Premiership sides must prioritise quality over quantity

This may sound like a contradiction of sorts. After all, what is football without the actual playing or watching of football? But as Nick Hornby wrote in his legendary book Fever Pitch over 30 years ago: “The nature state of the football fan is bitter disappointment.” 

The transfer window offers hope of a different future; a means of getting out of the humdrum. For your club's next signing could be a future legend: someone who bangs in loads of goals, dazzles supporters with sparkling play and could even win a trophy or two if you're really lucky. 

Though there are rare exceptions, you don’t know exactly what you’re getting when a new signing is unveiled. Until you see them play, their potential can be anything you want it to be. Even if they arrive with little pedigree or from a modest background, we all know examples in the past of footballers who came from nowhere to be stars, and we can reel off such lists at a moment's notice. 

We're currently just over halfway through the 2023/24 campaign and the majority of fans in the Scottish top flight are not entirely satisfied with what they’re seeing on the park, which then naturally leads to louder calls for reinforcements in January. But having spoken to fans of just about every Premiership club in the run-up to the window opening for the Terrace Podcast (*shameful plug alert*), a common theme began to take shape. Sure, new players were needed, and everybody wanted to see their club make signings, but many also spoke of a dire need for bodies to be shipped out. That's because many squads are perplexingly bloated. 

Take Livingston, for example. The league's bottom club with the smallest budget. Manager David Martindale spent most of 2023 talking about how skint they were. Yet they came into the month with a squad of 25 first-team players, and that doesn’t involve any youth players who’ve come through the ranks. Twenty-five! It also doesn’t count Morgan Boyes on loan at Inverness Caley Thistle, nor summer signing Aphelele Teto, who can’t play due to work permit issues. 

It’s the same around the league. Hearts have got eight first-team centre-midfielders, and still play left-back Alex Cochrane in the position at times. Celtic have seven wingers. Ross County had three left-backs until Ben Purrington left last week. Similarly, before Rhys Williams returned down south, Aberdeen had seven players who could comfortably play in their back three, with former captain Anthony Stewart out on loan. Hibs have six forwards. Our biggest teams are hoarding players like old newspapers and it’s detrimental to their success, or at the very least the enjoyment for their supporters. 

European football is a factor, but it's even harming our chances on that front. Rangers were outclassed by PSV in the Champions League play-off round, but the finances of each club are fairly comparable. In fact, the Ibrox side had a higher yearly turnover and spent more on wages. PSV had better players because their squad was a lot trimmer and they supplemented it with training up young players to come through. 

Scottish clubs are priortising quantity over quality. It's what I like to call 'S****bag Economics'. 

It's not a case of being too careful with money because our clubs are spending. Celtic and Rangers did their usual raft of signings in the £1.5m to £4m price range. Hearts, Hibs and Aberdeen all dished out multiple six-figure transfer fees, while even St Mirren and Dundee broke the £100,000 mark, with Livingston doing it in the summer of 2022 to sign Shamal George (it would seem the Tony Macaroni Arena is desperately in need of a better accountant). The finances are there, they’re just being spread too thinly across squads.

The fear factor has taken control. There’s too much concern that things will go wrong. If you have the option of signing one player on £6k a week or two players each on £3k a week, most would go for the latter because there’s insurance in case a signing turns out to be a lot worse than expected or gets injured. 

It doesn’t have to be this way. An example of success that can be enjoyed if you go the other direction is evident all the way down in Scotland’s fourth tier. Stenhousemuir have never won a league title in their 140-year history, but they’ve got a 14-point lead at the top of the League Two table as things stand. In the summer, fans were anxious they were going into the campaign with a threadbare unit, but boss Gary Naysmith wanted to use his modest budget to bring in players he knew would shine at that level and it’s paid dividends. 

Managers are generally the ones who sign these players, but responsibility has to come from further up the ladder. How often do we see teams making tons of signings, even sometimes mid-season, because they've jettisoned one manager who liked a certain style of play and replaced him with someone completely different? And with head coaching positions having shorter lifespans than your average hamster these days, there's less incentive to gamble in the market. 

Managers can work closely with a foreign import to make sure he's adapting to the Scottish game. They can teach an experienced pro how to operate in an unfamiliar position when a teammate becomes crocked. And they can simplify the match for inexperienced youngsters so they can fill the gap if needed. But all of this takes time. When you’re always five games away from the sack you don’t have that time. Instead, they ring out a little more from the budget and buy another expensive sticking plaster. 

If managers are going to have such a short shelf-life then a clear and consistent transfer strategy needs to come from above. 

Speaking of academy products, an issue that has been talked about at length over the last couple of years has been the lack of young players coming through Premiership clubs and getting a chance in the first team. 

The pathway is blocked and, frankly, it needs to be clearer because in the post-Brexit landscape, we are losing an increasing number of talented youngsters to English football because they can no longer pinch the best 16-year-olds from abroad as easily as they once did. So they come raiding up here instead. It’s hard to turn down big money and the bright lights of an EPL side when they come calling, but assurances of actual gametime during the season would at least entice some of those burgeoning talents to stick around Scottish football for a bit longer. 

I'm not saying clubs should be daft and throw money around. And yes, sometimes it's going to go spectacularly, and hilariously, wrong for some when a budget previously allocated for two or three players is spent on one big dud. But in sport you gain success by being aggressive, being brave, taking chances. It’s about time many of our clubs remembered that.