In Cyprus, a compromise is being made.

The appearance of progress is based on omission, on disregarding the consequences of short-term gain; of the mistakes that undermined Scottish football.

There is enough glory in the success of APOEL of Nicosia in the Champions League this season to reassure Cypriot football. They are top of Group G, are unbeaten in four games, have defeated Zenit St Petersburg and Porto at home and are on the verge of becoming the first Cypriot side to reach the knockout stages.

In the Europa League, AEK Larnaca overcame Rosenborg to reach the group stages, although they have won only one point since being drawn with Schalke 04, Maccabi Haifa and Steaua Bucharest.

For a country of a little more than a million people, making an impression on the European scene is a considerable achievement. There is encouragement, too, in the way that APOEL are making headway without spending lavish sums of money and with a team that relies on collective deeds rather than distinguished individuals.

The squad contains Cypriot internationalists such as Constantinos Charalambidis and Savvas Poursaitidis, who have spent time abroad and then returned to their homeland, and foreign imports such as Nuno Morais, the Portuguese midfielder who was once at Chelsea.

Under the shrewd guidance of Ivan Jovanovic, the club’s Serbian coach, APOEL have utilised a defensively-sound counter-attacking approach that is compact enough to limit more prestigious opponents and allow for moments of ambition, like scoring a winning goal only moments after Porto had equalised in the closing stages of their last Champions League game, which ended 3-2.

Yet APOEL are not typical among Cypriot clubs. Other teams are prepared to be more reckless, while the reliance on foreign players -- among them former Clydesdale Bank Premier League performers such as Mark Burchill and Danny Invincibile -- has impacted on the development of the next generation.

The national team that plays Scotland in a friendly on Friday in Larnaca will not reflect the sense among the more optimistic football fans that the Cypriot league is stronger than it has ever been. They ended the Euro 2012 qualifying campaign with only two points.

“Club football has been on the rise for the past few years,” says Nassos Stylianou, a sports writer who is covering APOEL’s Champions League campaign. “It comes from a much more professional attitude to football in Cyprus. There’s been an influx of foreigners during the past few years and foreign managers, which has really helped the game become more professional and pushed the Cypriot players as well.

“Still, Cypriot football has a lot of problems that aren’t addressed. Even although Apoel’s financial model is good, other clubs are not doing well financially. Omonia Nicosia, who are currently first in the league, are in court at the moment for issuing cheques that bounced. They’ve agreed to pay money they didn’t have, because it was on condition of getting into the Champions League in 2010, which they failed to do.”

Anorthosis Famagusta were the first Cypriot club to play in the Champions League group stages, in 2008, but a financial scandal followed when the president was questioned about where the majority of the revenue went. APOEL emulated them the next year and invested the income wisely, but like their rivals spent money in the hope that they would qualify for Europe; other teams are now struggling to manage their financial commitments.

The money propping up the game comes from gate receipts, the individual broadcast deals that each club is able to negotiate (with a crowded market of television companies) and the largesse of a few individuals.

What prevents a sense of impending doom is authorities that are prepared to be lenient and write off debts each year, and the tendency to offer only short-term contracts to players, then renegotiate them each season. Of the current APOEL squad, no player is contracted beyond 2013.

For all that there are sources of hope in the Cypriot game, there is also an awareness of the costs that will be demanded in time. It is already evident in the national squad, where there is an imbalance between experience and potential, a gap into which only nondescript players can be called.

“The golden generation was about 10 years ago, when loads of players went to Greece to try their luck,” says Stylianou. “They’ve come back with a lot of experience, and now some younger players are coming through. But it’s not ideal. This [Euro 2012 qualifying] campaign has been the worst for some time. So people are asking if there is a fundamental problem with Cypriot football, about how easy it is to bring foreign players in. The core of the Apoel side is built around foreign players, rather than young Cypriot talent.”