Steve Archibald travelled a road that led from Rutherglen to Las Ramblas and has nothing but admiration for any Scottish kid who packs his passport in his kit bag and decides his career lies beyond these shores.
A playing career that took the striker from Clyde to Barcelona, via Aberdeen and Spurs, then brought him back home to Hibs, will be revisited next week when Archibald makes the trip from his home in the Catalan capital to the Granite City and Edinburgh for a couple of Q&A events with supporters.
Now 65, Archibald doesn’t do many public appearances these days but time and distance has not dimmed his interest in Scottish football. Far from it.
The mind of the man who won the league at Pittodrie, two FA Cups and the UEFA Cup with Spurs then the La Liga title with Barca – playing in two World Cups and a European Cup Final along the way – remains as sharp as his movement was in the penalty box.
He knows, for example, a current Scottish player plying his trade abroad – Aaron Hickey at Bologna – is raising eyebrows after apparently rejecting the chance to play for our national Under-21 team.
“He reminds me of Marcos Alonso for Chelsea,” Archibald said. “He’s got a great end product, enthusiasm, puts tackles in, gets up and down the pitch and he can score a goal as well.
“He’s an outstanding player and Under-21 matches will do absolutely nothing for him. It would be a waste of time calling him up.
“I remember having games for the Under-21s and I didn’t want to go. I was playing and scoring goals every week and now they wanted me to go to the Under-21s? But the manager was Jock Stein so I went and did it.
“I scored a goal against England at Coventry and that was it – the one game I played for the Under-21s, it didn’t matter if I scored a goal or not.
“My club actually said to me, ‘Be careful. You can play for the Under-21s but you are not going to win anything or prove anything, but you are at risk if you get injured’.
“Hickey is doing the business in one of the top leagues in the world and you can’t ask for anything more than that.”
The ex-Hibs striker admits he’d have the former Hearts kid in the full Scotland set-up, even at right-back.
He is convinced that players who broaden their horizons, as Hickey has done, are invaluable.
“If you want a Scottish national team which has half a chance of qualification for World Cups then the players we have need to have the tools in their toolbox,” he insisted.
“To gain that they need experience of playing with other players, different mentalities and experience in the game. You have to soak it all in.
“You can play all your life in Scotland which is fine but you will be limited to what you can absorb.
“If players get the opportunity to move to another country, they must take it.”
Next week Archibald won’t mind wallowing in the past.
“I remember my time in Scotland very fondly,” he said with a smile. “I’m glad it happened the way it did. I started at Clyde and it was a harsh learning process.
“We used to train on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays at Shawfield. It was all muddy, we trained behind the goals. It was horrible.
“I played in midfield at that time and had a little bit of a problem jumping for the ball. People were over the top of me and elbowing me and all that kind of stuff.
“Willie McVie, the centre-back, played at that time. He was a big guy. Tough. Dirty. And that’s the way he played the game.
“He used to call me Ginge. He said, ‘Ginge, come on I’ll show you how to jump for the ball.’ There was only one floodlight on. Raining. Mud.
“So he throws this ball up, and we jump, and he smashes me right across the face. I’m lying in the mud and I swear to God, I thought my jaw might have been broken. He looked down and he said, ‘Ginge, that’s how you jump for a ball.’
“He just went in and left me lying in the mud. It was a great learning process and the type of football we played and the hardness of it was a tester for you really. It tested your desire in the game and taught you a lot of things.”
He was a teenager at the time. These days some of them are on £200k a week – and certainly if Archibald was playing in the current era, he’d be commanding that kind of cash.
“I don’t like the culture of young kids coming in, going on social media with a picture of them getting out their Bentley or Aston Martin. It’s dangerous for them,” he said.
“When I went to Spurs, the secretary of the club said to me that the biggest problem I’d have was the money I was earning. I burst out laughing because I was going to be earning a lot more and was wondering why that was going to be a problem.
“But when you are a kid going from nothing – it’s like getting into a car and going from 0-100mph in five seconds. I went from Aberdeen to Spurs for 10 times my salary and you just go bananas.
“You get the money and you want to spend it. The kids doing things online and on social media, fine, but there has to be a bit of humility in there and an understanding of how the world is and that people are suffering in the world and don’t be so stupid as to flash yourself around like that.
“That applies any time but especially when you’ve done nothing in the game. It’s a bit sickening. I hate it.
“But yeah, I want to play in the £200,000 a week era! But I would do it in the way I did it back then – with humility and giving my all to the club I was at and hope to win things. But I wish it was the £200,000 a week era. Absolutely.”
