Shock stat reveals how Rangers are failing young players

A shocking SFA report has concluded appalling standards in Scotland regarding young players have confirmed some diabolical figures.

The big problem revealed by the report is that Rangers and Celtic offered a combined 115 minutes to players aged 21 and under last season during the first 33 matches of the season, aka before the Split.

Rangers, in turn, only offered 26 minutes to the children, which is absolutely diabolical and shows zero path for young players.

The fact that Celtic only offered 89 wasn’t much better, and for a club with a historically strong youth academy, it appears to have failed of late.

Rangers produced youth, but in desperately low numbers, with only Barrie McKay and Lewis Macleod really coming into their own in 2012. And that was without any choice on the part of former manager Ally McCoist.

Today, yes, we saw Nathan Patterson, but he only managed a total of 1,500 minutes and 27 games. By far Rangers’ biggest success at Auchenhowie since the days of Alan Hutton and Barry Ferguson, not to mention Allan McGregor.

But apart from him, and he is long gone, Rangers have been endemically poor with youth, and their Old Firm rivals are barely any better. Ross McCausland is a brighter spot, but he’s not really ready to become a mainstay, and he’s not our own youth product anyway.

The main question is what went wrong to cause such a shocking poverty of young players who arrive and become mainstays at Rangers or are sold for big money?

The SFA purely and exclusively blames clubs in general for simply not trusting young players enough, and it is notable that the smaller Premiership clubs are the best at utilizing young players.

Simply put, there is less pressure on the mid and lower tiers of the table and these clubs also have less money to buy expensive players. They basically have to use their kids or they won’t have players.

But Rangers and Celtic are under a lot more pressure, and the standard of the youth coming through isn’t good enough – so if you combine the two, won’t the kids do well?

We’re struggling to remember the last Rangers youngster we saw real potential in – the only one is Alex Lowry, and for a variety of reasons he simply hasn’t made it into the first team.

Besides him? Very few have made it into the first team 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, apart from a few youngsters who rarely play, came through the youth academy.

What does the club do to change this?