Stuart Cosgrove: Can Scottish football make the most out of Brexit?

It has also had a negative impact on the risk-quotient in Scottish football. A couple of football managers have said to me in the past that the Bosman era coincides with the onset of short-term contracts, and short-term thinking. Many bosses from that era will say that they were never given time to develop younger players over, say, a five year period and so preferred to sign someone ready for first team football from Europe, which of course included England.

We now take for granted that players will come and go although football has always preferred the term mercenary to the more accurate economic migrant. Will the ease of transfers persist after a hard Brexit? Probably not. Football may need its own form of arbitration to establish whether a player coming into Scotland meets the required criteria for a work permit.

A number of years ago there was a huge dispute about Jason Scotland, who was a Dundee United player but had not yet secured enough international caps for Trinidad and Tobago to meet the 'special skills' criteria that the Home Office. Remarkably, he faced deportation until St Johnstone made a second application predicated on the number of guaranteed first team games. He eventually stayed and played in Perth before moving to Swansea, due to arcane employment legislation pertaining to skilled workers. Get used to arcane employment rules they will be the inevitable outcome of Brexit a potentially toxic mix of closed borders and tough immigration laws.

Bugger's muddle.

When it comes to football and the European Union. An obvious starting point is the movement of labour and the freedoms unlocked by the landmark ruling we now know as Bosman. We could have a long argument into the night as to whether players moving to Scotland has been good for the game or not. You could map out a very strong argument from the Bosman ruling to the gradual decline in Scotland producing its own indigenous talent.

It has also had a negative impact on the risk-quotient in Scottish football. A couple of football managers have said to me in the past that the Bosman era coincides with the onset of short-term contracts, and short-term thinking. Many bosses from that era will say that they were never given time to develop younger players over, say, a five year period and so preferred to sign someone ready for first team football from Europe, which of course included England.

We now take for granted that players will come and go although football has always preferred the term mercenary to the more accurate economic migrant. Will the ease of transfers persist after a hard Brexit, probably not. Football may need its own form of arbitration to establish whether a player coming into Scotland meets the required criteria for a work permit.

A number of years ago there was a huge dispute about Jason Scotland, who was a Dundee United player but had not yet secured enough international caps for Trinidad and Tobago to meet the 'special skills' criteria that the Home Office. Remarkably, he faced deportation until St Johnstone made a second application predicated on the number of guaranteed first team games. He eventually stayed and played in Perth before moving to Swansea, due to arcane employment legislation pertaining to skilled workers. Get used to arcane employment rules they will be the inevitable outcome of Brexit a potentially toxic mix of closed borders and tough immigration laws.

In a sense football shares will increasingly share a problem familiar to the Dundee gaming sector, where there have been long-standing problems securing work permits for high-end production and development talent, from in particular the far East of Europe and South East Asia.

On balance there are many benefits to be had from Scotland having a period of time to develop indigenous players, and by that I mean multi-cultural and diverse indigenous talent too. Players like young Karamoko Dembele, coming from migrant communities or economic refugees, these are players upon which we should also be developing our talent base for the future. It requires a policy of immigration that is neither myopic or driven by the UKIP agenda. Scotland needs many more immigrants as does our national game, but we want them young, not as the finished and expansive end of the market.

Another area we will have to keep beady eyes on is television rights. European nations specifically France are much tougher on major companies than we are in the UK, where the free market reigns. Scotland has been badly let down by dire TV deals and the dominance that Sky has had within the pay market. Sky has been a great driver of innovation and creative camera technology but a miserable deal maker. There are many better models of TV across Europe than the beggar economy Scottish football has found itself locked into.

Implicitly connected to this is to manoeuvre the policy makers in Scotland at the SFA and in the Scottish government that what is good for England is not always best for Scotland and we have to shake ourselves out of that narrow mindset. Scottish football is already viewed as an inferior product by broadcasting companies but we have allowed that to bounce us into a culture of gratefulness - thanks for the deal, and sorry we are so shit. I don't think BT or Sky deal stack up by comparison with smaller nations in Europe and some leagues do much much better in terms of what they return to clubs and therefore to talent.

If we then take the scenario where there is a Yes vote in a second Scottish independence referendum, and we remain in the EU and England and Wales don't, then the well-trodden path for Scottish players south becomes less well-trodden. Apart from the personal remuneration of the decreasing cluster of players that play in major leagues south of the border, I have to ask the question: how beneficial to Scottish football is this anyhow? The player may get five times the salary to move and no one would grudge them personal wealth, but that's not necessarily to the betterment of the overall game in Scotland.

There is no question that if you're, say, Dutch you grow up in a culture where there's easy movement across borders. They're something simple and not barriers, either physical or to them fulfilling themselves. They don't have the obsessions about borders and might see within the UK an unattractive mindset. Within a UK out of the free market, whatever that might look like, they may want to come to Scotland but less so the rump UK, where stricter immigration laws will be in place..

One potential spin-off might be that the post-Brexit world hastens the next generation of football contracts. Many businesses, the media being a case in point, are heavily predicated on freelance labour or short term contracts. I wonder if that will be something that will be of importance in the world of football as well. Players could ply their trade for teams for just a few months, like a major expansion of the loan system.

The former Celtic defender Bobo Balde famously told his chief executive that he was 'the chief executive of Bobo Balde'. Well, could we have a situation where a player incorporates himself, his assets and as a company is capable of more manoeuvrability across borders?

What should the game's authorities be doing? They are notoriously shy about doing anything which might be seen as controversial and would see making any noises about Brexit as just that.

But the SFA is under a historic and moral obligation to seek out the best level of arrangement for Scotland as an international footballing community. If they don't know the answers now they should be convening a panel of those who know the landscape to look at both the opportunities and the threats. What we know of the SFA is it his unlikely that they will do that. They will wait for English FA to make its move and imagine the same for Scotland.