Kilmarnock, on a Tuesday night in late April, was dark and cold and full of rain, the kind of west-of-Scotland weather that makes you wonder why anyone plays football outdoors from October to March. Rugby Park, all seven thousand six hundred and twelve seats of it, was three-quarters full for a league match that, in the English footballing imagination, barely registers. Findlay Curtis, a twenty-one-year-old centre-back on loan from West Ham United, was playing his twenty-eighth match of the season, and the Kilmarnock supporters behind the goal were singing his name with the particular devotion reserved for loan players who stay long enough to feel permanent.
Curtis is the sort of footballer who does not appear in transfer gossip columns. He is not a prospect discussed on podcasts, not a name linked to Champions League clubs, not a face on the Instagram timelines of football influencers. He is a young defender playing for a team in the Scottish Premiership’s lower reaches, on loan from a club in the English Premier League’s middle section, trying to keep Kilmarnock in the division and, as he told the BBC this week, trying to put himself in Steve Clarke’s thinking for the 2026 World Cup in North AmericaT2, BBC Football.
The ambition is not absurd. Scotland qualified for the 2024 European Championship and, under Clarke, have built a squad whose selection logic rewards consistency over pedigree. Clarke has shown, repeatedly, that he will pick players from outside the traditional Celtic-Rangers axis if their form merits it. Callum McGregor was capped while playing in Scotland’s second tier. John McGinn was capped while playing for Hibernian. The pathway from Rugby Park to Hampden Park is shorter than the pathway from the Premier League’s bench to the Premier League’s pitch.
Curtis’s case is built on minutes. He has played nearly every match since arriving at Kilmarnock in the summer, in a defence that has been, by Scottish Premiership standards, reasonably sound. The numbers are not spectacular; Kilmarnock’s goal difference is negative and their league position is precarious. But the individual data, the duels won, the aerial challenges, the progressive passing from the centre of defence, are the data of a player learning the profession at competitive speed, in a league that does not forgive positional errors the way an under-23s fixture might.
The West Ham connection is relevant but not central. Curtis was not loaned out because he was surplus; he was loaned out because West Ham’s centre-back options, established internationals on long contracts, made first-team minutes at the London Stadium improbable this season. Kilmarnock offered something West Ham could not: the pressure of a relegation fight, the noise of a crowd that cares about Saturday’s result more than next month’s development, the physical reality of playing against strikers who need the points. These are the conditions under which defenders either learn or fail, and Curtis, by the evidence of this season, has learned.
The Scottish Premiership’s place in the footballing ecosystem is a complicated one. It is not, by broadcast revenue or global viewership, a major league. It produces fewer Champions League players than the Eredivisie, fewer international starters than the Belgian Pro League. What it produces, with some regularity, is professionals: players who, having survived a season at Tynecastle or Pittodrie or Rugby Park, are equipped for the mental demands of the sport in ways that academy graduates sometimes are not. Curtis, at Kilmarnock, has been playing in front of crowds who will tell him, loudly and specifically, when he has made an error. This is a different education than the one provided by a Category One academy’s training ground.
The World Cup question is, for now, speculative. Clarke’s squad for the 2026 tournament will be shaped by form in the autumn and winter of the coming season, by fitness, by the competitive logic of a group stage that Scotland will enter as underdogs. Curtis will need to be playing regular football next season, whether at West Ham or elsewhere, and he will need to be playing it well enough to stay in Clarke’s peripheral vision. The distance between Kilmarnock and a World Cup squad is measured not in geography but in months of sustained performance, the kind of performance that does not make headlines but does make managers notice.
The supporters at Rugby Park have noticed. They have watched Curtis defend with a composure that belies his age, they have watched him organise a back line that has included three different partners this season, and they have watched him play through the cold and the rain and the Wednesday-night trips to Dingwall and Aberdeen with a professionalism that Kilmarnock’s manager, in his own press conferences, has described as beyond what was expected from a loanee of his age. The fans’ affection for Curtis is the affection of a community that recognises effort, and it is the kind of affection that follows a player long after he has left.
Whether Curtis makes the World Cup squad is a question for next May. Whether he has, at Kilmarnock, become a better footballer than he was in August is a question that has already been answered. The pitch at Rugby Park, on a wet Tuesday in April, was not the stage Curtis imagined when he was growing up in east London, but it was the stage he was given, and he has performed on it with the seriousness that the stage demanded.
