We need to give Project Brave time, says Stephen Robinson
Motherwell manager Stephen Robinson has warned it could take 10 years for Project Brave to come to fruition.
Robinson's club were this week named among eight members of the elite band of the Scottish Football Association's new youth system.
The project comes six years after the SFA launched a performance plan aimed at providing players to the national team by 2020.
Robinson, who previously coached in the Irish Football Association youth ranks, said: The same thing was done in Northern Ireland, where we started from scratch and we put a structure in place where we're now starting to see more young boys come through and be more competitive at youth level.
That can only be good going forward, but what people have to realise is Project Brave will take time to be successful, it's not going to be a magic wand.
I think you're looking at between a five and 10-year span when you see the new generation come through with the stuff in place.''
Motherwell made a major investment to ensure they met the elite criteria and St Johnstone manager Tommy Wright feels the bar was set too high for his club.
We have made improvements,'' said Wright, whose club were named in the second 'progressive' tier.
I know why the criteria was set so high: they want to get the standards up as high as possible and this is they way they feel they will do that. But with that was an enormous cost and expense, particularly for smaller clubs. For the likes of us and bigger clubs than us, Dundee United, it was unattainable.
The biggest problem was finding an indoor facility. We haven't got the luxury of what Hearts and Hibs have in Edinburgh, or massive resources to build your own indoor arena, but I would like to think the clubs who are progressive can still have a door open because I think it would be wrong to shut that door off and not encourage other clubs to reach the highest level.''
Dundee are in the third 'performance' tier after refusing to get assurances from the SFA that they would make the 'progressive' level if they employed more full-time academy staff.
A club statement read: It remains a source of great disappointment that we have lost out in this situation because we would not gamble with the club's financial stability. We are particularly surprised that the Scottish FA's 'cart before the horse approach' was effectively encouraging clubs to take such a fiscally irresponsible chance.''
Aberdeen head of youth Neil Simpson revealed the club had taken steps several years ago to implement a number of the requirements set out in Project Brave, including appointing a full-time sports scientist, analyst, scout and five coaches in their academy.
Simpson, whose club are in the elite, added: Obviously, Scotland haven't qualified for international tournaments like the World Cup and European Championships for years and if you recognise that then we need to produce a better player and international-class player.
The experts have said to achieve that then we have to work with them at the top level and that's playing best v best on a weekly basis, implementing a number of changes to the academies in terms of sport science, better recruitment and video analysis. All of these aspects will help to produce a better player and improve the quality of Scottish football.''