INSANE: While sfa proposals should pass club self interest will as always play its part - The Real Truth

The greater good doesn’t pay the wages of a £10million striker. The greater good has never been in the middle of a tense title run-in or a relegation battle. The greater good has never been forced to flee the stage and pull the plug on an AGM.

It would be unwise to assume, then, that Scotland’s 42 senior clubs will feel some kind of moral obligation to vote through the Scottish FA proposals to tackle the crisis in youth development. The devil, as always, will be in the detail.

What works for the national team rarely aligns with the interests of Celtic or Rangers. And what suits Celtic or Rangers rarely suits Hearts, and Hibernian, let alone Stenhousemuir and Stirling Albion.

The club co-operation agreements which allow Premiership under-21 players to play first-team football in the lower leagues are a rare example of Scottish clubs pulling together in the interests of the wider game.

Even then there was self-interest at play, because there always is. And no one should doubt that the impact on No.1 will be the decisive factor when clubs consider SFA proposals to address the fact that the first-team minutes given to Scottish players under 21 are plunging faster than Reform’s poll ratings.

Regardless of whether bad coaching, a 12-club Premiership or Brexit is to blame, everyone accepts that something needs to change. What form those changes should take is the awkward, fiddly bit.

The SFA wants two Scottish under-21 players to start Scottish Cup games, with one homegrown player on the pitch at all times. That needs a simple majority at a general Meeting next month and should go through.

The same rule would apply in the Premier Sports Cup, and the governing body also wants under-21 Scottish players in all four senior leagues to play an average of 60 minutes per game across the season. Clubs who fail to reach that target would be docked 10 per cent of their final prize money – with the funds redistributed among the clubs who achieved the target.

Chief football officer Craig Mulholland and chief executive Ian Maxwell will meet clubs in the coming weeks to remind them that a rising tide lifts all boats. A final vote on the Premier Sports Cup and league proposals will then take place at the SPFL AGM in November.

To pass, 11 of the 12 Premiership clubs need to put their hands in the air and 75 per cent of the Premiership and Championship clubs combined need to wave it through. If 75 per cent of the clubs from all four divisions are in general agreement, then it’s a goer.

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Put it like that, and leaping through a burning ring of fire on a Sinclair C5 sounds easier than getting enough clubs to say yes.

To avoid any ambiguity on this, these proposals should pass. At Friday’s summit in St Andrews, some clubs expressed the view that they don’t go far enough. Others will study the terms and conditions and take a different view, of course. In Scottish football, the conflict between what works for full-time clubs and what works best for semi-professional, part-time community teams has an impact on everything.

One of the contributors to Friday’s summit was Club Brugge, an outfit with a turnover of £130m.

Much of the profit they make from player development stems from the fact that they are one of four who enter under-23 “B” teams in the Challenger Pro League, the Championship of Belgian football.

The rules state that Club NXT can never be relegated, and that state of affairs caused a huge legal stooshie at the end of last season following a challenge from RWDM Brussels, the Morton of Belgian football.

While Celtic and Rangers would enter “B” teams in Scotland’s senior leagues tomorrow if they could, the rancour and resentment witnessed in Belgium would be a gentle walk in the park compared to the hurricane the issue would unleash here. Lower league chairmen, like their fans, would rather slide down a rusty razor blade in their underpants than entertain any idea which makes the Old Firm even stronger.

So long as the other teams won’t play ball on “B” teams, Celtic and Rangers might feel disinclined to weaken their own starting XIs by pitching in two untried 19-year-olds for a Premier Sports Cup game.

These teams spend fortunes importing young players like Kevin Kelsy and Joel van den Berg from overseas, and the SFA argues that they could save themselves a few quid and generate more revenue if they gave academy prospects like Robbie Ure and Daniel Cummings half a chance. They would do Scottish football a huge favour as well.

While the millions they waste on their academies should be a concern to Celtic’s Irish controlling shareholder Dermot Desmond and Rangers’ American owner Andrew Cavenagh, there’s no real reason why they should care how Scotland’s national team get on. Neither, for that matter, do a chunk of their fans.

Leaving St Andrews on Friday night, a WhatsApp from a pal showed why the SFA have their work cut out to get this stuff through. In favour of the principle of playing young players, he flagged up a few awkward, legitimate questions surrounding the nuts and bolts.

What happens, he asked, if there is one under-21 Scot on the pitch replaced by another from the bench and the substitute pulls a hamstring or lands a red card with no more homegrown players left on the bench? What then?

The SFA thinks this level of hypothetical nitpicking is part of the problem. Supporters who would rather beef up the Premiership to 16 teams or shoehorn “B” teams into the second tier are already exposing these proposals to the kind of forensic analysis Hercule Poirot might find a bit much.

And if they’re at it, then you can bet your bottom dollar that the clubs will be waiting to read the small print before asking the SFA the only question that really matters: “What’s in this for us?