This week, The Herald is feeling its way about, like a connoisseur fumbling for his opera glasses at a Lady Gaga concert, for the right questions. But the questions have been asked – and answers set forth – before, it’s just that the powers-that-be have an appalling track record when it comes to actually enacting change.

In 1995, Tony Higgins, then chairman of the Scottish Professional Footballers’ Association, was involved in a Scottish football think tank presided over by Ernie Walker – then secretary of the SFA – and also numbering the great Dutch coach Rinus Michels among its members. Since 2006, Higgins has been the Scottish representative of FIFPro, the international footballers’ union, but he is also aware that purview of Walker’s Independent Review Commission was inherited by 2004’s SFA Youth Action Plan and later by Henry McLeish’s ongoing Scottish Football Review.

Marx wrote that history repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce, and you would be unwise to bet against McLeish’s findings being pilloried by an irascible Scottish football public. Not that Higgins will be party to any of that: the former first minister’s recommendations, he believes, should be “sound”. But whether there is the political will to implement them is another matter.

“Irrespective of what Henry McLeish or anyone else comes up with, unless people recognise it may involve some self-sacrifice then it’s difficult to change things from within the existing structure,” Higgins told The Herald from an airport lounge en route to FIFPro’s General Assembly in Budapest. “It’s very difficult to challenge the power of the clubs and the leagues. In the 90s we wanted to devolve power, including some voting rights, away from the committees made up solely from clubs, because those people always tend to be tied to a particular vein of interest.

“If Henry McLeish’s recommendations are sound – and I would expect them to be – I would hope there is the political will among the governing bodies to take things forward. His first objective is to look at grassroots development and youth structure, so hopefully there will be steps which can be followed coming out of that. You would also hope that Henry would have some levers he can turn in government circles.”

Higgins knows precisely how difficult it will be to effect real change: the reforms made at the behest of Walker’s “think tank” were frightfully modest. “We had two tasks then,” recalled the one-time Hibernian, Partick Thistle and Morton midfielder. “One was to look at the SFA’s administrative set-up, and the other was to examine ways of developing grassroots football in order to feed into the professional set up. On the administrative side, the SFA council was reduced in size on our recommendation, from about 50 members to about 22-23.

“But it was also our aim to introduce new ideas and new people across football who could contribute to how the game was run. The people from the clubs would still be there but we also wanted to see the SFA’s standing committees incorporate members from outside of the club structure, whether it was coaches and people with a history of developing players, or, on the finance committee, people who were fans of Scottish football and worked in the City. The idea was to bring in people with real expertise. These ideas were never implemented, and I was quite saddened by that – it was a chance to bring in new ideas and more of an objective view.”

The most important bit of the commission’s remit, as Higgins saw it, was the part concerning the grassroots development of youth football. Regrettably, very little progress was made – because the political will did not exist.

“There was a lot of survey work done, but we never really got the opportunity to pull that information and provide concrete proposals because, at the time, the SFA felt the administrative restructuring ideas were taking so long to push through there wasn’t the will to look at more fundamental issues,” he recalls. “But there was real ambition at the beginning. We had Rinus Michels and we had Lars-Christer Olsen, who was general secretary of the Swedish FA and then moved on to become general secretary of UEFA. It was thought that the Nordic countries and the Netherlands would be good role models for us to consider; most of them are of a reasonably comparable size, and then, as now, they were more successful in terms of qualifying for tournaments and producing players.

“It’s also the case that the level of government support in these countries is far more substantial. I remember Rinus Michels saying about Holland that, being a small country, they couldn’t afford to miss a single young player. The one talent they missed might have been the next Johan Cruyff or Denis Bergkamp, so there had to be an even application of resources into coaching and development from the central government. The big clubs are then able to move in and try to pick up the elite boys, but the government funds grassroots football. Holland is three times the population of Scotland, but we just don’t have the resources to do that – it would require some degree of government support.”

Ah yes, government funding. No-one in sport, the arts or indeed the public services will ever demand less of it, but the point remains that it seems preposterous to talk of a national game when there is such a pronounced absence of a national strategy to nurture it.

“Nobody wants to see government-run football, but the government can be major investors in the development of sport,” says Higgins. “There was probably an opportunity for more investment with the tide of devolution a decade ago, at which point the economy was going through a period of resurgence, but it’s very hard now to see that happening. The excuse from governments has always been that they have to see an overall workable strategy before putting money in, but they don’t even need to say that now with the economy the way it is.

“Some of the clubs in Scotland are doing excellent work in their local communities as well as sometimes further afield. Some of the SFA coaching is good as well, but for an overall strategy you need to be in every community and that needs to be supported with a national plan that includes putting the right infrastructure and facilities in place.”

In his time at FIFPro, Higgins claims to have observed FIFA and UEFA becoming more open to input from his own union and other bodies and stakeholders in the game, including ex-players, managers and coaches. It is a trend he would like to see replicated in Scotland. “There are a lot people associated with the game who are very articulate and who can have an input into this debate. I think, for example, of Gordon Strachan – he won’t be in the running for the new manager’s job but when he was linked with it before he said he would want to be involved in the development side of the game. I think there are a lot of people like him who would be very useful in terms of how to make Scottish football better.”

More enlightened government involvement, a renewed focus on the grassroots and the devolving of power away from clubs and certain other “veins of interest”– just a few of the answers submitted by one who has dwelt long on Scottish football’s perennial questions. Over to you, Mr McLeish.