All roads lead to England. Some travel because they want to, others because they have to. Once the journey has commenced, few will return home with regrets.

The Premier League is the land of opportunity for the most promising players in the Scottish game. Money is a natural driver and motivator, of course. Yet it is the quality of the programmes – from the coaches, pitches and facilities to the arenas, matches and the pathways – that will continue to be the selling point for those who reach for the stars but find themselves hitting the glass ceiling.

That metaphorical barrier has been built by a system that is not fit for purpose. While Scottish football laments the English influence on our game, those who see the situation for what it is and what it can be will continue to reap the rewards in football and financial terms.

The academy system at Rangers is perhaps the perfect case in point. Producing players is not the problem, but playing them and keeping them is. Nathan Patterson spent months in the first team under Steven Gerrard before moving to Everton for a record fee. Billy Gilmour, Dire Mebude and Rory Wilson never kicked a ball at Ibrox.

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The default position is to bemoan young heads being turned by the bright lights and pound signs. In reality, each looked at the road ahead and believed heading south of the border was the only route to the top. Rangers will benefit to the tune of almost £20million as a result, but Patterson is the only one who helped add silverware to the Ibrox trophy cabinet.

The outlook for the next Patterson or Gilmour is relatively bleak at Auchenhowie. That is not solely the fault of the club or the staff, although Rangers do have to carry their share of the blame in some regards. A generation of kids are victims of circumstance, held back by a system that is parochial and unfit for purpose.

Last month, the Rangers B Team beat Huddersfield Town’s Under-21s in a bounce game. Blackburn Rovers were 6-2 winners in a friendly in August, while Rangers edged a match of seven goals against Middlesbrough earlier that month. Bo’ness United have been beaten in the SPFL Trust Trophy and Clyde and Fraserburgh overcome in the Challenge Cup.

There has been a reticence from Rangers to flood the market with loan players in recent seasons. Sending players down the leagues may give them a taste of first-team football but the infrastructure – in terms of sports science, coaches and analysis – cannot be matched. Rangers believe it is better to keep their players in-house, but every positive has a negative as answers are sought to questions that shouldn’t really exist.

The schedule is ad hoc, the majority of matches are all but meaningless. The players are there but the pathway isn’t. The adage about training the way you wish to play doesn’t apply when you don’t have fixtures to participate in.

Rangers have sought to alter that situation on several occasions and been left banging their heads off a brick wall at each turn. Finding consensus in our game is, after all, an almost impossible task.

The Lowland League experiment was worthwhile but ultimately a failure given that players did not progress physically, tactically, technically and mentally at the required rate. A Conference League proposal that would have seen the introduction of B Teams in the SPFL structure never got off the drawing board.

In the absence of a competitive format, Rangers embarked on the ‘best v best’ programme and arranged matches with clubs from England and abroad to allow those on the fringes of the first team to play and to challenge their most promising players by operating at higher age levels.

A couple of seasons ago, Craig Mulholland, then the head of the academy at Auchenhowie, wrote a paper that researched the benefit of B Teams and put forward a case that was supported by the evidence from leagues and clubs across Europe. Alongside former managing director Stewart Robertson, Mulholland invited every club in the SPFL to discuss his findings and a way forward via a series of Zoom calls.

(Image: Ross MacDonald - SNS Group) Two clubs, Dundee and East Fife, did not even take part. While some were supportive of the ideas of strategic partnerships and a new loan model, many dismissed the blueprint out of hand. The reason? If it was going to benefit Rangers, and by proxy benefit Celtic, they were not interested. Typically, it was easier to shoot ideas down than it was to provide an alternative.

Mulholland was, of course, coming from a position of a vested interest. The higher the quality of player that Rangers can produce, the better their first team should be. But that only applies to the best of the best and it would be rare for Rangers to promote more than one or two outstanding talents from their academy each season.

Many of them, the majority of them in fact, will still not make the grade at Ibrox. So where do the remaining members of a 20-man B Team squad end up? They are the Premiership and Championship players of tomorrow, the late bloomers who head to pastures new and make their name and their money elsewhere.

Rather than leaving Rangers having hardly got their boots dirty, they would depart with 100 competitive games under their belt and ready for the rigours of first-team football. Rangers would have benefited from the few, but the game would have benefited from the many.

Different stakeholders did not and will not look beyond the snapshot at the bigger picture. Right now, the setup benefits nobody and the absence of a framework for players between the ages of 18 and 21 leaves Scotland as an outlier in European terms. A glance across the border shows the folly and futility of what has been in place here for too many seasons now.

Premier League 2 provides teams with a guaranteed 20 competitive fixtures each term and the top 16 sides then progress to a play-off structure. In addition, the top 12 clubs qualify for the Premier League International Cup which sees invitations extended to 16 teams for a season-long competition that runs alongside the domestic schedule.

It is a calendar that also includes participation in the EFL Trophy, where players are guaranteed group-stage outings against established sides from the Championship, League One or League Two. By comparison, Rangers are the only B Team to have reached the last 16 of the SPFL Trust Trophy. Celtic lost 3-0 to East Kilbride, Aberdeen were beaten by Banks O’Dee and Hibernian and Hearts were eliminated by Albion Rovers and Fraserburgh respectively.

When the menus are placed in front of kids and their families, it should come as no surprise when they choose to pull up a chair at the top table in England. The fact that they do so before establishing themselves here adds insult to injury but clubs in the Premier League need to snap up the most natural talents before they are indoctrinated into a system that is more likely to hold them back in their late teens than push them forward as they enter their twenties.

Academy directors and managers, and the players themselves, will agree with the development case. It is on boards and owners to understand the commercial case, though. Even with the richest league in the world on its doorstep, Scotland has a weak player trading model.

Rangers continue to benefit financially from the aforementioned handful of academy graduates but two of the shining lights – Leon King and Alex Lowry – have faded and their Ibrox careers will likely end in regret. In those cases, it is those at Ibrox who have the questions to answer rather than those at Hampden.

King and Lowry were the standout talents at several age groups and were touted for prolonged and prestigious Rangers careers. Ultimately they act as evidence that even natural ability is not enough to make it at Ibrox. If their stories are not to be rewritten by others, the actions of managers and the demands of directors must change.

(Image: SNS Group) The rise and rise of Patterson was only possible because Steven Gerrard took a chance on a kid he believed had what was required. On the night the right-back made his debut against Stranraer, the chatter around the Blue Room was about the risk that Gerrard was taking by starting an 18-year-old. It perhaps spoke to the culture of the club and the fear factor of playing young players. Many like the idea until it becomes a reality and risk but Gerrard’s call to promote Patterson ahead of more experienced players such as Jon Flanagan and Matt Polster paid dividends for all parties.

Two years later, Giovanni van Bronckhorst did the same with Lowry. The night that the playmaker replaced Ianis Hagi and marked his debut against Stirling Albion with a goal should have been the start of something special. History tells a different story.

King and Lowry were examples of big fish in a small pond. Only they will know if mentality rather than talent has been a defining factor in their careers. King was pitched into the Champions League and paid the price of being at the heart of a side that toiled at home and abroad due to faltering form and an injury crisis.

Across the first 33 Premiership matches last season, Rangers had a Scottish Under-21 player on the park for a total of just 26 minutes. King played nine minutes across the three fixtures against Dundee, St Johnstone and Motherwell in December and completed just one full match all season as Philippe Clement utilised him on the final day against Hearts. A loan spell at Tynecastle was unfulfilling for Lowry and his last outing this term came in a 2-0 defeat to Fleetwood Town for the B Team that is coached by Malky Thomson.

It could be argued that King and Lowry had their chances but just didn’t make the most of them when they came along. If players of that level are not able to make it, then what hope do the next corps of kids have after emerging through the same system?

Some supporters would no doubt be in favour of scrapping the academy altogether. What use is the time, money and effort put in over 14 years to produce Robbie Fraser, for example, when he is deemed too young to start a Europa League game at the age of 21? For context, Clement started Neraysho Kasanwirjo – born 13 months later than the left-back – against Malmo last month. Crucially, the Dutchman has games and experiences on his record after emerging through the ranks at Ajax and turning out for Groningen, Feyenoord and Rapid Vienna before moving to Ibrox on a loan deal this summer.

Clement has spoken of his desire to play academy players and highlighted his track record from his time in Belgium. In a passionate address at the start of the campaign, Clement lamented the structure in Scotland.

"Everybody benefits out of that,” Clement said on the B Team debate. “And it's a big difference because people are talking about cooperation with other teams and putting several players in one other team and to work in that way. But it's much more difficult, because you don't have any control what is done there with the players.

"It's totally different when it's your team, with your coaches, with your performance staff, with everything controlled around the players. You have much more control of the story.

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"How is the evolution of a player if you put them alone or you put them in a team where you don't have any control. It's just like throwing them in the swimming pool without learning to swim. So we need to make these steps smaller, so it needs to be more controlled.

"So I hope in the future maybe everybody can join together and follow that idea. It's not my idea, it happens in several countries. And they have success also with much younger players. So I think it's always good to look where things are going well and to learn out of that.”

It could be argued that Rangers have not produced enough players through the system but many were able to get so far and then fall at the final hurdle as they succumbed to circumstances. If the likes of Bailey Rice or Zak Lovelace are not played, how can they be judged? Could Adam Devine have received more match minutes after initially impressing under Michael Beale or could King prove to be older, wiser and better today for his experiences of yesteryear?

In June 2022, Rice made the decision to leave Motherwell and join Rangers. His peer at that time was Lennon Miller. For some, it was Rice who had the higher ceiling. Today, Miller is the standout Scottish talent in the Premiership and arguably out of Rangers’ price range.

A big breakthrough can come as a result of being in the right place at the right time. Players must be at the right club in the first instance, however, and Rangers need to prove that they are indeed a believer in and exponent of young players. Saying it and doing it are very different things.

The ambition of having an academy that is held in the same regard as the likes of Ajax or Benfica is not an unrealistic one for Rangers. That part of the process and the formative years is not the problem. It will take leadership from the dugout and the boardroom for Rangers to produce players, win with them and then sell them. It must be in the DNA of the club; it must be practised as well as preached.

The appointment of a new head of academy is on a lengthy to-do list for the Ibrox board but is unlikely to materialise until a chairman and a chief executive are in place. A sporting director would also benefit the football infrastructure at Ibrox and Auchenhowie.

Six months after Zeb Jacobs, who spent just a year in post after succeeding Mulholland, left to join Feyenoord, Rangers have no permanent replacement in situ. At present, David McCallum is overseeing the academy. In an area that requires long-term vision, Rangers are operating with a short-term fix.

(Image: Shutterstock)

That is the case in so many ways when it comes to the academy at Auchenhowie and further afield. The requirement of a manager to win games and trophies will dissuade him from looking beyond the next match. The insular outlook of member clubs will prevent them trying something new while living with an old system that is not fit for purpose.

While those at the top of the game worry about themselves, the kids at the grassroots are taking their own futures into their own hands. If more decide that Scottish football isn’t the place for them, then who can blame them? England will continue to come calling.