During his decades working in the field of athlete development, with many of those years spent in Scotland, Neil Gibson has long pondered the question of what goes into producing a top-level footballer. Or, more pertinently, what are the factors that would allow Scotland to produce more of them on a reliably consistent basis?

It is a question that the Scottish FA transition report attempted, in part, to answer. And one that most football fans have an opinion on. Gibson may now work in Sydney as the Project Director for the redevelopment of an Olympic legacy site, but he too read the report from afar with great interest.

And as someone who worked for Hearts for a decade between the academy and the first team, who was previously the Managing Director of Oriam, the National Performance Centre for Sport (and who was responsible for its delivery), who was the former Director of Sport Performance and Health at Heriot-Watt University and who for seven years, was the Head of Fitness at the Scottish FA and part of Gordon Strachan’s backroom team, he seems a smidgeon more qualified than most to offer his tuppence worth.

Do we have enough academies? Do we have too many? What are the factors that ensure a player makes it through that system to the very top? Why do so many fail to do so?

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There are, in Gibson’s view, still many unanswered questions around youth development in Scotland, but we have to make sure we are asking the right ones. And, with the right data, they shouldn’t necessarily be unanswerable.

“It is about framing,” Gibson said.

“What's the question we're asking? Is the question, are our academies good enough? That's one. Is it, do they develop enough players for first teams or the national team in Scotland? That's two. And maybe a third one is, is there something in that that could be better to bridge that gap?

“There's sort of three questions, and when you conflate them, it's hard to come up with an answer.

“I thought the SFA report covered lots of really important and really interesting areas, and credit to them for doing it. But it raised more questions than answers, probably, and I think if anything comes out of it, it should be the question of what data do we need to commit to collecting that helps us answer some of those questions?

“One of my critiques of the SFA report was that there was a lack of data. I thought there was a bit of cherry picking to some extent.

“If you look at the SPFL Premiership at the minute or Scottish football as a whole, it is littered with players who've come through academy systems. So, it's not that academies aren't working at all. I think we maybe just don't have the data.

“For instance, I found it really hard to get to the answer of each year, how many slots are there, not in squads, but in teams, based on players retiring, players leaving, players coming from overseas?

“Academies are filling those spots. Maybe not as much as we'd like. But I'm yet to see any research that says what an upper threshold would be, a lower threshold and a middle threshold.

“If you recruit 120 boys and girls each year into an academy system, what's the conversion rate? What's the return on investment? That research, I just don't think it exists.”

What would such research tell us though exactly, and can it still be done?

Gibson continued: “I think if in Scotland we're able to say what's the average cost to develop a player, what's that multiplied by 10 years, how many players progress to some level of first team football, how long are the loan periods, how many games should they play when they're on loan?

“If we had that kind of player tracking across the leagues, I think it would help us understand the question a little bit better, and then look for what the answers are.

“I think that's quite a hard job to get everyone in line to collect the same information, but I think it's doable. Similar to the performance schools, we had a PhD student in there for three, four years, who was able to amass a huge amount of data on those players.

“So, whether it is a link with a university or something the SFA can do in-house, or something just a group of clubs get together and say, if we all do this together, and share the data anonymously, we're all going to benefit.”

Different factions within Scottish football working together for the greater good? A fanciful notion, some might say. But that sort of co-operation is going to be required, in Gibson’s view, if we are to wring the best from the talent we undoubtedly have in this country.

“I think in most sports, no one wants to share, but ultimately, most clubs and sports are dealing with similar data,” he said.

“Two clubs might see the same data but have different interpretations of it and how they structure internally, which is fine.

“The problem is if they only collect their own, they are limiting, I think, how much they can learn about. They just don't have the critical mass or the power in the data to make informed decisions.

“You know, we have clever people around Scottish football that could do it retrospectively if we had the resources, because clubs will have all their previous registrations.

“We'll know how many players were signed for a year, signed for two years, released at 15, 16. And that brings in that whole different level of if you're still at the club at 16 or 17, you've made it through six or seven thresholds where they could have got rid of you. And they definitely did get rid of some people. What was driving that decision?

“Understanding that to a better degree I think would help us make some recommendations on things such as should young players be given three-year contracts at minimum in the academy, for example? And what's the criteria for moving on?

“It won't answer everything because you'll always get the nuance, but it will give you a sense of - statistically speaking - based on the cost, is it worth clubs having an academy, one. And then two, what is the likelihood that you will get from any academy in the Premiership or Championship or down into being a first-team footballer?

“Or even, should academies exist at clubs that can't offer you a full-time outlet at the end? The data will tell us that as to how many players have passed through that system and found their way into first-team football.”

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Academies then, and the SFA performance centres, are doing their jobs to an extent, with Gibson seeing the evidence of it in the current national team squad.

“It comes back to what is the metric we're judging ourselves on,” he said.

“Scotland's got an incredibly rich history of developing players that go and play in the top leagues, not necessarily in Europe but certainly in England. The current squad reflects that. There are multiple examples.

“Scotland is developing really good players who play in Scottish football and if I was to compare it to Australia, football in Australia is way behind in my view.

“And so the fact that we've got a Scotland team at the minute, and all of them, I think, with the exception of maybe Scott McTominay, started their careers either at a Scottish academy or have played for a Scottish Premiership or lower league team, to me that says if the system is there to get players to first team football, it's working, at least in part.”

The issue is, without knowing the underlying trends of why the system ‘works’ to a degree, we are rather left like the proverbial elephant up a tree. No one knows how we got here, what has worked and what hasn’t, so without the proper data, there is no way to know how to improve that system to produce better players. Or whether it will, like the elephant, soon come crashing down.

“This is my personal view,” Gibson added.

“I think Scotland and Scottish football has tried to do lots of really good things to help develop young talent.

“I think some of the academy systems at the clubs are really strong. I think the performance school programme is a good idea. Things can always be tweaked, but I thought as an idea for how you combine training with the national curriculum, I thought it was a good thing.

“I think the challenge is still that it comes down to a philosophical question of why are we running academies? Are we running academies to get as many young boys and girls into the game as we can? If that's the case, we have to accept that not many will get there. It's a development pathway, but only a couple will be good enough.

“If we are there to just select and train the best, that's probably not where we are.

“The report suggested to me that we still weren't clear as a sport or country what that academy system was there for. Depending on what the answer to that question is will depend on whether you have the multitude of academies that we have got.

“This is where we're at. But I do think reports like this, at least it's bringing that into the consciousness of the football community, and that can only be a good thing.

“I think the SFA, you always get shot at when you're the first one through the door, but they've developed it, they've thought about it, they understand that something needs to be done, and I think it's a really good starting point getting it out into the open.

“It'll get people thinking. There's some really great research staff in Scotland, some really good minds outside of football that I think can help answer some of these questions.

“I think the onus is on the clubs to reach out beyond their immediate circle and think, who are the other people that can help us solve this problem?”