Turn up at any of the countless holiday, midweek or weekend football camps aimed at primary school age youngsters all over Scotland and you are likely to see a hive of enthusiastic activity.
For the vast majority in this part of the world who have any sort of hand and eye coordination and a competitive instinct it remains the sport of choice and, for most, the only one they will have a real chance of playing competitively at school level.
It is, of course, pretty obvious early on which of them are the few that have any sort of chance of going beyond playing the game for fun and they are quickly and relentlessly picked off. Chances are if their talent has not been identified by the time they have selected which subjects they will be taking as national exams, they have been discarded.
And so the dream of playing professional sport dies and, such is the Scottish culture, the pursuit of other ways of filling spare time begins with the pull towards all the wrong sorts of behaviour, even for those deemed good enough. The friends they have grown up with are staying up until all hours drinking and stupidly or even sometimes even jealously, they make it difficult for those who still have a chance. Youngsters who have been the leaders within their peer groups because of their talent are consequently faced with a choice between losing that status by staying disciplined in getting the right kind of rest and nutrition or retaining popularity by going with the flow.
This is by no means unique to Scotland but in countries where football is less dominant and they are consequently exposed to many more sports at an early age, many youngsters will already have identified sports they are better suited to and will switch.
In other football obsessed countries with bigger populations and similar social cultures, most obviously England, the cycle is more akin to what we are used to here, but sheer weight of numbers means there is also a community of like-minded aspirants for the more gifted to gravitate towards should they choose to.
The answer lies not within the approach to football alone, but to sport as a whole.
Since Gordon Strachan, the Scotland manager, addressed this far-reaching subject last week and while his counterparts throughout the British Isles concentrated upon more immediate matters in hand, most of the hundreds of thousands of words written and spoken by way of reaction have remained focused upon the narrow confines of seeking football-specific solutions.
However the real solution lies in addressing the feeble sporting culture in Scotland which has meant that almost all of our major success stories in recent times, from Andy Murray, to Chris Hoy, to Kath Grainger to Catriona Matthews, have been people who have had to leave Scotland to get themselves into the right environments.
The onus for dealing with this lies with football because of its dominance. Those engaged in it need to start recognising that when they break hearts it is vital for those who are kept in the system that their friends continue to support the right values.
The easiest way of achieving that is to ensure that if football is not going to let them fulfil their dreams then other activities that require the same sort of attitude towards the right lifestyle might and that, for competitive kids, means other sports.
It may seem counter-intuitive but the solution to football’s problems lies in encouraging youngsters to play every sport other than football, so creating an environment where the peer pressure among the maximum number of youngsters is a positive influence on aspiring athletes.
It seems a huge project but it could be that if the instinctive resistance to such thinking that lies within a huge section of the traditional football community - all the way to the top of the sport - can be overcome, change might happen much more quickly than when telling the handful who currently make it into academies that they have to put in extra sessions working on technique when they would rather be in pubs and nightclubs with their mates.
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