Think you could find Liverpool’s replacement for Trent Alexander-Arnold? Maybe you sit in the pub watching games on the telly sharing bolshy opinions about who your club should sign instead of the useless striker who’s missed three glorious chances in the first half. Or are constantly posting in WhatsApp groups about the centre-back playing in the French second tier who you’re adamant is the next Virgil van Dijk.
This is, as a matter of fact, often the starting point for many who sign up to courses run by the Professional Football Scouts Association (PFSA) to learn about the trade and earn qualifications that are often a first foot in the door of an enigmatic industry. The courses have a rich alumnus, including senior recruitment staff at Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Arsenal, Manchester City and Newcastle United.
Paulo Araujo, Barcelona’s director of scouting, says that the courses “relate directly within the industry giving users an insight into how things are done within an elite environment”. Andy Howe, Newcastle’s assistant head of recruitment, took a level two course while at Bournemouth and says he “can’t recommend [it] highly enough”.
I have gone to scout school to find out what the experienced professionals and fresh-faced fledglings hoping for a way are taught, to discover the emerging trends, the conflicting views and what’s coming over the horizon for one of the most fundamental yet elusive roles in football.
The group includes attendees from Portugal, Italy, Germany and the United States, an agent and professionals from the city. Many are still in day jobs, love football and have simply decided they want to pursue a dream before it’s too late.
Kevin Braybrook, one of the tutors with 20 years’ experience in coaching and scouting, explains to The i Paper afterwards that they are increasingly seeing people from business and finance worlds and that they may be more valuable than they realise in the years ahead, now the game is full of sporting directors with Masters degrees and clubs seeking “scout scientists”.
“There’s a market now for many new people who come on our courses,” he says. “There’s a lot of older school scouts not as comfortable working on a PC or wouldn’t be able to compile data.
“Some of our candidates who have minimal football experience other than passion for the game still have some key attributes. They work with presentations, numbers, spreadsheets, they manage finance.
“It’ll be really interesting what the landscape will be in the next five years. You have older generation scouts, very much eyes-and-ears scouts, which is hugely important, but equally clubs that want to go down a video and data scouting route, looking at more of a scout scientist background.”
Before class, the scouting hopefuls have been set homework to practise video scouting, picking a player from Paris Saint-Germain’s Champions League match against Barcelona in 2021 to produce a report. Scouting covers a broad spectrum – including opposition analysis and technical scouting – but this level 2 course focuses on talent identification.
The group split in two and take turns to present their findings in a maximum of 10 minutes. The presentations vary wildly, and there is a surprising amount of scope for creativity within the basic parameters.
There are technological issues – one member’s laptop packed up so he’s had to hastily write his report with pen and paper – and some are surprisingly professional, with radar charts, diagrams, detailed analysis, video clips, tactics boards full of dotted lines and moving arrows.
For a bit of fun many have picked the club they support to make scouting comparisons. Someone analyses whether Sergino Dest could be signed by Liverpool to offset the departure of Alexander-Arnold, as a back-up to Conor Bradley.
Another assesses whether Frenkie de Jong would be an improvement on Manchester United’s central midfield of Kobbie Mainoo, Manuel Ugarte and Bruno Fernandes.
They give advice, ask for tips, offer support among the group, and the tutors provide feedback.
Dean Whitehouse, another tutor, tells them, “I’d be happy to send some of the ones I’ve seen for people in game to look at”. Whitehouse has deep wells of experience in the game after 23 years at Manchester United, leaving in 2023 to join Blackpool’s academy.
Braybrook, who has worked for Liverpool and Newcastle, sounds a note of caution. I had presumed that scouting was all about opinion, but, especially in the early days, it is about facts, they are told. He tells the story of a situation he’s been in where he’s given an opinion on a player and a higher-up has said they don’t want his opinion.
“If you’re presenting back to someone you could get a manager come back to you saying it ain’t your job to say whether you fancy him, I want to know A, B or C. I want facts. What backs up what you’re saying?”
Opinion comes much later, he explains, when you have built up trusted relationships and superiors ask you for it.
When broken down into its components by the tutors, scouting is incredibly simplistic. The PFSA provides a basic scout report template on the course, and each club usually has their own in a preferred style.
You watch footballers and analyse their attributes, giving scores. Yet the scouting paradox is that it is incredibly difficult to be great at it. Most football fans can rate passing, shooting, heading, tackling or any of the 20-plus attributes in the template; hardly anyone can find a player who will turn a £100m profit within two years.
But in the beginning, it is about getting the basics right.
“We must always make reports easy to read and presentable,” Whitehouse says. “I’ve seen scouting reports where they’ve talked about a player’s physique and put ‘good body’. Good body compared to who? Arnold Schwarzenegger?
“Pace: ‘I’ve seen quicker.’ Usain Bolt is quicker? Or a slug is quicker? We need to know what you’re referring to – acceleration, deceleration, speed, reactive speed.
“Work rate: ‘Not bad.’ What does that mean? If their work rate is high, give us detail. Give examples. Attitude: ‘Not the best.’ Why?
“Intelligence: ‘Couldn’t tell.’ If you look at Wayne Rooney – I’ve met him and I know his family well, I’ve coached two of his sons – he’s not necessarily academically intelligent but I’ll tell you something: football-wise, his intelligence as a player was extraordinary. He could see things and do things that other players could only dream about.
“If you say the player showed great game intelligence, back it up with how.”
It stirs in my mind the old story of a teenage Cesc Fabregas completely skewing a pass during an Arsenal youth game and a coach afterwards asking what he was intending and realising the young midfielder had seen a pass few players could ever spot.
The scouts who unearth gems are extraordinarily valuable, yet often little is known about them.
The youth scout who recommended Liverpool sign teenage Raheem Sterling from Queens Park Rangers for £600,000 earned the Merseyside club a profit of £43.4m five years later.
Paul Winstanley was head of recruitment at Brighton & Hove Albion when they signed a 19-year-old midfield prospect playing in Ecuador for £4m. Two years later it netted the club a profit of £111m when Moises Caicedo was sold to Chelsea.
Can you imagine making your employer tens of millions of pounds in a single transaction?
“Scouts are priceless,” Whitehouse tells The i Paper after the session. “They can create multimillion-pound assets by the work they do.”
Often there are several voices and inputs in any transfer, but those who regularly have more hits than misses stand out and climb high.
Winstanley is now Chelsea’s co-director of football – one of the most influential positions in the game.
Still, Whitehouse also points out that the contribution of scouts who recommended players to youth teams are sometimes forgotten, with staff higher up the food chain taking credit when players develop into first-team stars.
For those who might not get the deserved financial returns Whitehouse has “heard stories about retired ex-pros who’ve rewarded the scouts who found them when they’ve had their first big payday with a big chunk of money towards a house”.
Evolution of the football scout
The PFSA was the brainchild of Dave Hobson, who set it up in the early 2000s while working as a scout at Manchester United.
“He’s very eccentric Dave, a lovely man,” Whitehouse says.
“He’s one of these guys who has 20 ideas a week, 19 of them might be barmpot crazy and one might be amazing.”
One of those was a scouting association.
“He was fed up with scouts not getting the prestige and parity everyone else got in football,” Whitehouse adds.
“He set up the PFSA, created courses, got scouts on board, got them qualified and paid what they were worth, rather than the pork pie, the new coat, and 40p a mile going up and down the motorway.”
The game has changed irrevocably in the quarter-century since (Dave’s son, Adam, now runs the organisation) and they are constantly having to keep up-to-date with the latest developments, while keeping the basics at its heart.
“The game isn’t what it was even 10 to 15 years ago,” Braybrook says.
“Systems have changed, styles have changed, laws change, VAR was introduced. We have to be willing to embrace it. Things are different, if there are tools that can add value to eyes-and-ears scouts, those great people who can get a feel of the game and the players, understand attributes, recognise this player can do this and that player can do that, you need to use them.
“Those people are still hugely important. But there has to be an understanding if you can add value to that knowledge by looking at data before you go to a game, looking at pass completion, distance covered, if you can add those layers you’re going to get far more informed decision making.
“Decision making is the standout parameter for the very top people. They can make, more often than not, very good decisions. Brighton have done brilliant work. Bournemouth are now doing brilliant recruitment.”
Whitehouse reveals that Thomas Frank, the Brentford manager, another club using smart recruitment to compete with sides on much bigger budgets, is known to incorporate “everyone in decision making”.
Braybrook adds: “There’s some top clubs you’d assume would have the best recruitment strategies in the game but are making some incorrect decisions.”
Data has had the greatest impact on the profession in recent times. And the class are shown a video of Sky Sports’ The Art of Scouting documentary, which presents the old school scout vs data scout debate – eyes and ears vs laptops and algorithms.
Whitehouse explains how conflicting opinions can derive from the two sources. In previous courses, he says, he’d ask participants to vote who was the better player out of Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard, the leading England central midfielders of their generation.
Most chose Gerrard, but the statistics point to Lampard being better.
The overall lesson here is that a combination of both is integral now, but that if you’re not adept at the numbers side, at learning to use the latest technology, you will struggle.
Whitehouse tells his own story of spending years using Microsoft Windows at Manchester United then being handed an Apple Mac on day one at Blackpool and finding it frustrating that it slowed him down for weeks.
It also reminds him of another example to share about how impactful scouts and analysts can be. There had been “loads of great analysts” working in United’s academy but Blackpool was more limited, he says.
“Then an analyst came from Liverpool who was brilliant. Within a matter of weeks we had absolutely everything, every game. The level he took it to within a few months was superb.”
Afterwards, I point out that I have been writing about the scouting data debate for at least a decade now, and ask what the future holds for this fast-moving industry.
Braybrook believes artificial intelligence, which is already being explored by clubs, is one of the major frontiers that will compliment data.
Whitehouse reveals he is part of an invitation-only global scouting WhatsApp group in which somebody recently posted an article about how players are only on the ball for an average of three minutes in a game.
“They were saying off-the-ball actions are more important than on-the-ball actions” because modern systems are so complex, based on pressing, shape, choreographed runs, and that “recruitment is starting to be more driven by people who can do stuff off the ball – tactically and offensively”.
One to watch (when they haven’t got the ball).
Intriguingly, two of the course attendees spend a large portion of time analysing the off-the-ball work of De Jong and PSG’s Idrissa Gueye, who had the unenviable task of shadowing Lionel Messi.
They discuss how hard it is to make fact-based psychological assessments from a game, but how Gueye nullifying Messi after picking up a yellow card in the 20th minute reveals a high level of resilience.
One attendee is complimented for noting the conditions and quality of the pitch. Another for how the attendance can impact players.
Thousands of these little details can translate into spotting the next multi-million-pound player. And who knows, maybe the PFSA will have dug up the next scouting diamond right here.
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