With the European Championships done and dusted, it's time now to return our attention to domestic matters with the new Scottish Premiership season coming into view just over the horizon.

It goes without saying that Germany 2024 wasn't the best of tournaments from a Scottish perspective. No longer content with simply having a seat at the adults' table, we'd hoped Steve Clarke's boys were going to make a significant impact this time. At the very least we saw ourselves winning at a match and making it out of the groups for the first time ever.

Alas, it wasn't to be, but the future still looks bright for the men's national team, doesn't it? Mmmmmm, about that.

While just about every key member of the squad has another international tournament in them with regards to qualifying after the next World Cup, after USA-Canada-Mexico 2026 (damn you, Fifa) there is a lot of uncertainty. Andy Robertson, John McGinn, Scott McTominay, Ryan Christie, Kieran Tierney, Callum McGregor, Grant Hanley, Jack Hendry, Angus Gunn and Stuart Armstrong will all be in their 30s (some well into their 30s and likely retired) when the next Euros arrive, and there's a question as to whether there's a fresh crop of stars coming through to adequately replace them.

Aaron Hickey, Billy Gilmour and Lewis Ferguson are all good pieces to build around, while there's a hope that Ben Doak will finally emerge as the top-class attacking talent Scotland have been desperate to possess for decades, but we should be concerned over a possible regression back to what we endured between 1999 and 2021, when we were very much on the outside looking in.
One such worry is that the Scottish Premiership isn't currently set up to best nurture homegrown talent coming through. Twice within the past few months, research posted on X has shown that Scotland lags behind many countries in Europe with regards to the number of minutes given to young players in the top flight. 

The latest, posted by journalist Stefan Bienkowski, has Scottish Premiership clubs giving just 3.2 per cent of overall minutes to players aged 21 or younger. This is well below the 11.8 per cent rate of leaders Belgium and falls even below the English Premier League at 3.8 per cent, which is particularly galling as we think of the EPL as a league where clubs would gladly spend £50 million on an import rather than give an academy player a chance.

I have previously written about our clubs prioritising the signings of overpaid journeymen rather than supplementing first-team squads with young players. My criticism was from an entertainment point of view. Instead of using resources on better top-end players and using youngsters to fill out squads, managers bloat them with experienced-yet-uninspiring pros who act as insurance. It's what I call 'Sh–––bag Economics'.

However, in terms of this approach damaging the future health of the Scotland national team, or at least having a meaningful impact, I'm not entirely convinced it's as big a problem as many are making it out to be.

Yes, undoubtedly, players need to be given a chance in which to flourish, but we also don't want to create situations where youngsters are just handed opportunities and don't have to work as hard for them. Pressure makes diamonds, after all. If you're a young player and you need to be at it all the time just to make your club's matchday squad, isn't there an argument that it will make you a better footballer in the long run? 

England and the EPL is a good example of this. The English national team has consistently been at its strongest across the last 25 years – with perhaps the exception of the transitional Roy Hodgson era – than at any other point in history. This boom in English talent occurred after foreign imports started flooding the Premier League market. This not only meant youngsters had to work harder to get opportunities, it also led to an improvement of the league, which led to more money, which led to better coaching, which led to better players. If you want an example of it going in the other direction, look at the Italian national team. Yes, they won Euro 2020, but their talent pool has diminished in recent years as Serie A has also become weaker.

There's also the increasing trend of young players going south to contend with. We don't know yet how this will affect the strength of the national team in the future, but it's certainly true that more and more academy talents are being snapped up by bigger clubs before they even have the chance to break into a first-team squad up here. That's because Brexit has meant EPL teams can no longer sign as many youngsters from the continent as they once did. Doak is a good example of how this impacts the percentage of minutes to under-21 players in Scotland. If he'd remained at Celtic he'd be playing most weeks, but instead the 18-year-old is a Liverpool reserve player.

Clubs will likely have to start putting their best and brightest in the first team sooner in order to convince them to stay and not go down south as soon as they turn 16, so it's also likely the current "problem" will resolve itself in the near future. It's also worth noting that the best talents still get their chance, like David Watson and Lennon Miller showed last season in excelling at Kilmarnock and Motherwell, respectively.

Scottish football is a long way away from the EPL and will never be comparable, but it is a league that has been recovering in recent years with more money coming in. This not only sees an improvement in squad strength, but also in coaching and facilities, two things which are also hugely important for developing younger players.