FOR a man who was not a player, manager, referee, club owner, director or administrator, Mark Wotte created quite a splash in Scottish football.

It would be wrong to overestimate his profile - plenty of casual supporters would have only a vague idea of what the Dutchman did, or what he was brought by the Scottish Football Association to do - but when he arrived here in 2011 he didn't take long to become a familiar, brash, divisive figure. Strutting and unabashed outsiders with plenty to say for themselves don't go down well in Scotland and there is no other way to accurately describe the SFA's first, and perhaps last, performance director.

There is an obvious temptation to suspect that Wotte's resignation, announced yesterday, means he is fleeing the scene long before his own performance can be assessed. That isn't totally true, even if he planted seeds which aren't due to fully blossom for another six years.

The cornerstone of Wotte's work was the introduction of seven performance schools around the country where the best young 12-year-old footballers would be hothoused throughout their secondary schooling. Training before school and after, then more sessions with their club academy coaches, the golden 10,000-hours of practice in childhood: the chosen few would get a level of attention the likes of which no previous set of Scottish kids had ever enjoyed.

The system is still open to human error - it is entirely reliant on the right 12-year-olds being selected in the first place and the quality of the coaches developing them - but that cannot be put at Wotte's door. It is hard to see how the performance schools can be anything other than an excellent vehicle to develop plenty of our best young players.

The performance schools began with a first intake in 2012. The first batch are 14 now and two new years have been inducted since then, around 300 kids in total. The point of all this was to create a smoother pathway to the national teams and specifically have a few of those graduates playing for Scotland proper in 2020.

We can only wait and see how that works out. But the assumption that the architect of all this would stay around for the long haul was always misguided.

Wotte became restless once his primary work was over and he began to feel the job became more about operations and budget-management rather than ideas and visions.

He is a manager and coach at heart and a guy who had seven jobs in 10 years before coming to Scotland was never likely to put down roots.

Big claims were made on his behalf when he arrived. Stewart Regan described him as one of the most important appointments in Scottish football for years. The Dutch have an exalted status in football coaching and Wotte was presented almost as if he were an Oxford don. There was much less fanfare over his departure. It would be an exaggeration to say the game was united in mourning over his departure last night.

Wotte could be mouthy. When Neil Lennon advocated a panel of coaches be used to make recommendations on youth football Wotte said he was "stunned", alleging the Celtic manager was unaware such input was already taken board. That prompted Lennon to call him "insecure and paranoid".

Some thought Wotte too quick to take credit or associate himself with victories achieved by the youth teams, or even by a senior side which had nothing to do with him. After defeats they felt he disappeared.

Others disliked his insistence that the youths play 4-3-3, even more the creation of an under-20s league. When he spoke up about Scottish kids consuming McDonald's and Cokes, before moving on to Buckfast, there was much tut-tutting. Many found him overbearing and dogmatic.

His detractors, and there were a few, always suspected he would flee the scene long before the judgement day - or judgment year - of 2020. Football has an inherent suspicion of those who take a job and set themselves long-term goals. It can sound like scripting a cushy number free from the unforgiving scrutiny which comes with living or dying by immediate results.

But how can a job which is essentially about devising and implementing strategy, with its structure and his mechanism to start a conveyor belt of young talent, be anything other than long-term? If 2011 was ground zero for what the SFA is trying to do, and 2020 is the delivery date for the rebuild to be over, then there is a case for saying that after three years a performance director has done nearly all the devising and implementing he can do. It is a waiting game after that.

Where he was wrong, yesterday, was to rush to claim great progress on his watch. Only time will tell on exactly how good his work was.

The SFA may now decide that Wotte was a one-off in more ways than one. It is not certain that they will appoint another performance director, or at least continue that job description. The board will meet to consider the matter in the coming weeks but if the members share Wotte's own belief, that the role was becoming more of an operational position than one relying on the creation or refinement of strategy, then the position may be redefined.

The SFA has lost another man, just as it has lost a handful of youth and performance school coaches recently. What cannot change is the strategy into which it has bought.