The behind-the-scenes life of football scouts

Andre Villas-Boas

Scouts are commonly of two types. The easiest way to spot the difference is that one is smart, disciplined and dons a uniform similar to that used by the country’s military while the other one is usually in a track suit, laden with notepads and coloured pens with an outdated mobile always on his left hand.

Footballing scouts can be divided into two. The more popular one being the Player or Talent scout and the other one being the Tactical scout.

The talent scout who can hold a full-time, part-time or a self employed job, spends day after day focusing on a specific player and maintaining a dossier on him. It could contain everything from specific attributes, strengths, weaknesses , consistency and so on. The tactical scout is usually employed full-time by the club to analyse the opposition and prepare reports on how to face them for the manager.

A talent scout’s job is pretty tedious. He needs to spend hours in stadiums watching matches that he might not have any interest in but is forced to analyse a player that his club wants him to.

To make it simple, behind every successful man, there is a woman and sometimes it isn’t always true. But behind every successful footballer, there always is a hard-working talent scout.

If we look for examples, Brian McDermott, manager of Leeds United, revealed in a press conference how he recommended a 16-year-old Eden Hazard to the Reading management when he was the chief scout. He had personally been to France three times a week and seen the young star stand out in every game for more than two months.

However, lack of funding made sure the deal never went through. Even Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi themselves were spotted by a group of scouts.

Sir Alex Ferguson’s trusted group of men had seen the young Portuguese play for Sporting weeks before the boy actually played against United. With over 20 scout reports on Lionel Messi piling up on Charles Rexach’s office, he decided to fund the move of the promising Argentinian and convinced the club into paying his medical bills.

Another prime example includes the famous Graham Carr, the man responsible for Newcastle’s French citizenship. He was responsible for the arrivals of Cabaye, Ben Arfa, Cisse , Ba and all the French internationals who ply their trade for Newcastle United. As chief scout of the club, he has a number of talent and tactical scouts working under him. When reports come in about promising players, he personally goes and analyses as many games as he can in which the player plays.

Tactical scouts, on the other hand, have a career in which they can’t miss out the tiniest details. Managers these days have a much easier jobs thanks to them. They spy on opponents and take down notes on set-piece routines, phases in transition, special plays. They spend hours studying footage to analyse strengths and weaknesses that can be exploited. They advice the manager on how to field the team and what to expect. Hence, if they are to miss anything, it would reflect heavily on the pitch.

Jose Mourinho

Famous examples include Jose Mourinho and Andre Villas Boas. Mourinho, who started out as a translator for Sir Bobby Robson, used to sometimes prepare reports on opposition and their important players. This he did with previous experience from being a scout in Lisbon. He continued under Louis van Gaal and did the same.

On moving to Chelsea, Mourinho brought his own scouting staff, headed by a budding Andre Villas-Boas. Fresh from earning his coaching badges, AVB quickly earned respect by providing very intricate details on opposition and players. He used to even speak to players personally on how to handle certain situations.

As AVB became the manager of Chelsea, Mourinho revealed how his scout reports on the team they were going to face next week even included what the players were having for breakfast every week. They were meticulously written as the man spent hours and hours in stadiums across the country.

Despite all this, the life of a scout is seen as quite an enjoyable one. Who wouldn’t want to be paid a lot of money to go to stadiums and watch the game you love? It is widely believed that Leverkusen, who reached the 2002 Champions League final, had 20 international scouts, five of them working full-time – one each in Brazil and Argentina – earning 50,000 euros (£44,000) a year.

An astronomical amount of money if all you have to do is watch football and make reports on specific players.

However, it isn’t that simple (surprise surprise) . You can’t really learn to become a scout. You can learn to become a coach but very few people would risk the role of managing a small club to become a scout for an average club. Usually, former players who have experience are picked to be scouts.

Many start from the bottom, where they scout local players and send reports to clubs in the lower division. The clubs then monitor the player or take him on trial. If he does earn a contract, then the scout earns a paycheck, which doesn’t really financially satisfy the effort he put in .

They need to slowly climb up the ladder until they earn at least a part-time job. From then on, it becomes more hectic as they are given assignments to travel to different countries, be stuck in traffic, stand in the side-lines and watch an under-16 game while getting drenched in pouring rain. It’s a life filled with hard-work and, at times, even quite boring.

A scout who worked under Michael Emenalo, the current technical director of Chelsea Football Club, revealed in an online gaming community of how he had to travel to countries whose languages he didn’t have a clue about. This is basically how every footballing scout’s life is as he slowly writes down the names of youngsters for recommendation to his club.

Technology has, however, crept into the scouting system. Sports Interactive, the developers of the highly acclaimed football management simulation game series, Football Manager, have hired hundreds of scouts to keep their database updated with almost every player out there.

Ever wondered how the contract clauses, staff details and attributes of young players are so detailed? Well Sports Interactive hires scouts to analyse every known football club in the planet and creates a huge database on their website. It has correctly predicted every young superstar years before they had been revealed to the real world.

Sports Interactive also has a partnership with Everton, due to which, the club gets a special look into its database before release. This helps Everton cut down on their own scout system. Disastrous for budding scouts in a way, but financially beneficial for the club.

Moroever, scouts use Scout7, a database containing details of every club and player. Scouts and clubs even have their specific login usernames and passwords.

To bring this to an end, scouts have one of the most important and under-rated jobs in world football as they can be the fine line between “I’ll pay £5 million for him.” to fast forward 5 years and “Can you please accept £60 million plus bonuses?” .