Brighton's move away from 'old school' methods is the end of talent ID as we know it
Brighton’s move to dispense with half their scouting department last month sent shockwaves through the world of football recruitment.
The Telegraph reported in November that three full-time scouts had been sacked as part of a major restructuring of arguably the Premier League’s most successful transfer engine room.
The Brighton model is driven by data supplied by Jamestown Analytics, a company specialising in “football player and head coach data analysis”, closely linked to the club’s owner Tony Bloom.
In the words of David Weir, Brighton’s technical director, the club has access to “all the information from every league in the world, which you’d never be able to cover on a scouting, subjective, eyes-on basis”.
With that level of information at their fingertips, no wonder they are moving on from traditional methods.
“It’s a bit scary,” Leyton Orient’s chief scout Steve Foster tells The i Paper, admitting that seeing colleagues put out of work is an unsettling experience.
Foster played non-league before stumbling into part-time scouting at Brentford, who believed there might be some untapped talent outside the Football League of whom they were not aware.
“At first, I was still working full-time, running a DJ business [he still does the odd soul night] but then I’d do a Saturday afternoon game and a Tuesday night game, and I really got the bug for it. So I gave up my full-time job and committed to scouting. It was the best decision I ever made!”
Foster was mentored at Brentford by Shaun O’Connor, the man who in a previous job was credited with discovering a nine-year-old Jack Wilshere and recommending him to Arsenal.
O’Connor moved back to Arsenal in 2014 and rose up the ranks on the youth recruitment side, and Foster only stayed another year after his mentor left.
“Brentford decided to go down a more data-driven model,” Foster explains. It is no coincidence that Brentford is owned by a former colleague of Bloom’s in the betting world, Matthew Benham.
Brighton owner Tony Bloom is the brains behind football’s data revolution (Photo: Getty)
“I was still really in the early stages of my career and I felt as if I stopped learning.
“Because I went from going to three, four or five games a week, to going to one game a fortnight and I was watching games on my laptop on a Saturday afternoon, which wasn’t really me.”
Foster, a self-confessed graduate of the “old school” of football scouting, knows that video work and data analysis are increasingly important, but he shares the view of many that it cannot be the sole modus operandi.
“One of the good things about old school scouting is the networking you get when you’re out at games, mixing with other scouts, and picking up little snippets of information,” he says.
“You can’t discount data or video scouting – it’s a very, very good filter.
“It helps filter it down so we can go and watch them.”
For clubs like Leyton Orient, video scouting is essential. (“We haven’t got the budget of Birmingham City, we can’t afford to just sign the best player in the league!”)
Instead, Orient try to skirmish round the edges of the market, looking perhaps at Championship players who have been given limited opportunity this season and might be open to a loan, or might be unhappy and keen on a permanent deal. They’ve even started looking overseas, a virtual impossibility on their shoestring budget in previous eras.
“We’re sort of dipping our toes in, just sort of following some players on video,” Foster reveals.
“Culturally, Holland is very similar to the UK, most of the players speak English, and geographically, it’s not a million miles away.”
Tools like Eyeball, which claims to be the “largest youth football database in the world”, allow Foster, and many others, to create a virtual scouting network that covers parts of the globe he could never get sign-off from the board to travel to and watch a player.
“Football is a global game and as the money stakes are so high, you just want the best players, and you don’t care if the best player is in Ivory Coast or Croydon. You want the player,” Eyeball co-founder David Hicks says.
“Brighton recruiting for youth players probably up until 15 years ago would have been going to Sussex, Hampshire, Kent and south-east London, but now they can go to Senegal or Cameroon or Burkina Faso.”
But even Eyeball admit there is still a role for the human touch – though the days of spending months travelling to games to assess a player are probably gone.
Football scouts could be retrained to put their skills to good use elsewhere instead (Photo: Getty)
“Speed is a key element to scouting,” Eyeball CEO Benjamin Balkin adds.
“Whether it’s on video or live, you cannot make a decision on a player based on one game or two games.
“You have to watch a set of games, and you want to watch games of this player when he’s playing at home, when he’s playing away, when he’s playing against the top opponent, when he’s playing against the easier opponent, when he’s playing maybe out of position, in position, when he’s starting, when he’s coming off the bench.
“If you are heavily relying on those games being watched live, this is a process that can take a full season, and then the player’s probably either becoming too expensive or he’s gone – like another club has gone faster [to sign them].
“I’m sure if Brighton had waited another six months to recruit Carlos Baleba, they wouldn’t have paid £20m for him, they probably would have had to pay double because you keep on adding up top performances for Lille and then all of a sudden he’s out of out of range, and only Manchester City and Liverpool and Real Madrid can buy him.”
It means some clubs are signing players without ever having met them or watched them play live.
Assane Ouedraogo recently joined Charlotte FC in Major League Soccer from an academy in Ivory Coast.
Charlotte’s recruitment team discovered the 19-year-old on Eyeball’s enormous network in Africa, a market that they believe is still underutilised by top clubs because of the perceived impenetrability of scouting that continent. They viewed all the tape they could, and signed him without ever watching him in the flesh.
One recruitment specialist said he was shocked that clubs at that level were willing to take the risk.
“When you go to a game, you can suss out a player’s body language, his intensity levels and things you might not pick up on the camera,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“We wouldn’t sign anyone blind. My CEO would hit the roof!”
Clearly, there is still a culture war of sorts going on within football talent identification.
The de facto peacekeeper in that conflict is the Professional Football Scouts Association (PFSA), which works with scouts at all levels, teaching accredited courses with titles like “opposition analysis” and “technical scouting”.
“Clubs want faster data, faster knowledge, and trying to get the balance between subjectivity and objectivity,” Kevin Braybrook, formerly of Southampton, Newcastle and Liverpool in various talent ID roles but now the PFSA’s head tutor, says.
“So we’ve got this lovely balance at the minute of requiring knowledge but need up to date experiences and work around analysis and data.”
Evidently, Brighton’s approach is an extreme one, where decades of footballing knowledge have been set aside in favour of the new model. But it is not one that other clubs are – yet – speeding to adopt. There is, however, little doubt that there is change in the air.
“We have this divide really in the candidates on our courses,” Braybrook says.
“There are the experienced ones, maybe senior in their knowledge, great people, great experiences, but they recognise that the new model of working has to be slightly more up to date, more relevant in terms of computer work, video scouting, and how to report. So we are getting lots of people that want to up-skill and update their craft knowledge.
“And then we’re also seeing lots of people that have come in that are maybe only a graduate, but that are far more IT literate and far more aware of video scouting, or scouting in terms of alternative means. But they then need to get the experience of the game, and actually learn the game.
“Three, four years ago, we never saw VAR coming, we never saw centre-halves receiving the ball in the 18-yard box. We never saw things that are developed in the game.
“And as a result of that, I think we have to continually modernise and think outside the box a little bit, but without neglecting the value of the eyes and ears, of going to games, knowledgeable people.”
Even those who build the AI software that some say is “replacing” traditional ways of working believe there is still a place for scouts – their jobs just might not look the same as they used to.
“It’s not that there are going to be less people,” Balkin says.
“They’re probably going to have different types of skills. Once the identification of a player has been done, data only gets you a certain way. It’s actually most often the other way around.
“They’ll need more staff to process the video and they’ll need scouts to watch the games and analyse the data and process it. And then go and eventually recruit those players. So if anything, it’s creating opportunities in this market, but probably for different types of scouts.”