Scouting networks for players

  • Thread starter Deleted member 45378
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Deleted member 45378

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I've often wondered how this works ?
Hopefully somebody on here has been a football scout in the past and can enlighten me.

In the past I know it used to be the case of managers used to ring each other up and they would be given the lowdown on other teams players.

I know buying players now is all stats based but as far as I know the data companies only cover the main leagues.

How would a club know whats going on in the south Korean or Jamaican league...where stats were not readily available. I know most games are available to stream but watching every game would be a huge undertaking

Do clubs like man utd employ people in these countries and if so that must come to a small fortune.

And what about youth players how would Sunderland know that Leyton Orient have a promising 14 year old player in their youth ranks.

Genuine question because some of our foreign buys in the past have been absolutely abysmal
 


There's a database in the industry iirc that pulls together all of the analytics for players all around the world.

A lot of clubs also use the Football Manager database as Sports Interactive now have one of the biggest (if not the biggest) individual scouting networks in the world.
 
The orignal programmers of the game (The Collyer brothers) are massive Everton fans. I remember them being very hard to beat in the early years.
 
Funny you should say that Evertons scouting network pay in advance to get an early copy off the game😂
They probably won't employ people permanently in far flung places but just commission regional scouts to prepare reports or supply them info. Freelance scouts will also approach clubs if they find young players that they think are decent. If clubs take them on they pay the scout a finders fee and then usually further installments if the player progresses to first team level, number of games, possibly even international.
 
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No point scouting in places if we cant get WPs for players. It’s easier to get WPs in the PL than Div3 as clubs can genuinely say there’s no one can do the job this kid can......whereas in div there’s hundreds of players could walk into any Div3 team and not look out of place. Having said that if we’ve not got that big Nigerian kid at Almeria on the books by Burns neet then we are officially Happy to stay here.
 
Read 'The Nowhere Men' by Michael Calvin. Gives a few good insights.

Most scouts are only paid expenses the further down you go. Then you've got the data side of things. Most clubs or at least the bigger ones will use a mix of people who actually go and watch and compile reports and data analysis.

Far as I can tell we have Coton's mobile.
 
Mentioned this a few times on here. As far as I know we have never had anyone doing this in Spain. I know the scouts of clubs like WBA, Villa, Boro, QPR, Brentford and Bournemouth who are watching players here every week.
All Premier sides have people here full time. Biggest league in the world next to Premier so makes sense. But we never bothered.
 

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