St Mirren boss McLeish calls for homegrown player quota
· Yahoo Sports
St Mirren manager Craig McLeish wants to see a homegrown player quota introduced to Scottish football.
The suggestion comes as the Scottish Football Association prepare to host discussions in St Andrews, which all 42 league clubs have been invited to attend, aimed at improving the prospects for homegrown talent in Scotland.
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McLeish, who worked in St Mirren's academy and with the SFA as a development coach before taking on his role as Buddies boss, insists more youth involvement at club level will help the national team and improve the Scottish game overall.
"We have to put a quota in place for young players being involved in match day squads," McLeish said.
"Everything else they talk about might be good ideas, might need to rely on other people to make decisions on it. The only thing that's going to change is if we put the quotas in place.
"I've got the benefit in that I've come through the academy system here, worked with the youth national teams.
"I'm fed up of coaches, youth coaches, getting battered in this country, academies getting battered, youth national teams getting a bad rep.
"I've been part of it. We went away to Spain and beat them at under-16s, the under-17s have played against the likes of Italy and Portugal and competed against them. There's a lot of good work going on in this country.
"There is a lot of talented coaches, a lot of talented players but until we change the rules then it's always going to hit a brick wall at some point.
"You can go really extreme with it like Norway have. In Norway, I think 16 have to be homegrown, locally-trained, you can only have nine non-homegrown players in your matchday squad.
"I would go extreme with it. The argument will be that then it harms our clubs competing in Europe.
"But you only need to look at like Bodo/Glimt and progressing to like latter stages of the Champions League. They are able to do that with the restrictions that they've got in place.
"It's not going to happen overnight, it will take a bit of time and there might be a little bit of short-term pain, but you even see that we've got clubs going out of Europe right now with no restrictions in place.
"I think we all should strive to develop Scottish football as a whole and part of that is developing the national team and it's the only way I see any sort of difference being made."