The complexities of scouting & recruitment at the pro level

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One month removed from the 2022-23 European season, all the attention continues to be on the transfer market. Transfers are the talk of the town across the globe at the moment, with each European club preparing to enjoy happier times next season, and handle all their ins and outs as efficiently as possible.

Many of these clubs (in fact just about every European top-flight men’s team, and many other second-division clubs) have entire scouting & recruitment departments to handle the initial steps in the process. Others rely heavily on data companies without a dedicated person that can connect the data to the club, not to mention bring greater context, research and video analysis into the fold.

Many young professionals who take an interest in football often want to know how they can get their foot in the door. I often tell them that they should be prepared to do much in the way of work for free, learning and researching as much about the game as possible along the way. Over time, reputations develop, relationships form and eventually that free work starts to pay dividends down the line. With that, here are some of the top considerations when conducting scouting & recruitment analysis for professional clubs.

CONTEXT IS KEY

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The first thing that you must do when scouting for pro clubs is to consider the context of the situation. What are the team’s ambitions, league standing, budget restrictions, goals, desires and limitations? What would be a dream signing for the club and what would be realistic for the club? These are two different categories, but in any recruitment scenario, I’d like to ideally have a sense of both.

Now clubs like Manchester City and Chelsea, with an abundance of resources and all the right ambitions and prestige, can attract just about any player in the world.

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The task of finding players that will realistically want to move to these clubs is not particularly difficult. You then only have to focus on finding players that best fit the style of play (or intended style of play for the future) and the club’s ambitions.

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But for the other 95-99% of pro clubs out there, the task needs to also involve identifying players that might see the challenge as the next logical move in their career. Being able to connect the player and/or agent to the club and have a conversation are excellent ways that you can do that. But as scouts, you often have to use ulterior methods to identify attainable options.

I like to have a broad sense of a team’s budget and then match attainable targets to that price range. Market value therefore becomes one of the essential pieces of the puzzle that I’m always interested in identifying. Even when it comes to players with expiring contracts, it’s still important to have an understanding of the market value as it pinpoints what kind of club they might be interested in for that next move in their career.

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Another recruitment analyst that I spoke to recently brought up the idea of using Opta’s league and team rankings, where you can see the level of a prospect’s team/league against the club you’re conducting the analysis for.

But so many other scenarios go into what makes a player a realistic signing or not.

To give you an example of this in practice, a neat and tidy former Bayern youth product is available for free at the moment. He’s twenty-six now which is around prime time for a central midfielder. Within the past calendar year, he’s hit fairly high notes from a data perspective, particularly in-possession, where he could solve many issues for clubs without a clear progressor in midfield.

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But in spite of that and in spite of being a recognizable name, his market value is low, and he played last season in the Swiss Challenge League (2nd division).

So far this sounds exciting and promising! But realistically, with his prestige of playing for the likes of BSC Young Boys and Bayern Munich in the past, it would make it a difficult signing for clubs in the CPL, where I’m doing the bulk of my scouting & recruitment.

For a club like Toronto FC or Vancouver Whitecaps, it could be a decent deal, and they might have more of a shot of convincing him to join. But for those clubs, it would worry me that the German footballer has not achieved a sustained spell at any club he’s featured for. Video analysis can pinpoint toward him being excellent on the ball, an efficient player in the final third, and even decent on the defensive end.

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But there will always be doubts about a player that’s had five different clubs in the past five years. On that note, the CPL now sounds like a low-risk destination for a club to make him their own version of former PSG product Lorenzo Callegari – picked up by HFX from France in a similar vein.

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Contracts are typically short, he can be an instant hit, and he can get his career back on the right path to stardom. But a European player might not always see it that way, and might see playing in Canada as too much of a step down.

Even at that, all of this might be pointless, as his wages could very well be too high for what these clubs can even afford. The Canadian Premier League operates with a salary cap on both player and staff compensation. It’s one of the main reasons why I think CPL clubs are yet to take more of a shot on having a dedicated (and paid) performance analyst in place. You need a right-back to play football. You don’t NEED a performance analyst. So the priorities of wage structuring make sense to match the club’s needs.

I too would take a shot on an unrecognized youth product from Nottingham Forest’s U21 team before a recognized analyst. That player has inherent resale value, while an analyst does not. But on the note of that salary cap, signing anything but youth products can make life difficult for these clubs.

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Let’s take a player like Gianluca Gaudino out of the equation and discuss players operating in teams and leagues below the level of the league you’re scouting for – in my case, the Canadian Premier League. Here you generally run into two issues. Either quality video isn’t available to bring context to the data you can find, or quality data isn’t available to bring context to the video you can find.

Of course we could spend time finding hidden gems in Bolivia or Cambodia, but the more likely scenario is that CPL clubs are looking for Canadian players. Below the level of the CPL, our scope is therefore often limited to college soccer in the States, U-Sports in Canada, provincial leagues, and USL divisions.

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Many of those leagues don’t have reliable data beyond goals, assists and clean sheets, some don’t have great video (if any at all), and in many cases, players are finishing up school degrees and have their eyes glued to other projects outside of football. You sometimes will get situations like a 19-year-old Tyler Crawford stop his schooling to join Vancouver at the pro level. But other times you get situations like Mateo Restrepo leaving the pro dream behind to become a doctor. Young professionals in North America are not always ideal options, even for clubs operating in a league with an actual incentive to give young players minutes on the field.

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The fact that CPL clubs are so new and don’t have as much infrastructure around academies also means they don’t always have that natural transition from youth to pro for these players, and have more work to do in finding youth players that can fulfill their league requirements.

This means that we often scour through data, analyze video, and recommend dozens of players to clubs that they will never actually sign. That is the nature of scouting & recruitment at any level, where entire databases of 400+ players might be created, only to never sign any of those 400 players.

Nevertheless, what often separates the clubs that stand out from a recruitment & scouting perspective is that they are always proactive in that approach. They go through the pains of analyzing hundreds of players, ensuring they can find the very best fit for the specific role. They plan ahead, knowing they might lose certain players, and knowing that they have to find that replacement either in-house, or somewhere else.

Then when Marc Cucurella leaves the club, they’ve already picked out their ideal replacement well in advance, and know to sign Pervis Estupiñán. Yes, it’s easier for a club like Brighton to sign the player they want. But every single club can function with the same philosophy, especially if they have at least one person at the club who can have conversations with the coaching staff around the types of players they want, and then build in a player profiling system that flows continuously around the club’s game model, ambitions, desire, budget, limitations, and context.

With that, I’m sure you can see just how much context and conversation actually needs to go into a recruitment scenario.

PLAYER PROFILING

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Once having a clear sense of the context around the club, it’s then important to establish more into what the team desires from a playing perspective. I like to have a sense of either a dream player the club would want in that position/role (can be as outlandish as possible to get the idea of what type of player they would want), or a set of traits and characteristics that the club is looking to find. Ideally, you have both.

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You have a player in mind that you can compare statistics toward and compare style of play toward, and you also have a set of tangible and intangible qualities that you can find. This is a helpful frame toward sifting through hundreds of players that might be potential options (remember those 400+ player databases?).

It then becomes much easier when you get to this stage to compare all the options. You might find a nice well-rounded player, and another who spikes high on the traits desired, and low on other traits that matter less. Personally, I’m taking the player that spikes higher on the traits the club desires. But ideally, I’m also finding a player who can combine a range of other traits that might be perceived as added bonuses over time. I want fewer low-points, mixed in with higher high-points.

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In this article, I spoke about how I go from a database of hundreds of players to just ten-twenty names. At that point, that’s when video analysis and assessments over realism take greater form, and you can narrow it down to even just a few options to recommend to the club. But you must remember that for various reasons, the club might not even sign any of those players. This isn’t where you give up, but where you can create a cyclical player profiling process for the club to use anytime, continuing to garner your recommendations.

Players will change clubs, new ones become available, some become attainable and some become way out of reach. This is where those player databases may change on a month to month basis. That’s one reason why it’s valuable to have that dedicated analyst in place who can focus on player recruitment and analysis, and connect those linkages back to the club’s context. So for those still looking to put their foot in the door, roles at clubs are certainly available. Sometimes you might have to work for free as you gain a reputation, but again, eventually that work pays off.

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What do I do for Canadian Premier League clubs?

-> Scouting & Recruitment
-> 1-on-1 performance coaching
-> Team/Player Analysis

For more articles and content exactly like this, check out my Introduction to Analysis Ebook and course!

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But even then, he may be out of reach simply because of that prestige of playing in higher leagues in the past, such as for BSC Young Boys and Bayern Munich. That man – Gianluca Gaudino – would make for an excellent addition to any CPL club, but even at a free transfer with a low market value, it might not be the most realistic next step for the player in their career