The Scout in Modern Football

Scouting, the English term for exploring, spying, or even gathering intelligence.

What may sound more like military or intelligence work is the job of a not-so-new, but now recognized and professionally working unit of modern football clubs: the sports scouts.

Where in the past maybe a coach or manager decided based on instinct, decision-makers now rely on the data and analyses of employees who primarily deal with observing and evaluating players and teams.

This makes the scout, in larger clubs whole departments with several employees, an important part of modern professional football.

And the task areas of the scouts continue to grow, as it is not enough to assess and find individual players, to analyze opponents, and to help optimize the game of their own teams: The scout is increasingly becoming a squad planner and a service provider within their own club for important sporting decisions.

Skills a Scout Needs

Fundamentally, a strong interest in football should be present. Comprehensive knowledge and personal experience in the respective sport play a big role. It is not a disadvantage to have personal playing experience (professional) and detailed expert knowledge related to the sport.

It is important to know what specific football requirements are placed on the respective positions in a flexible modern game system.
As a scout, you must objectively evaluate players and teams (appropriate scouting forms/templates can help here), in order to then objectively record and compare the generated information. Recognizing special strengths, action fields (weaknesses), and competencies up to the personality traits of a player and the mentality of a team is of fundamental importance.

Important action fields in the scouting of players:

• Transforming requirements into a player profile
• Concentrated and objective observation
• Consideration of position-specific requirements
• Objectively capturing data
• Evaluating and further refining collected data
• Creating a talent forecast taking into account physical development and biological age
• Preselection of suitable players
• Analyzing players from the recorded data that meet the desired requirements (specific requirements for the position?)

The Scout in Team and Opponent Analysis:

• Analyzing games with a focus on the general tactical orientation, the game systems, the strengths and weaknesses (of players, groups, and the entire team)
• Knowing the strengths and weaknesses of your own team and its players
• Recording and evaluating acquired data as objectively as possible (including statistically)
• From the acquired data, deriving, suggesting, and presenting recommendations for one's own tactics, the strategy for the current match day (match plan), and the personnel composition of one's own team

What are a Scout's Responsibilities

The task most associated with a scout is probably finding new players. Discovering the next gem that previously kicked in a lower league or abroad, has special abilities, or has a strength that no coach has recognized so far.

This task is still at the core of a scout's work, but their field of activity covers much more.

Observing the Opposition

A significant area in scouting. Especially in the highest leagues, where knowledge and exploitation of small weaknesses in the opponent or individual players can decide between victory or defeat, observation and analysis of opponents are now indispensable. A comprehensive strength-weakness analysis of the team, team parts, and individual players is standard.

Only in this way can weaknesses be found in the opponent (e.g., pressing victims, playing open spaces, utilizing set pieces?), in order to exploit these and bring in one's own strengths (e.g., long and precise throws on the left side, a dribbling-strong 8 with a drive to the goal).

Searching for Players

Football clubs, especially in the higher performance range, constantly have their eyes on the market. Whether a player is injured, a player leaves the club (e.g., generating extraordinary profits), or another player does not meet the expectations placed on them.

Then it's about being prepared to implement the best possible new solution!
A well-filled database (see our scouting module), a shadow team taking into account the position-specific requirement profiles of the players is of decisive advantage in these cases. The task of the scout is then to find suitable candidates and prepare solutions. Alternatively, a scout can also make use of large player databases. But this can only be a first orientation, afterwards personal scouting and evaluation always follow.

From this information, the scout then develops recommendations for the coach and the people responsible for sports (presentations with data, statistics, and possibly video sequences).

System Football or the Transition from All-Rounder to Specialist

In football, all positions have a special task profile. In modern high-speed and system football, these tasks are very precisely defined. The all-rounders ("He can play anywhere.") often find it harder to integrate into a specific game system.

And this makes it clear why scouting in performance football is becoming increasingly important. Because in order to achieve the best possible occupation for each position in the team's game system, the player and requirement profile must be described very precisely, meticulously researched, then objectively and in the long term, the suitability of the player in question must be checked.

And this makes the scout currently, and surely also in the future, more and more of a squad planner who precisely seeks and finds the right players, who:

- Comply with the coach's game system
- Fit the planned game system / the coach's and the club's game idea
- Bring a skill that the coach needs in that area

Squad Planning for a Team

What exactly the construction or conversion entails and what this means can be seen well in the teams that Jürgen Klopp has coached in recent years. Both in Dortmund and Liverpool, he implemented his game system and his game idea. In both clubs, he rebuilt the team in such a way that they could play the aggressive attacking pressing, fast on the wings, and endurance-intensive. Strong in duels in the center. And this happened partly by "retraining" the existing players, especially in Liverpool but also by exchanging players. New players were brought in (Sane, Mane, Firmino) who could play this fast-paced football or who brought the necessary skills for it.

Squad planning does not mean reacting to events (injury, sale?).

Squad planning is looking ahead and thinking ahead beyond the current season, at least 1-2 seasons further, and developing and knowing ideas and options.

How can Software Help the Scout?

With modern solutions, the scout makes his work easier. Capturing and storing data in such a way that all involved can access it from anywhere is an important step. In this way, scouts from all over the world can feed their data directly into the system. These are then immediately available to the chief scout, the coach, or the sports director.

With professional software, the appropriate players can be filtered out from the masses of data faster and easier than with Excel lists or on paper. Databases offer the advantage that they are searchable, that the search parameters can be determined and deliver very fine, so matching hits. These hits can then also be easily compared.

Appropriate scouting software primarily saves time and makes the work of scouts easier. But also the question of data protection in the club can be answered positively with a professional solution. And finally, all this data remains exactly where it belongs - in the club. When a scout leaves the club, they take their expertise with them. But the scouting data in the database stays in the club.