A VARIETY of different factors enabled Hearts to fend off interest in James Wilson from their Scottish rivals Celtic and Rangers as well as clubs down in England and keep the gifted young striker at Tynecastle.
Sensible parents who recognised the benefits of their son gaining an education and experiencing first-team football at an early age were important. Responsible agents who were prepared to put the long-term future of their young client ahead of making a quick buck also helped. The chance to play in the Lowland League with the B team was an attraction for the teenager too.
Wilson stayed and has not had cause to regret his decision. He made his debut for his boyhood heroes last year, has featured regularly both at home and abroad this term and was handed his Scotland debut against Greece last week at the tender age of 18 years and 17 days. He is his country’s youngest-ever internationalist.
Joe Savage, who worked tirelessly to keep the outstanding prospect in Gorgie towards the end of his tenure as the Hearts sporting director, has been, like every Jambo, delighted to see the promising forward’s sudden rise to prominence during the past 15 months.
Savage knows only too well, though, that for every youth player who remains loyal to the club which discovered him, handed him a chance and then nurtured him through his formative years there is another who is lured away. He speaks from bitter personal experience.
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He was bereft last summer when right winger Alfie Hutchison, who the capital club had worked with for years and had high hopes for, suddenly left for Rangers, who beat off stiff competition from Arsenal, Chelsea and Newcastle United, for what he describes as “an absolute pittance”.
The Scot, who stood down from his role at Tynecastle back in July last year, has seen first hand how such departures have become a regular occurrence in recent years and strongly suspects they are going to become even more frequent in the seasons to come.
“Brexit was a killer for the English clubs,” he said. “It meant that they couldn't go into the European markets as they did before. We then suffered in Scotland because of that. It had a domino effect.
“The English clubs said, ‘Well, if we can't get European kids, we'll just go and get more Scottish kids’. They started to base more of their full-time scouts up here. All of a sudden, clubs in this country became at the mercy of these massive clubs.
“Hearts tried like anything to keep Ewan Simpson, but lost him to Aston Villa. They are obviously a massive club and he chose to go there. Celtic lost Ben Doak to Liverpool and Rangers lost Rory Wilson to Villa. So I completely understand why there's this issue with it now and why we're trying to protect them from approaches at an earlier stage.”
“You think, ‘If he had stayed here like Lennon Miller or James Wilson he would have got 50 to 100 games under his belt, developed, improved and matured as a player and then ended up going to a bigger club’.
“I worked my a*** off to keep James Wilson at Hearts. I've got messages on my phone from his parents and from his agents saying, ‘It wouldn't have happened without you Joe’.
“The reason I did that was because I lost Ewan Simpson to Aston Villa, I lost Greig Allen and Alfie Hutchison to Rangers. I thought, ‘We can’t keep losing all our good players to these clubs’.
“We needed to make sure we had a structure and a pathway so that James knew he was going to get game time. That was a big thing for us. We could say to him, ‘Look, you’re going to get games, we have a lot of games, League Cup, Premiership, Scottish Cup, European’.
“There's absolutely no doubt it was massive. James said in an interview the other week says that he didn't want to go down to England and play under-23 or reserve team football, he wanted to play first team. But we tried the exact same tactics with Alfie Hutchison and he chose to go to Rangers. He felt the right option for him was to go to Rangers.
“He left for an absolute pittance, the lowest amount of compensation you could get. It was less than £40,000. We were all devastated as a club. He had been in our academy since he was a young boy of 10 or 11. We only got training compensation when he turned 16 and signed a professional contract.”
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Savage can, then, understand why there are SFA and SPFL rules which are designed to help a club hold on to, or at least receive adequate compensation for, the youth players they have spent huge amounts of time and money attempting to mould into first team stars of the future.
The Competition and Market Authority has been asked to investigate if the “no poach” and “no approach” rules as well as the two year registrations which kids aged 15 in the Club Academy System system currently sign breach competition law after receiving complaints from the Children’s and Young People’s Commissioner Scotland and youth campaigners Real Grassroots.
But Savage said: “If there's something that can be done to protect our younger players, to stop them getting snaffled by English clubs, then we need to look at doing it.
“The situation is designed to keep these players. If, say, Motherwell or St Johnstone have a golden team which reaches the Youth Cup final, they need to protect those players. If they're not protected, then the next minute one's going to Hearts, one's going to Fulham, one's going to Rangers, one's going to Barnsley.
“Nobody in Scotland ever agrees on anything. But I think they've realised they need to come together, protect our young players in the right manner, but don't lose out on compensation.”
There are growing concerns that some Scottish clubs may decide to scrap their youth academies because they are no longer receiving seven figure sums for first team players and are operating at a sizeable annual loss as a result. Does Savage believe that is a danger?
“It’s realistic at some clubs,” he said. “When I was at Hearts it was put to me by a couple of fans. They said, ‘Why don't we just get rid of the academy and put all the money into the first team’. I am not a believer in that. I always advocated protecting the academy. We just needed to do a better job of developing players.”
The children’s commissioner believes that multi-year registrations for children under the age of 16 breach six articles of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child - which MSPS voted unanimously in favour of incorporating into domestic law in 2021.
“When I was there at Hearts we did everything we possibly could,” he said. “We had a psychologist and a wellbeing officer for the academy. We would have meetings with parents every quarter about how the boy is behaving, how they are feeling, how they are getting on at school. Then you would talk about how they're performing football wise.
“One minute they're buzzing with life, the next minute they're a wee bit down in the dumps. We really made sure that we had everything in place so these kids could come to us and talk to us if they were having any issues. I never had any worries about us not looking after their well-being or their mental well-being, because I knew that we had done everything that we could.
“I get the concerns about clubs holding on to the registration if they don’t want a young player to leave. That can be the difficult part. But then the other argument is, ‘They've been in the system for five years and we've given them everything. We've trained them, coached them, done everything we can for them. Then they just want to leave’.
“When I was at Hearts, we'd sit down and have a sensible conversation with the parents. Maybe they would say, ‘We’re moving to Inverness’. Then, okay, we're not going to ask you to travel down. But maybe they would turn around and say, ‘We want to go to Hibs, Rangers or Celtic’. I'd say, ‘Well, we should be compensated for that’.
“That's where a lot of clubs take umbrage. I can see why they say, ‘That’s rubbish. We’ve had him for five years. If he breaks a leg and has to retire then we don't get any compensation’.
“But it comes down to negotiation. Sit down with the parents, sit down with the child, sit down with the other club, and see if you can thrash it out. It shouldn't need to get to the stage where you are having arguments.”
