Shock stat reveals how Rangers are failing young players | OneFootball

A shock SFA report has concluded dreadful standards in Scotland with regards youth players, having confirmed some diabolical numbers.

The big one the report revealed is that Rangers and Celtic offered a combined 115 minutes to players last season aged 21 or younger during the first 33 matches of the season, aka prior to the Split.

Rangers, for our part, offered just 26 minutes to the kids, which is absolutely diabolical and shows zero pathway for the young players.

That Celtic only offered 89 wasn’t much better, and for a club with a historically strong youth academy, it appears to have badly floundered of late.

Rangers have produced youth, but a desperately low amount, with just Barrie McKay and Lewis Macleod actually breaking through back in the day in 2012. And that was without any choice on former manager Ally McCoist’s part.

Today, yes, we saw Nathan Patterson, but he only got a grand total of 1500 minutes and 27 appearances. By far Rangers’ biggest success from Auchenhowie pretty much since the days of Alan Hutton and Barry Ferguson, not to mention Allan McGregor.

But aside him, and he’s long gone, Rangers have been endemically poor with youth, and their Old Firm rivals barely any better. Ross McCausland is a brighter spot, but he’s not truly broken through to become a mainstay, and isn’t our own youth product anyway.

The key question is what has gone wrong to make such a shocking poverty of young players either coming through and being mainstays at Rangers, or being sold for big money?

The SFA purely and solely blames the clubs in general for simply not trusting young players enough, and it’s notable that the lesser clubs in the Premiership are the best ones for using young players.

Simply put there is less pressure in the mid-to-lower reaches of the table and these clubs also have less money to buy expensive players. They basically have to use their kids or they have no players.

But Rangers and Celtic have a great deal more pressure, and the standard of youth coming through is abundantly not good enough – so if you combine the two the kids are not alright?

We are struggling to remember the last Rangers youth we saw a real potential in – the only one is Alex Lowry, and for a lot of reasons he just didn’t properly make it into the first team.

Aside him? Very few have broken into the senior side, and this report only confirms how dependent Rangers have become on signing players from other clubs.

Not a single Rangers player in the first team squad, aside some token youngsters who rarely play, actually came from the youth academy.

What does the club do to change that?

Damned if we know.