YES, writes Gary Keown.

FOLLOWING Gordon Strachan’s announcement that he wants to save the game, we have had a week of deep discussion over the state of youth football in Scotland.

It is all very worthy. Much of it is interesting. Anything that leads to the abolition of Club Academy Scotland - a dreadful mess of self-interest, money-grabbing, jobs-for-the-boys and appalling treatment of children – is to be encouraged.

The changes Strachan wants to implement will take quite some time to bear fruit, though. Can we really afford to wait another 10 years to see whether things are going to take a turn for the better?

This is not just about youth football. It cannot be. If the top end of the sport in Scotland is allowed to slide much further, heaven knows what will be left by the time the current crop of eight-year-olds are ready to make their first-team debuts.

Scottish football has to repackage itself. It has to figure out a way to raise revenue levels considerably. An injection of finance is badly needed and it is needed now.

There are non-league clubs in England working with bigger budgets than some of our Ladbrokes Premiership sides and that is some indictment of how far we have allowed ourselves to fall.

Some criminal mistakes have been committed in the past and there really is no immediate fix, but it is my belief that there are a number of clubs in Scotland do have individuals at helm who are capable of fresh thinking, entrepreneurial spirit and generation of new ideas. They simply have to find a way to make those ideas heard within the SFA and SPFL.

Scottish football, at the moment, has no right to demand more TV money. The product is not attractive enough. Standards cannot be raised overnight, but there is a decent level of competition and the case for moving to summer football is strong.

Sources state that Sky, for example, have already intimated they would be willing to pay more for a competitive league that could help fill its summer schedules. Summer football makes sense for so many different reasons and this is one of them.

With BT Sport now a big player in the broadcasting market and looking for material to keep the subscriptions rolling in during June and July, could we even dare to think of there being an auction for our summer league?

There could be other pay-offs, too. Teams would enter the qualifying stages of UEFA competition at full fitness, youth players would, in general, be playing and training in better conditions. Crowds, providing football finds a cohesive way to market itself and become more of an ‘event’, would surely rise when the weather is better.

Moving to summer football would not lead to a massive rise in television revenue immediately. It is all about building the product up slowly and adding more quality to first-team squads in addition to financing youth systems as extra cash trickles in.

We need more money in the game, though. Otherwise, we are going nowhere.

NOT NECESSARILY. IT’S ABOUT MORE INTELLIGENT SPENDING, writes Neil Cameron.

ON Wednesday night, at Lesser Hampden in the shadow of our national stadium, a group of kids were having a kick-around on the plastic pitch.

Well, they were trying to kick the ball. Horizontal rain and a gale were making their one-touch passes just a little difficult.

Of course, we have all been there. Indeed, those of us who are now a certain age can remember playing in worse conditions and on blaes pitches once we’d pushed the Asda trolleys off the six-yard line. Those were the days.

The difference between now and then is just about every country on planet football has invested in indoor facilities while we still seem happy to risk hypothermia on our weans. Is it a wonder we are not fulfilling our potential.

So how to fix it?

Mark Warburton seems to think attracting more money would solve the problems we all hope Gordon Strachan is going to address in his upcoming manifesto.

There will be quite a few who will suggest that it is somewhat ironic, or even a scandal, that anyone who works for Rangers can lecture about money. It is true that those crazy days of spending did nobody in Scottish football any favours and perhaps that, more than EBTs or whatever, is why this observer believes David Murray to be most guilty party.

But all of that is hardly Warburton’s fault and, as manager of Rangers, he is more than entitled to his opinion. For me, he was a bit off the mark, even if his heart was in the right place.

Warburton said: “It’s just my opinion, but to attract more TV investment you have to improve the product. It comes down to money, it’s as simple as that, and so Scottish football has to improve its product to attract greater investment.”

That’s fine to an extent, but Scotland’s TV deals are worth around £20 million and bettered only by ten of Uefa’s 54 associations. So we actually do okay regarding TV money.

Warburton also spoke of the English Premier League being a brand if that was a good thing and something to emulate. The money down south is obscene and, take it from someone who worked in that environment for many years, the soul is going out of English football. We don’t want that.

Extra funds would be great, of course, however, we don’t need more money per se; rather we need to spend what we have in a far more intelligent way.

Let’s build indoor pitches instead of talking about it. The TV money we do have has to be redistributed in a fairer way so the smaller clubs earn more. A rethink of ticket prices, safe-seating and drinking at games is also required.

Scottish football is not going to earn much more from television, as Warburton seems to think it can, because the product is not what it should be.

To solve this we need to stop eight-year-olds catching their death on a Wednesday night, which could put them off the game for life. That’s not about cash. It’s common sense.