Courage in your convictions. Faith in your young players. No fear of the sack. Those are the key pillars of Stuart Kettlewell’s management philosophy, and the values that have allowed arguably the most exciting young talent in Scotland at this moment, Lennon Miller, to flourish.

Kettlewell isn’t about to lecture other managers about how they should approach their job, mind. Managing Motherwell comes with its own pressures, of course, but he recognises the environment is perhaps a little more forgiving than some others in this country.

He has a fanbase at Fir Park that revels in watching their own homegrown players coming into their team, and as a result, may be more understanding of their flaws in the early stages of their development. He also has a board who see the development of young talent as a non-negotiable aspect of his job description, and the future survival of their club.

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The figures pertaining to the minutes (or lack thereof) given to young Scottish players in the Premiership last season that were contained in the Scottish FA’s recent report into the ‘transition phase’ were a shock even to Kettlewell though.

The Motherwell manager was consulted by the SFA along with assistant Stephen Frail during the compilation of the report, and with his own side way out in front of a table that otherwise (Kilmarnock being the honourable exception) made for some pretty stark reading, it is easy to see why.

Celtic, for instance, had a Scottish under-21 player on the pitch for 89 minutes in total across the first 33 games of last season, while Rangers had one on the field for just 26 minutes.

Kettlewell acknowledges that the demands on the shoulders of a Brendan Rodgers or a Philippe Clement are different to his own, but one of the main conclusions of the SFA paper was that the game in Scotland requires a seismic cultural shift, where the pressures on managers or the size of the league can no longer be held up as excuses not to blood young players. Clubs in comparable nations, after all, manage to give far more minutes to native prospects than those in Scotland.

That is certainly the mantra at Fir Park under Kettlewell, who kept throwing Miller into the midst of a relegation scrap last term when it would have been easy to rely on more ‘seasoned’ campaigners, and who has now introduced Ewan Wilson into his side too. Motherwell are reaping the rewards in the short term through their performances, and certainly in the case of Miller, will also benefit financially over the longer term.

If Kettlewell is to fall on his sword at some stage, he will be doing so on his own terms, and that means having the bravery to keep pitching in young players whenever he can without fearing how it will impact his employment prospects.

“I think that’s a huge part of it and I’m certainly not criticising any manager for how difficult this job is,” Kettlewell said.

“I can only give you a perception of what my mindset is in that I have no fear whatsoever of losing my job.

“I’m going to do everything I can to make a success of it, but I just believe that if I get up every day in fear of losing my job then I’m going to miss so many opportunities to try and do it right, because I’ll kind of worry about that day that never comes.

“That’s always been my mindset. I think when you’ve been through so many challenges yourself as a player, then you learn to live without fear, you learn to live without that apprehension.

“The other bit that you need to mention as well is sometimes the expectations on managers at different clubs are completely different.

“The staff and the players and everybody here at the football club understand that young players make mistakes, but so do the old players. There’s this mentality that it’s much worse if a 19-year-old makes a mistake over a 32-year-old. It’s still a mistake at the end of the day. I’ve never been a finger-pointer. I’ve always been one that tries to find solutions as to why did we make the mistake and how can we rectify it, how can we cure it and how do we not see it again. But I think also for that you must give players a little bit of freedom to express themselves, freedom to grow.

“I always talk about freedom to make mistakes, but can we mitigate where the mistakes happen? Can we try and create scenarios where certain mistakes don’t cost us? Of course, because the result is always extremely important.

“I heard something a while ago from a very successful manager on a call that I was on. It was almost, forget about the academy because you’re not going to be there long enough to do anything. I’ve heard that a lot of times now.

“I disagree. I’m not trying to be disrespectful about that manager. He’s won some serious trophies and managed at the highest level of the game, but we’re all entitled to an opinion, and I disagree with that.

“The key word is opportunity. Again, I think that comes back down to – not being blase – but I don’t have any fear of losing my job because I’ve played a young player.”

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Kettlewell agrees that the reasoning often given to not include young players can be short-sighted. For instance, if a manager refuses to play younger players because it may cost them a league place or two and their club a few hundred thousand pounds in the short term, they are missing the bigger chance to develop an asset that could earn them several million pounds perhaps down the line.

“I think as Scottish clubs we sometimes miss this idea of how we become a better business model,” he said. “Ultimately, do you go all out to finish in a better place in the league at any cost, or do you produce your own players through your youth academy that you’re able to then sell on?

“I’ve spoken about us being a selling club. We have to be. That’s part of our make-up. That’s part of our business model as a football club.

“But that has to be what we’re striving for because that’s the type of thing that will make the difference. And I think especially with your own academy players when you’ve not invested any crazy amounts of money other than salaries, then everything that you ultimately get back is pure profit. And I think also the story that goes with that as well.

“Young emerging Scottish talent playing minutes at your club for your supporters to follow, I just think that’s a wonderful story. I think it’s something that really gets supporters excited and a story that they want to follow and a journey that they want to follow off the back end.”

Kettlewell may confess to being slightly idealistic when it comes to youth development, but he is far from naive. He knows that if results hadn’t eventually turned during Motherwell’s 15-game run without a win last season, then a starting XI made up entirely of academy players wouldn’t have saved his job.

Patience with managers, he acknowledges, has never been shorter, but he hopes his own example – where the Fir Park board fended off calls for his head and backed their man, knowing the bigger picture of what he was doing behind the scenes in regard to the player pathway at the club – can be one for others to follow.

Now, Motherwell are being rewarded for that patience, with results on the field on a Saturday being favourable, at least a couple of terrific young talents in the starting XI every week, and more coming through the pipeline.

“I think the statistic that tells you the story is that the fact that I think I’ve maybe been working 19 months or something doing this job at Motherwell, and I’m the third longest-serving manager in the country,” he said.

“That probably gives you an indication that mass hysteria is starting at all clubs, I think, in the top division.

“If you’ve not won in a certain period of time, I think the media is really guilty for that. I don’t look at social media, but I’m willing to believe it’s the same on there. Supporters, pundits, everybody that’s out there watching games of football has this tendency just to purely look at the result.

“I’ve always been one for thinking that one game of football on a Saturday isn’t the be-all and end-all. Yeah, I want to win it, I’m the same as everybody else. Of course I do.

“But I think sometimes we have to pay more respect and understand that, you know, we had that run of games last season without a win.

“But we had Lennon Miller playing in the middle of the park, doing fantastically well as a 17-year-old. We had times, and we still do, where we had six and seven teenagers in our group on a match day. We had several loan players under the age of 21.

“Not for one second during that 15-game run was there anybody questioning my message in the club, and what I was working towards.

“I have a pitch map, in and out of possession of how we work, what we work towards every single day of life as a football club, how we believe is the right way to play for this football club. During those 15 games, I never once wavered from it. I never once deviated.

“We had a much stronger second half of the season. We started this season off pretty well. But that could all be different if people don’t trust you. That could be different if people don’t believe in what you’re trying to do.

“Fortunately for me and the staff here, the players and the people in the hierarchy of the football club, one hundred per cent believed in what we were doing and what we were trying to get to.

“So, I suppose player development might have been a completely different thing here at the football club if there had been a major knee-jerk reaction, and if we were purely to look at the result as opposed to peeling those layers back and starting to look at so many other aspects of what’s happening at your football club, which, eventually, will bring success.

“I feel so passionate about this subject. Why were Alex Ferguson, Jock Stein and Walter Smith and Arsene Wenger and these types of guys so successful? Amazing managers. Fantastic minds on the game. Brilliant man managers.

“One common denominator though was that they were all given time to nurture players.

“You look at the class of ’92, it’s always the example, isn’t it? How do you get these guys through? Well, the manager trusted and believed in them. There are so many stories about all those managers and how much influence and interest they had in the academy.

“Well, I think you seriously reap the benefits from that. And there they are, a lot of trophies, a lot of millions made for their clubs later. I don’t know why we’re at a stage now where we think it has to be so short-term. There’s plenty of evidence in days gone by of success by trust.

“I still understand that the manager’s job should be under scrutiny. If you’re cutting corners and you’re not doing things properly and you’re not working hard with players on the pitch and you’re not putting every last thought into what you’re trying to do on a Saturday, I get that, I understand that.

“Look at how many guys have been hired by clubs and then only a matter of months later have been out of a job. That board, that executive board, that chairman, that chief executive sat there and saw out of the 100, 200 candidates that this is the right guy. I think sometimes they’re due a little bit more than a couple of months, don’t you?”


The clubs themselves have to do more then, but there are also structural issues at play in Kettlewell’s opinion.

As manager of the Ross County under-20s, he was a fan of the under-20 league, which was scrapped and replaced by a Reserve League in which just six teams now compete.

That games programme just below first team football requires another look, in his view, and there may be some sacrifice required across the board to find a solution that benefits players, rather than simply bending to the will of the individual clubs.

At the moment, it is all a bit of a mish-mash, with the Reserve League and ‘B’ Teams co-existing, and neither really producing the optimal environment.

“We have to come up with a better system,” he said.

“I think we would all have to give up something in doing so, so it might not be perfect for Motherwell, it might not be perfect for several of our top five clubs in Scotland, but I do think we have to come up with a games programme that bridges that gap a little bit better than what it does.

“I keep referring back to the under-20s side of things, that had guys like Kieran Tierney, Lawrence Shankland, Andy Robertson, Kenny McLean, I know all these guys played at under-20s levels, they played within that system, and that possibly bridges the gap for a lot of them to then go and play first-team football.

“I think that’s so important that the games programme lends itself more so to that and being able to propel yourself into under-20s.

“When I won the 20s league with Ross County, I think it was something leading to a 16, 17-team league, when you played something like 32, 34 games, home and away.

“I thought that that was good, it was fresh, you were playing against different opposition, home games felt different to an away game, because you could go and play away from home.

“They were a really young group, and you would play against a team that had five over-aged players, five first-team players playing in their team, so you learn how to go and play away for home against a real good standard of player.

“That in my mind would start to link in much closer to what you would experience, and what you would feel for some of the games in the Premier League.

“I know the standard is not right up there, but you’re bridging that gap, that’s my thought process, that’s the thought process of Stephen Frail too, who took Celtic under-20s for a number of years.

“I would be willing to listen to other ideas, but I think that we have to come up with a better bridge between that youth academy and that first-team.”