Street football...what happened to it?

April 15, 2021

"I trained 3-4 hours a week at Ajax when I was little but played 3-4 hours a day on the street. So where do you think I learnt football?"

Johan Cruyff

I thoroughly enjoyed the Champions League (football) quarter finals and thought the standard was incredible across all the teams involved. I think Scotland had one player involved with Andy Robertson the sole representative at Liverpool.

Going back the last 30 years there have only been a handful of Scottish players involved in the latter stages of Europe's premier competition. Add Darren Fletcher, Paul Lambert and Gary McAllister to Andy Robertson and I'm struggling to name others. Excluding Rangers fantastic Champions League run in 1992/93 the best chance you had of seeing a Scotsman on the pitch was the referee. Going back before then and you had Celtic winning the European Cup with a team full of Scottish players and Scottish players were an integral part of every big club in England. Could you imagine Dundee United beating Barcelona home and away now or Aberdeen beating Real Madrid in a European Final now? Tell our kids this and they will just look at you and laugh. What has changed?

I personally think it is to do with a lot of different factors but the lack of children playing football for me is one of the biggest ones. Can we get back to those days or replicate it with something else?

I'd love to know people's thoughts on it.

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