An Eye to the Future

A massive part of running a successful football club is finding the right personnel. Of course, finding the right coaches, physios and marketing team are all important jobs in their own right. But they’re not the ones running around the pitch for 90 minutes every Saturday. Undoubtedly, it’s finding the right players which is the key to winning matches and being successful.

So how do clubs find players? Of course many players come with a great reputation and would improve any team. And there’s the players playing for the big teams which are on TV every week that everyone is aware of. But signing these famous players isn’t an option for most teams. These players would definitely be the least risky players to sign as they are already proven at the top level. Because of this lack of risk, these players always require higher transfer fees and massive wages which only the richest clubs can afford.

If you can’t sign the players that you know, you’re going to have to go out and find some players that you can afford to sign. This is known as the scouting process in football. The players you’re looking for might be playing really well but in a lower division, or in a foreign league with less media attention. Maybe the player you’re looking for is really young and could be the next big star, and you want to find him before other clubs take notice.

You’re probably wondering where we can find these players. In days gone, clubs would have a team of football experts, called scouts, which they would send around the world to watch football matches every week, hoping to find the next Pele. Without the internet, this was the only way to know first-hand what kind of a player you’re getting. There was a number of issues with this approach. Firstly, it must have been very expensive for the top teams to have scouts all over the world. Smaller teams would not have the resources to compete with the biggest clubs, and as a result, the rich clubs would more often than not scout the best players. Also, since most football matches are played on the weekend, it would be impossible for a scout to see all of the matches and has to be selective about who to scout (Fieldoo Blog, 2012).

In recent years, technology has revolutionised the player scouting process. Premium services such as Wyscout have used information systems and the internet to create a global scouting network for clubs. Now, it doesn’t matter if you’re League of Ireland or Champions League, there’s no limit to the amount of information available to you.

I’m sure you’re wondering, what exactly is Wyscout? It is an online video database which football clubs use to help with their scouting process. Every week, more than 2,000 new matches are added in full! It is the largest football video archive in the world (Wyscout, 2020). As well as this, it has an extensive database of player information, with statistics on every player in more than 250 competitions.

However, it is the player searching aspect which is most useful for scouts. This feature allows a club to go and find every player that fits into the exact profile of the player they are looking for. For example a club could select a list of filters such as; ‘Left Winger’, ‘European’, ‘Minimum 6 foot’, ‘Maximum 21 years old’, ‘Right-footed’, ‘Minimum 90% passing success rate’. This would search through the player database with each filter narrowing down the results list which is returned to the user. Extensive player highlights are then available for each player on the shortlist, as well as his transfer value, his agent’s name, and any other relevant information. In a matter of minutes, the club now has an exact shortlist of all the players they will need to scout further and their entire careers’ statistics (YouTube, 2020).

The introduction of information systems in football scouting has revolutionised the way in which clubs find players to sign. These services save scouting teams massive amount of time and money. Also, it benefits the players being scouted. They are no longer being judged on the one game that a scout came to see, but by their career statistics and footage of every match they’ve played.

References

Fieldoo Blog. 2012.Who Is A Football Scout?. [online] Available at: <http://blog.fieldoo.com/2012/12/who-is-a-football-scout/> [Accessed 7 March 2020].

Wyscout. 2020.Wyscout - Football Professional Videos And Data Platform. [online] Available at: <https://wyscout.com> [Accessed 6 March 2020].

YouTube. 2020.How Analytics Has Changed Scouting In Football. [online] Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcGaph1XNPk> [Accessed 6 March 2020].