New Money in Scottish football

Aaron Hickey’s incredible £19m move to Brentford looks like an eye-opener for Italian football.  Bologna paid around 10% of that for the Scotland international two years earlier.  Now Hibs have accepted a £3m bid from Hellas Verona for Josh Doig, while Aberdeen have accepted a bid for the same money for Lewis Ferguson.  Scottish players of this calibre were disappearing into the English lower leagues for a fraction of this money before Hickey.

Fans hate when their best young talent leave after only fleeting appearances in the first team, “What’s the point if we only keep the poorer players?”, is the overwhelming emotion.  Aberdeen and Hibs have stumbled into a lucrative player trading seam.  They now need to figure out how to grow that side of the business.

£3m can be wasted in a season on imports from cheaper European markets with lower wages.  This was the route Dundee United and Aberdeen went down when their player development strategy was broken up in the late 80s.  The whole of Scottish football followed, although other clubs did not have a successful youth strategy to dispose of.

Alternatively, £3m buys you a lot of scouting and youth development resource; Aberdeen could be bidding against Celtic for St Mirren’s best talent, for example.  Scottish Premiership clubs have a competitive league, relatively straightforward access to European football and a domestic pond that has largely been overlooked by foreign scouts until recently.

Selling players of the calibre of Hickey, Ferguson and Doig has allowed clubs from genuinely impoverished leagues like Romania and Moldova to make an impressive impact on the European stage.  This is the model for Aberdeen, Dundee United, Hibs and Hearts; Celtic are operating on a related but different model.  If this New Money is spent wisely we will all benefit.