• Report wants elite 12-year-olds to train eight times a week • Focus follows failure to qualify for tournaments since 1998

Scotland's failure to qualify for a major tournament since 1998 plus the realisation of the sharp decline in standards among the country's footballers have prompted the formation of a £60m performance strategy north of the border.

Headed up by Mark Wotte, a Dutchman appointed the Scottish Football Association's first performance director in June, the plan aims to focus on elite players at youth level with a view to tracing their progression into the full international team.

The association has accepted that when Scotland routinely qualified for World Cups and European Championships, youth training was neglected or wrongly focused.

A review of Scottish football by Henry McLeish, a former first minister, published last year presented the game's governing body with 103 points for consideration or change. From that, a performance strategy was born.

This week Wotte said he would be disappointed if half the Scotland side had not progressed through seven elite regional academies which will seek to train 500 youngsters a day.

The performance schools – commandeered rather than newly built – will select the most talented 12- to 16-year-olds in Scotland and are based on the notion that, to produce world-class athletes, 10,000 hours of practice must be invested from the age of 10 to 20 or from 12 to 22.

Wotte says Scotland's excuse of being a small country that cannot compete at the upper echelons of football is offset by the time spent coaching young players in similarly sized nations.

"We want to produce a training environment for kids from the age of 12 to train eight times a week," he said.

"That would be four times in the morning before school and four sessions after school. We have to set up co-operation with schools and local academies. In an ideal world, kids start training early then go into school. This will only be for elite players but we will be careful not to overlook late developers.

"We have to create a situation in Scotland to allow elite players to be in contact with a football 20 hours a week. This is already normal in other countries."

The Scottish FA is recruiting seven coaches to run these schools – the former Sunderland manager Ricky Sbragia has been appointed as the national Under-17s coach.

The association said it wants 75% of the Scottish Premier League to be Scottish players by 2015 and the youth football season to be altered to include more matches in summer.

The SFA would like, however, more financial assistance from the Scottish government. Wotte points out there are only about 200 3G artificial pitches, a tenth of the total in his homeland; football's wider benefits for society are also stressed by the FA.

"The whole project is very challenging and after five, six or nine years we hope to be proud of the national team," Wotte said. "This year, the Holland national team was No1 in the world rankings for the first time. But just nine years ago they didn't qualify for the World Cup.

"Uruguay has only three million people but won the Copa América and came fourth in the last World Cup. This is an example for us."