Scott Brown: Scotland head to Euro 2024 with real strength in depth

Scott Brown believes Scotland can impress at Euro 2024 and says the quality throughout the squad will give manager Steve Clarke difficult decisions ahead of the tournament next summer.

The national team have been drawn to face hosts Germany in the opening game of the tournament before taking on Switzerland and Hungary in their other group games.

Former Scotland international Brown, who earned 55 caps and captained his country, says he’s looking forward to seeing the team on the big stage and thinks the curtain-raiser will be a huge occasion for all involved.

He thinks the ability of the squad is there for all to see and that the talent goes far beyond the starting side.

“The thing about the Scotland squad is that they have great strength in depth throughout the whole squad,” Brown said.

“Steve is going to find it hard to pick 23 bodies. That’s because of how well they’ve been playing, whether it’s down in England, here in Scotland, the lads have been playing exceptionally.

“And you’ve got Lewis Ferguson in Italy and Jack Hendry in Saudi.

“There’s great quality and strength in depth throughout the whole squad.”

While pitting themselves against the best teams in the continent is going to throw up difficult challenges, Brown thinks the team can take heart from their qualifying matches against Nations League winners Spain, while recent friendlies have also underlined the threat that some teams pose.

The former midfielder says lessons will have been learned from all of those encounters, and that the team has learned how to manage games and know how to give themselves the best chance of success.

“We’ve played Spain here, we’ve beaten Spain here,” he said. “We’ve gone away there and probably should have been 1-0 up. I would have liked to have seen what that would have been like for the last 10-15 minutes of the game, seeing how they could hold out as well.

“You want to play against the top quality teams. We played France and England recently and you know what you’re going to expect from them.

“Going into a major finals you know its going to be hard but the thing is they are going in with quality and that understanding of how to win games, knowing when to sit in and when to attack.

“It’s going to be hard. Every group is going to be hard. There’s always a couple of underdogs that go through and here’s hoping Scotland manage to keep quiet and get through.”