Lord Brian Mawhinney wanted to Americanise the Football League by deciding all matches on penalties.

Awarding an extra point to the winners of the shoot-out seemed like a great idea to the former Tory cabinet minister.

Then Albion chairman Dick Knight exposed the absurdity of the scheme by pointing out a team could reach a title-winning total of 92 points without winning a single match.

Now Mawhinney has devised another plan which, on the face of it, makes sense but which, in fact, is seriously flawed.

If the chairman of the League gets his way then, from next season, Albion and their English and Welsh rivals will have to include in their 16-man matchday squads at least four players who have been registered domestically for a minimum of three seasons before their 21st birthday.

It sounds like a good way of dealing with the thorny issue of youth development and Albion, with the current make-up of their squad, would have little difficulty meeting the criteria.

But Mawhinney, ever the politician, is turning an important subject into a numbers game with a sound-bite policy.

The devil is in the detail. Mawhinney trumpeted his scheme with a statistic. Of the 23 players in the England squad that beat Germany in Berlin recently, 14 came through youth development programmes at Football League clubs.

That is all very well but alarm bells should be ringing because the percentage figure of England internationals developed by Football League clubs drops from 60 to under 50 for the under-21s, 40 for under-19s and less than 30 per cent at under-16 level.

The implication is obvious. More and more of the best young players are being snapped up, from a very early age, by the Premier League elite.

This has serious consequences for clubs like Crewe, who have survived in the past by producing their own players and selling them on.

Albion do not rely on this source of revenue for the smaller clubs to quite the same extent, although it is worth remembering Knight negotiated handsome compensation when Aston Villa pinched from them one of the Berlin heroes, Gareth Barry.

Mawhinney's scheme does nothing to address the problem of Premier League clubs monopolising the market for schoolboy players, most of whom will not end up like Gareth Barry.

It is far more likely that they will never make a top-flight appearance for clubs rich enough to cherry-pick and discard without a second thought and, in some cases, they could be lost to the game forever.

That is not all. What if, for example, injuries and suspensions left Micky Adams with only a handful of players fitting the criteria and some of them were out-of-form? Why should he have to pick them?

Checking all of the paper work will also increase the already prohibitive administrative burden placed on unsung members of staff in the lower leagues such as Albion secretary Derek Allen.

Mawhinney's vote-winning instincts have not deserted him. A special EGM takes place at Derby County next week to debate the so-called ‘Home Grown Players’ rule.

His motive is clear. “League clubs will, once again, be taking a lead that others want to follow,” Mawhinney says.

I hope club chairmen are ‘grown-up’ enough to make up their own minds and give his scheme the red card it deserves.