FORGOTTEN HISTORY: Ambitious spfl boss calls for extreme homegrown quota for young players - Caught on Camera

McLeish worked in St Mirren’s academy and with the SFA as a development coach before he was promoted to first-team head coach at the Paisley club this year, and he has strongly held opinions on the way forward. He said: “We have to put a quota in place for young players being involved in matchday squads.

“Everything else they talk about might be good ideas, might need to rely on other people to make decisions on it. The only thing that’s going to change is if we put the quotas in place. I’ve got the benefit in that I’ve come through the academy system here, worked with the youth national teams.

“I’m fed up of coaches, youth coaches, getting battered in this country, academies getting battered, youth national teams getting a bad rep. I’ve been part of it. We went away to Spain and beat them at under-16s; the under-17s have played against the likes of Italy and Portugal and competed against them.

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"There’s a lot of good work going on in this country. There are a lot of talented coaches, a lot of talented players, but until we change the rules, it’s always going to hit a brick wall at some point.

“You can go really extreme with it, as Norway have. In Norway, I think 16 have to be homegrown, locally-trained; you can only have nine non-homegrown players in your matchday squad. So you can go really extreme with it, or you can go like the basic level of UEFA’s rules. We don’t even have UEFA’s basic rules in place. But it’s up to the clubs.

“I would go extreme with it. The argument will be that then it harms our clubs competing in Europe. But you only need to look at, like Bodo/Glimt and progressing to, like, later stages of the Champions League. They are able to do that with the restrictions that they’ve got in place.

“It’s not going to happen overnight; it will take a bit of time, and there might be a little bit of short-term pain, but you even see that we’ve got clubs going out of Europe right now with no restrictions in place.

“I think we all should strive to develop Scottish football as a whole, and part of that is developing the national team, and it’s the only way I see any sort of difference being made.”