Could Danish model help Scotland solve talent crisis?

Lots of factors have gone into making Nordsjaelland one of European football's prime clubs for developing players. Some can be replicated, others cannot.

But at the heart of it is an unflinching will to put teenagers into the first team in order to allow them to grow - and make mistakes.

A Uefa report last season indicated that 39% of the club's total minutes were played by teenagers, the highest in Europe.

In comparison, the average minute share for teenagers in the Scottish Premiership was 4% last term. A stark difference.

It yielded a third-place finish in the Danish Superliga to qualify for Europe, and this season they fielded six players under the age of 21 in their Conference League play-off victory against Swiss side St Gallen.

Over the last decade since Nordsjaelland's youth strategy accelerated, they have finished in the top half of the league in nine out of 10 seasons.

Their biggest purchase in that time was this summer's 3m euros (£2.5m) fee for striker Alexander Lind.

Despite the strategy of selecting young players, results have been relatively consistent given they are competing against larger Danish clubs such as FC Copenhagen and Brondby.

The club's sporting director Alexander Riget says they have no option but to give youth a chance if they want to be successful, because they cannot compete financially for the same level of talent at an older age.

"Our best players, normally, are our young players between 18, 19, 20, because they start here, and then they are sold," Riget told BBC Scotland.

"A player like Caleb Yirenkyi, sold to the Premier League, would be an example.

"He was our best player last season. So if we want to achieve something, it should be with talent who is too good to be in Danish football, basically. That's the idea.

"There's always a dialogue about young players making mistakes. Sometimes you can see it from a different perspective - that young players often don't have a lot of bad experiences. So they are more brave when they play.

"I don't think necessarily that young players are making mistakes, and older ones are not. That's not how we see it."

An important element of Nordsjaelland's success is their access to talent from west Africa, which Riget explains has helped to raise the level of their Scandinavian teenagers.

The club was bought in 2015 by the Right to Dream Academy, a network of football schools set up in Ghana by former Manchester United scout Tom Vernon in 1999. Vernon remains' the club's chairman.

That link has opened up a pipeline to talent in Ghana in particular, which has been mutually beneficial for players given a platform in European football and the club who profited from selling those players on.

Yirenkyi - as well as Tottenham Hotspur's Mohammed Kudus, Lyon's Ernest Nuamah, Ibrahim Osman of Brighton, and Kamaldeen Sulemana of Atalanta - are Ghananian players who have come through the Right to Dream system and have been sold in multi-million pound deals after first playing for Nordsjaelland.

No player at the Africa-based academies have to sign for Nordsjaelland, but often they choose to do so because of their track record of giving players first-team minutes and launching their careers.

"Two or three years ago, we opened the academy in Cairo," Riget says.

"In the Cairo and Giza area there are close to 30 million people and there is no real academy structure. There is so much potential still in Africa for many more clubs.

"Of course, the awareness of the market and the prices in terms of signing or buying players from clubs in Africa have increased, but there is still a lot of potential also for clubs in Scotland, for sure."

A club in Scotland looking to change an approach to youth development could learn a lot from Nordsjaelland.

Dismissing myths around young players costing points and the stability from their commitment to the strategy are key tenets of their success.

However, the Right to Dream element and the sheer size of Nordsjaelland's investment means it cannot just be transposed to another club.

But every organisation has to start somewhere.

"The most important thing is you have a consistent ownership bringing calmness down to the organisation, and then you stick to the strategy when things become difficult," Riget says.

"The other thing is that instead of the coach deciding how to play, the club have a club model - that's how we are training, that's how we are playing.

"Because then it's much easier for the players when they make the transition into the first-team squad that they are used to playing in that way.