An announcement on our future
SCOUTED is changing in 2026.
"Find your heart, and jump."
Dear readers,
We won't bury the lede too far: this letter contains details on very large changes coming to SCOUTED in 2026. These will fundamentally affect not just how the team works but how you, our readers, consume our magazine. If you're a fan of our work, a paid subscriber or just otherwise invested in our destiny, it contains information you'll want to read.
We have always believed in building a new kind of media business, with transparency and honesty at its heart, and in the growing of which its readers feel involved. We're still committed to that ideal. So, once you read this letter, please jump into the feedback form at the end, or the comments, to let us know what you think.
In Tom's last editor's letter, before Christmas, he wrote this:
I hope we’re seeing a future develop in which others, like me, become totally exhausted with it all, and return to slower and more human spaces. Sometimes I catch myself forcing SCOUTED to try and sprint after the noise, when our mission should be to build the opposite - so I hope whatever we do next year will return to that slowness without compromise. The question is whether that will ever be financially viable.
We've decided to answer that question; to jump, and find out. Here's how.
SCOUTED 2026
Here is the headline.
SCOUTED have published several stories a week, every week, since May 2023. We've decided to bring that practise to an end. In fact, this year, you might not hear from us for weeks at a time.
Instead we are going to attempt something different, slower, and more intentional. Instead of constant, disparate newsletters, SCOUTED will now be a single, curated digital magazine, delivered once every 4-6 weeks. There will be no more newsletters or weekly features, and we won't publish regularly on the website. We squeezed out a final Rabbit Hole this week because Kenan Yildiz was too good to ignore, but that's it.
We are thinking of this cadence as a gentle return to the philosophy that underpinned our origin. We intend to deliver something resembling a mini (but still very substantial) Handbook, straight to your inbox, ten-or-so times in 2026. New readers won't know, but SCOUTED's reputation was built around a digital magazine of this kind before we ever went to print or started a newsletter. During their uni days, Stephen and Tom consumed a dangerous amount of caffeine (being 21 is wild) and curated a colossal annual ebook, which we released for free. That snowballed, over years, into 12 print issues.
Magazines are in our blood.
Magazines are in our blood; long-form projects of this kind are as important to SCOUTED's history as the scouting itself. We feel we've lost some of that identity and, although this is not (yet) a return to print, and the incentives of the digital economy make undertakings like this difficult, it just feels right. Like coming home.
Although we're still finalising our creative plans, and it's absolutely crucial that we underpromise and overdeliver, we think it's important to give you some idea of what to expect. Right now we can say for certain each 'Volume' (working title) of SCOUTED '26 will contain a featured cover star, with an accompanying story in the depth we're known for; several more detailed player profiles; and a tight, curated batch of essays and pieces of narrative journalism (Jake will be let off his leash). Each Volume will be themed, cohesive, and feel like a bespoke standalone edition of your favourite magazine.
Each Volume will be delivered as a complete package you can sit and read through, front-to-back, if you so wish, and we will design it to be read that way. We will also publish each article as a standalone piece on the website, if you'd prefer to take them one at a time, and at least one essay from each Volume will be free.
Finally, we plan to offer some means for paid subscribers to download and keep each Volume in its entirety, to read at their leisure. In the dream scenario this is a fully designed, beautiful .pdf in the style of a classic magazine, perfect for reading on a tablet or laptop, but we will stop short of promising that today: we're already planning a lot of work, and will only properly understand our available resources once we get stuck in. There is a danger here, of course, that this works against the subscription model altogether, which is predicated on the idea that the content is only available while you hold the subscription, but to be honest we don't care. We want to put the work first for a little while.
We'd love to go much deeper on our thought process, philosophy and the many risks we've considered, but there's plenty of time for that. We'll say, for now, that the internet is not built to incentivise or reward media companies slowing down, and we know we might be fighting against a tide that will drown us, but we're going to try anyway. We've been chasing financial goals in ways the internet and social media has dictated to us for years, and we've not quite made it, and we've burnt out anyway - and diluted what made SCOUTED so special - so all that's left to do is to try things our way, to build the product we wish existed, and see what happens.
Two more important comments, and we'll leave you. The first: the underlying motivation for this change is quality. We want SCOUTED's position as the greatest football analysis magazine in the world to be totally indisputable, and we want to solidify our reputation as the most enjoyable and detailed publication in this space. It became clear in 2025 that maintaining that bar with a single editor, publishing as quickly as we were, was unsustainable. Slowing down and building a single product with intention will allow us to curate the absolute best of Jake and Llew's research, and for Tom to ensure everything sings in distinctive SCOUTED voice. We believe we're at our best when those elements work in harmony, and Volumes will allow us to ensure they always do. We promise, right now, that in 2026 we will deliver our best, deepest, most entertaining and enlightening work ever.
We're making this promise because we are asking you to hold your subscriptions while we go away and work, in relative quiet. This is a really scary moment for us: our livelihoods are dependent on your memberships, and we are stepping away from the content treadmill. But this is a leap of faith. In 2025 we allowed our constant desire to deliver you value to become volume, which crushed the team and confused our mission. These days you can find sheer volume anywhere, often for free - and our value must be in delivering sheer, bespoke quality, quality you can find absolutely nowhere else and that cannot be automated, at whatever cadence that requires. Therefore we're asking you to trust us while we disappear from your overstuffed inboxes for a little while. It may be you feel what we deliver in Volume I is no longer worth your subscription fee, but we hope you'll wait until then to decide (If Volume I is not worth £4.99, I will run down Oxford Street in nothing but socks - ed).
And the second comment is related: stepping back from constant content churn will allow us to do other things, and one of those is to deliver little editorial updates as we work, which we plan to semi-frequently during each Volume's development - so you can take a behind-the-scenes look at what we're working on, where drafts are at, and let us know what you think. The 'newsletter' element of this publication will, from now on, be used to a) deliver you Volumes and b) talk to you about upcoming Volumes (the regular SkillCorner research essays will continue as normal).
This is the biggest change to SCOUTED since we ended the Handbook. It is terrifying but deeply necessary, and all three of us feel totally rejuvenated. We can't wait to get stuck in and deliver you something exceptional.
We'd love to hear what you think, so we've opened a feedback form here (and below). Tell us anything: your immediate reaction to this news; your worries or questions; the things you'd like to see in each Volume; whether or not this slower, more methodical pace fits with how you consume your media. We'll return next week to answer any FAQs in a second editor's letter. And we promise to keep you updated as we write, design and curate your first Volume of the year.
Thank you for your faith and readership. Let's build something magic.
Tom, Llew and Jake
