Explaining SCOUTED50 2024/25
How our annual list works and the changes we're making this time around
Dear readers,
SCOUTED50 will be posted in the coming days - or is already live, depending on when you’re reading this.
Ranking football players is an inflammatory task, so we wanted to put together a brief explainer on our process, why certain players are excluded, and how we plan to keep this list relevant for the entire season. Let’s get into it.
But first!
If you’re reading this in advance: we’re doing a giveaway. To celebrate the launch of S50, we’ve put together a care package of old-skool SCOUTED memorabilia to be won. This is Handbook-era stuff - including magazines and a huge collection of stickers. This is the only way to get any of our out-of-print work, besides getting scalped by some dude on Ebay.
To enter, you need to be or become a paying subscriber. Once you are, keep an eye on your emails for a notification about a subscriber-only chat later today, October 16 - we’ll share the competition details there. You have until Friday evening to enter.
Readers on free trials are not eligible to win. We want this to be a reward for those who’ve committed financial support to help our small business survive. Sorry, but we need money to buy groceries and stuff.
Cool! Back to S50.
Unlock SCOUTED50, the giveaway, the entire breadth of our independent journalism and help stop us from going under.
How do we build the list?
The fifty players we feature each year are curated entirely by our in-house team of analysts. This year, that meant Llew Davies, Stephen Ganavas and Jake Entwistle.
There are no strict criteria for building the list. The only rule is that players featured previously cannot feature again. You will not find Lamine Yamal, Warren Zaïre-Emery or Evan Ferguson on this year’s release. We know people get upset when we don’t feature their favourites; it’s almost certainly because we’ve featured them extensively before.
SCOUTED
That, and that the players must be born in 2004 or later. That ensures we’re focussing on the emerging generation of stars, those breaking into first-team football. So I guess there are criteria, actually.
The players are chosen because our analysis team believes readers are likely to encounter them in first-team football this year. They’re the players we think you should keep an eye on - it’s a bit like one enormous watchlist.
We’re looking for breakout players, specifically. What does that mean? Well, for us, a “breakout” player is someone likely to make a significant jump in their development this season. The likes of Endrick, Arda Güler and Alejandro Garnacho are eligible for this list, but most people know who they are already — we want to bring you those that you probably haven’t heard of.
That’s really all there is to it. Lists are silly, provocative things that don’t make much sense in the world of serious analytics, so we try not to overthink it. This is a SCOUTED list, built on SCOUTED vibes, and the many hundreds of hours our analysts spend watching the next generation.
We are not trying to be prescriptive or predictive - think of it as a curated list of recommendations, by us, for you.
How do we rank players?
Over the years, we’ve been immensely lucky to build a community of friends and colleagues in the football analytics, media, journalism and recruitment spaces.
For S50, we ask them one simple favour: to pick a top ten list of favourites from our curated long-list of fifty. This year, we gave them no more instruction than that. We didn’t tell them to pick based on potential, ceiling, first-team readiness or likelihood of a breakthrough. Assigning value this way is ultimately meaningless, incongruous with good scouting, and confusing. Most importantly, it’s simply impossible to ask our voters to watch every player on the list in enough detail to be perfectly confident of their judgement. Ain’t nobody got time for that, even these nerds. Instead, we wanted each top ten to reflect the personal bias and expertise of everyone we asked. We think it’s simply more fun that way.
Once we receive the top tens from our voters, we assign each player points based on their position - so first place gets ten points, second gets nine, and so on. Then we add them all up, and boom. A ranking is formed.
Any ties are decided by our in-house team. Any players without points are also ranked by our in-house team.
This year, our list of friends, colleagues and in-house voters included:
- Stephen Ganavas, SCOUTED
- Llew Davies, SCOUTED
- Jake Entwistle, SCOUTED
- Phil Costa, SCOUTED
- Joe Donnohue, SCOUTED
- Rahul Iyer, Freelance
- Alex Barker, The Athletic
- Neel Shelat, Freelance
- Mohamed Mohamed, Freelance
- Aaron Moniz, Devils in the Details
- Ninad Barbadikar, Freelance
- Jake W. Fox, Pot Shot Podcast
- Jon Mackenzie, The Athletic
- Jamie Kemp, Opta
- David Cartlidge, ESPN
- Alex Collings, Pot Shot
- Billy Carpenter, Edu’s BBQ
- Bence Bocsák, Freelance
- Kees van Hemmen, Devils in the Details
If you have quibbles with the final ranking, please take it up with any of them and not this long-suffering editor. Thank you!
How will SCOUTED50 evolve this year?
Last year, we made hefty promises about S50’s longevity that we couldn’t keep. This year, we’ve come up with a better plan.
For 2024/25, we’ll be treating S50 as a power ranking. Three times this season, we’ll publish a new ‘Round’ of updates, moving the players up and down depending on how their year is panning out. The team will keep an eye on our graduate’s fortunes as the year develops, and let you know how they’re all getting on.
Best case scenario? Something dramatic happens and everyone loses their minds. For example, you could imagine Evan Ferguson’s rank absolutely tanking last year, after his promising start petered out completely. Wouldn’t that be fun?
Each Round will be re-published to your email inbox as a new article, so you won’t miss a thing. Round One: coming December 2024. Stay subscribed!
That’s all there is to it. We really hope you enjoy this year’s list, and it serves as a handy guide in your football-following endeavours.
We’ll be back in a few months with SCOUTED50: Round One.
If you’ve appreciated our work for a while and haven’t yet become a paid subscriber, please consider doing so - this is the perfect time. We simply can’t continue to work on projects of this depth unless we receive financial support from those who appreciate them. Thank you so much.
Viva SCOUTED,
Tom, Steve, Jake and Llew
