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.
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”.
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Read More“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.
“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!”
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.
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.
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.
“You can’t discount data or video scouting – it’s a very, very good filter.
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Read MoreFor 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!”)
“We’re sort of dipping our toes in, just sort of following some players on video,” Foster reveals.
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.
“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.”
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.
“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.
“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.”
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Read MoreOne recruitment specialist said he was shocked that clubs at that level were willing to take the risk.
“We wouldn’t sign anyone blind. My CEO would hit the roof!”
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”.
“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.”
“We have this divide really in the candidates on our courses,” Braybrook says.
“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.
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Read More“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.”
“It’s not that there are going to be less people,” Balkin says.
“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.”
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