A Christmas letter from SCOUTED
Our year in review.
Dear readers,
Tom here, back with your regularly scheduled, overly introspective editor’s letter that absolutely no-one who subscribed to a football magazine asked for. Can’t stop, won’t stop.
First, some housekeeping. As is customary, SCOUTED will be taking a publishing break across the holidays to rest our little team’s brains. Stories will stop from now until January 5th - we might drop a few things that we’re still waiting for clearance on, but otherwise we’ll be quiet. Before then I have two little bits of reading for you, below:
- 2025 in review
- Our favourite stories of the year
And here's a cool new feature from Llew that’s free to read, featuring an entire XI of players he was right about this year, and four predictions on those he'll be right about next year. Presenting the 'I told you so XI:'
Llew Davies
If you don’t fancy reading my annual note-that-becomes-an-essay, I’ll catch you quick before you click away: thank you! Thank you for being a SCOUTED reader in 2025. It’s been our best year ever in terms of growth, and we are so stupidly grateful you’ve chosen to spend just a little time incorporating our magazine into your footballing life. I speak for myself, Jake and Llew in wishing you a very Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and a wonderful new year. We’ll see you soon!
A present worth buying...yourself.
The article below is free to read for all members.
But as it's the season of giving, we thought it worth reminding you our little team depends almost entirely on reader support, and a subscription to SCOUTED is really incredibly cheap.
Join the club. It's pretty cool here. And that is the most marketing copy you'll squeeze out of me this late in the year.
2025 in Review
2025 has been a strange - but pretty good - year for SCOUTED. In March, we completed the move to our new platform, the independent non-profit Ghost (on which, I recently realised, we’re the largest football publisher), and left Substack behind. Realising this was less than a year ago is crazy. At the time it was a big gamble: we’d be losing Substack’s built-in discoverability and network, which were big contributors to our growth at the time. But we really wanted to own our destiny, and it seemed to me being totally dependent on a for-profit, motivated-only-by-growth tech platform was a poor bet. Eventually, they all degrade.
