Calum Ferguson achieved what thousands of young footballers dream of when he played for his boyhood club, Inverness Caledonian Thistle, in the Scottish Premiership. Yet the 31-year-old looks back on his career as proof of a difficult truth about youth development in Scotland. Ferguson graduated from Caley Thistle's academy at 18 but played just two games for the first team before moving to lower league clubs and then to Canada and New Zealand to try to get top-flight football.
Now a development officer with Alba Football Alliance, he believes Scottish football continues to sell young players and their families the promise of a pathway from the academies to the first team, which for most will never be a reality. "Parents believe their boy, or their girl, will get to the first team - that they will be a star in football," he told BBC Scotland's Eorpa programme. "You just fall away from the game and your life changes overnight." His comments come as Scottish football wrestles with a growing concern over the number of homegrown players who are making it to the top of the game.
In September, all 42 SPFL clubs gathered in St Andrews for a summit to discuss why so few young Scottish players are making the grade at elite level. Data presented to the clubs showed that Scottish players under the age of 21 made up just 4.1% of minutes played in the Scottish Premiership. By comparison, in the Danish Superliga, a league of the same size, the figure was 15.1%.
In the first round of fixtures in the Scottish Premiership this season, 28% of the starters were born in Scotland. A stark contrast to similar sized Norway, where homegrown players made up 72% of the starting 11s on their opening weekend. This is because Norway has strict quotas.
Its league rules state that a club's full squad must include 16 homegrown players and a matchday squad can have a maximum of nine foreign players. Nicklas Fuglestad is 20, and regularly plays for Viking FK, based in the Norwegian city of Stavanger. He believes quotas are good for the game.
"Everyone I know is very happy with how the Norwegian football league operates," he says. "It makes it a bit easier for a young player to move up from the academy and make the step into A-league football." Viking turned their focus to developing academy talent nearly a decade ago, after they were relegated to the second division. After finishing champions last year, they have made it to the league stage of the Champions League, where they recently started eight Norwegians in their line-up, four of whom had been in their academy.
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