Coming up

Dear readers,

Thanks for your patience. We appreciate SCOUTED has been quiet on the football content front this summer, and we've been working diligently to fix that. Here's what we've been tinkering with.

Our writer search

I was so overwhelmed with excellent responses to our recent writer search that I had to cut off applications early. Thanks to everyone who sent me a thoughtful application.

The writers we'd like to move forward with at this stage have been contacted. Sorry I've not been able to get back to everyone individually; there were hundreds of applications!

We want paying good rates to great writers to be a fundamental pillar of our future, just as it was for our past. If we are looking for pitches again in the future, we'll make the first announcement here.

Announcing SCOUTED's Football Writing Festival

We know we need to return with a splash. So, to launch this new era of SCOUTED, we're planning an event we're calling our Football Writing Festival.

Over two weeks across the end of August, we'll be introducing you to our new writers by publishing a story from each of them, one every weekday. I've commissioned eight new stories from writers who have never worked with SCOUTED before. I'll also be publishing something I've been working on for months, and a very special figure from SCOUTED's past will make a surprise appearance. Everything will be free to read.

During the Festival, we'll also be dropping the paywall across all of our most popular content. This is a chance for free members to read all of our SCOUTED50 archive, anything in Volume I or II, and even download and keep the magazines if they wish. We'll also be launching Gift Links for the first time.

Finally, we'll be using the Festival to launch a subscription drive, to ensure we can continue paying new and returning writers the fair rates they deserve. We ask only that, if you enjoy anything you read during the Festival, you help share it and champion our new faces.

We'll confirm the date of the Festival in the coming weeks.

Just the start

This year has been transitional for SCOUTED, but with the launch of Pro, we've never been in a better position - or more committed to our ideal of building the definitive home for thoughtful narrative football writing & analysis.

After the Festival concludes, we'll fall back into a regular cadence of publishing great writing by great writers, paid fairly, every week. Print projects will return.

We've done too much talking about our plans this year. It's time for us to return to publishing the kind of football writing that convinces you SCOUTED is a publication always worth your time and money. That starts with the Festival next month, and will continue for the rest of 2026.

Hope you've all had a great summer so far - see you soon!

Tom