10 scouting tips: Passion, persistence and the power of perspective

Scouting is one of football’s great paradoxes. It is both invisible and essential. When done well, it tends to go unnoticed. When done poorly, it can derail an entire long-term project. This is why clubs have invested so heavily in highly efficient and distinguished scouting departments in recent years.

In times gone by, scouts would write notes down about a player on the back of cigarette cartons. Now, they are sifting through a large volume of data on Excel spreadsheets while using platforms such as Wyscout to watch players, view their stats, and track their progress.

However, with more scouts in the game than ever before, it is increasingly difficult to stand out amongst the crowd. So, in this article, I will go through some key tips that have helped me get into scouting, and hopefully, you can take some of the advice on board. For those looking to begin their journey into this world, the path isn’t clearly marked. There isn’t a universal blueprint. This article isn’t a rigid how-to, but a set of principles to guide your thinking, sharpen your judgement, and, hopefully, help you carve out a place in the game.

1. Passion over profit

An uncomfortable truth is that you may not get paid for your work. Many scouts who work in football, such as at a lower level or through internships, will never make a cent while plying their trade. If it’s cash or clout you are chasing, you are at the bottom of the wrong ladder and will be weeded out quickly. Money needs to be considered an object, but not an end in itself.

Unfortunately, the reality is that most professional scouts had to do quite a lot of unpaid work to get into the positions they are currently in. They ground for long, laborious days, weeks, months, and potentially years to get to where they are. They went through all this due to their passion for football and scouting.

It won’t be easy, but the pay-off will be priceless, knowing you have got into a position that many tried to but couldn’t quite achieve.

2. Learn, reflect and execute

The behind-the-scenes aspects of football are more open now than ever before in the sport’s history. We are living in a golden age of open-source knowledge with resources such as:

• Scouting podcasts

• YouTube breakdowns

• Substack/Medium pieces

• Twitter/X threads

These free tools are invaluable when starting out. Use them. But more importantly, speak to experts and those who work in football. People are also more accessible than ever before. Find a scout you admire on LinkedIn and contact them with questions – not to ask for a job, but to pose questions to them. Be humble, curious, and polite, as you never know what opportunities could come from a simple conversation further down the line.

Finally, make sure to post your work under your own name. Use Twitter/X, LinkedIn, Substack, etc, to get your work into the public domain. If people can’t see your work, you’ll never get an opportunity. And don’t be afraid of feedback. Constructive criticism will challenge you to be a better scout. If everyone hypes you up straight from the off, you’ll never develop your skills.

3. Appreciate rejection and failure

One of the most important aspects of becoming a professional scout is to embrace failure. It teaches us humility and proves that we can bend without breaking. The worst thing you can do is back your corner even when you know you’re wrong.

10 years ago, a 20-year-old Bruno Fernandes was playing for Udinese and scored four goals in 34 games. No club in a top five league came calling until he proved his worth with Sporting CP. He fell through the net completely, and his next move was to Sampdoria in the same division. Elite scouts are wrong all the time. They analyse deeply, back their judgement, and own their mistakes. Stand by your view, even when it’s unpopular, and if you’re wrong, credit others for being right and move forward.

Furthermore, don’t take rejection personally. You may email hundreds of clubs looking for opportunities and never hear a response. Don’t give up, keep going, keep publishing your work, and standing out from the crowd. Good things come to those who wait.

4. Find your scouting niche

The Premier League and UEFA Champions League have enough eyes on them. You will not make an impact creating scouting reports that everyone is watching. Leave that for Sky Sports or CBS. Watch football that others are not watching – whether that be the League of Ireland, the Ekstraklasa, or 3. Liga. You need to find your niche where you can stand out and become the go-to person for finding hidden gems.

You don’t need a Wyscout account. If you have the money, it can be a really helpful tool, but it often prices out independent scouts. There are plenty of resources showing full matches or replays, such as YouTube or OneFootball.

5. Context is king

Finding your niche is incredibly important for standing out from the crowd. However, still keep an eye on the wider football world. This is vital for understanding how a player can translate from one league to another when recommending them for a transfer elsewhere. Would a highly rated player in the League of Ireland hit the ground running in the Premier League? Probably not.

This is one of the most difficult parts of scouting, yet is one of the very foundations of recruitment. You need to know the whole map, not just a village. But you don’t always have to watch football from every league, or else you’ll never sleep. Just keep tabs and try to digest as much information as possible by studying transfer flows or engaging with experts.

6. Embrace the data revolution

The great Charles Darwin once said, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change”. This can apply to all areas of life, really, but it especially rings true in the scouting world.

Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are now a part of scouting and recruitment. Every club uses statistics and AI models, and often invest huge sums of money in them in an attempt to minimise risk with transfers. Ignore them at your peril, but try not to feel overwhelmed either. Ultimately, you do not need to be an expert in data or AI. You just need to understand and appreciate the processes.

Additionally, data is not the be-all and end-all of scouting. When presented with certain data, always scrutinise it. What is useful and what is just noise? Simply saying that a player completes 10 progressive passes per 90 doesn’t offer your audience any context apart from it sounding good.

7. Scout yourself

Before you scout others, examine your own lens. Are you favouring players who perform well early on, or those who simply have a certain aesthetic? Are you biased by position or proximity to the camera? Every scout has patterns of bias. It’s important to know yours and challenge them.

You should also surround yourself with voices that will question you. Healthy disagreements aren’t threats. They’re audits that help check your biases.

8. Step into their shoes

Another key trait that you should try to develop is understanding perspective in football. There are so many different angles that a scout must look at when watching a player:

• How will a coach/manager under pressure week in, week out be able to use this player?

• What are agents looking for in a footballer? How do they make money?

• You know him as a footballer, but what about as a human?

• How will this recruitment be received by the fanbase?

Good scouts don’t just evaluate players. They look at context through every lens. If you work at a club in the future, the team could be challenging for a title one minute and free-falling down the table the next. The context will have greatly shifted, and scouts need to be wary of this.

9. Future focus

In essence, scouting is predicting the future with incomplete information. You’ll never see the full picture. Gain as much information about a player as possible, discerning between what is useful and what is not, and then trust your judgement to make the correct prediction. But remember, you are never signing the player that you see. You are signing the player in the context of what you are recruiting for.

You can then apply this methodology on a personal level. Take careful consideration about the roles you apply for, accept or pass up on. This is a highly competitive industry, and clubs do try to take advantage of this.

10. Become prolific and persistent

When posting your work to the masses, quality matters. However, consistency is equally important. Anyone can get a banger tweet once for the right or wrong reasons. But are you showing up and posting consistently with high quality?

The same can be said for working at a club. You can’t just create one top-class scouting report. You must do so consistently under pressure, while delivering results. Train yourself to do so when nobody is watching to get into the habit of doing it when all eyes are on you.

There’s no perfect route into scouting. No single model to follow. But by approaching the work with curiosity, humility, and consistency, you give yourself the best chance of growing in the right direction.

Keep learning, stay open, and let your passion guide your process. Over time, the opportunities tend to find those who do the work, even if no one is watching.