ball, pass it, dribble and make the right decisions. Not only do we want them to be a good football player, but also a good person.

“I ran a performance school 20 years ago when I was at Den Haag in Holland. It was a similar set-up but not exactly the same. It was more a club-school relationship, like Celtic have at the moment with St Ninian’s High School in Kirkintilloch.

“But this SFA one is a great and unique programme. I have not seen another one like this in the world, not even in France or Holland. In the French programme, the kids go to school and train with the federation. They are not training during the week with clubs. They play at the weekend for their clubs. But we are doing everything in conjunction with the clubs. We are not competing with the clubs, we are just adding five training sessions a week in the same way they learn mathematics or geography.

“It’s a natural way of developing players. You bring the best 20 kids in the region together, they play a lot of small-sided games and develop skills. We will also train the brain so they are academically clever as well. We will try to influence their personalities. Even if they are not going to be a professional player after six, seven or eight years, they will be better people because they had a great four-year experience at these schools in such a healthy environment.

“I don’t know if you have had a lost generation of footballers in Scotland but the results of the national team have been poor over the last 10 years and this season all of the Scottish clubs were knocked out of Europe in August. That was a shocker for Scottish football and a wake-up call. After that, a lot of people in Scotland supported our ideas for change and to come up with these new ideas and philosophy. I believe today’s announcement will prove to be one of the most significant developments for Scottish football in decades.”