Youth Football Scotland

A lot of misconceptions about Scottish Football are made throughout the world claiming the standard of football is poor, the quality of players are bad, their is no skill or talent coming through the ranks and to a certain point this may be correct. However, Scottish Football is working to rectify that and however late this may be, progress is on the way.

As someone who works closely with the Ayr United Football Academy, I will try to explain the changes that are being made to help bring through our next generation of young players.

In Scotland, like many other countries, the footballing finances are in meltdown. Outside of the big 5 European countries, there just doesn't seem to be any spare cash to spend on players, development or training facilities.

Ayr United like so many others always looked towards ways of cutting resources when money was tight and unfortunately the youth setup was always a prime target when thinking of ways to save a couple of dollars.

5 years ago a group of local supporters and businessmen decided that for a club the size of Ayr to move forward, they had to start and run an Ayr United Football Youth Academy whose finances were raised for the Academy and ring fenced for player development without the need of funds from the Ayr United senior club. With the acceptance that this was to benefit both the Academy players and the club itself, board members were chosen and the AUFA as we know it today was born.

As a self financing charity, it receives funding and grants from the Scottish Football Association, local government and the National health service in Scotland. It also had to top this up with sponsorship opportunites for local and national businesses in order to keep up the high standards that have been set in the organisation.

The Academy have sports science classes, schools programmes, college programmes, local boys clubs development programmes, development and coach SFA quality mark programmes, primary school programmes and SFA coaching programmes to name a few.