How to scout a football player

Since 2014, Llew Davies has been the brains of SCOUTED’s scouting efforts. In the twelve years since we started this publication together as a student blog, Llew - he won’t like me writing this, but I’m going to anyway - has built a reputation for his staggering knowledge of global football markets and incredible eye for technical detail. He curates SCOUTED50 every year, and has written hundreds of player profiles and detailed breakdowns over the decade we’ve worked together.

When football’s data revolution began, some assumed traditional eye-test scouting would become archaic. In fact, the opposite has happened. Data is crucial, but smart football people with the knowledge to apply it to real-life scenarios are equally as important - and remain a point of distinct competitive advantage. “I think it's [data] really useful,” a Head of Recruitment at a European club told me this summer. “It's really good in defining what you want in a player, if you have a reliable data set. But in the world we're working in now, sometimes you need to take decisions based on gut feeling […] in the end, I think the biggest advantage you have as a club from a smaller league is being able to take these fast decisions without having the data.”

Llew is SCOUTED’s gut feeling. Today, he’s scouting talent worldwide for clients of SCOUTED Pro. This week, I had him sit me down and walk me through his work.

We plan for this to be an ongoing series. In this first edition - an Introduction to Process - we cover the very basics: how to maintain such a broad knowledge of markets, how he tracks so many different players, and the first things he looks for when he first sits down with video on a player he’s never watched before. “Forgot to mention...” Llew messaged me afterwards. “I was playing darts on Tuesday night, and someone told me 'no wonder you do football analysis' because I was talking to them about one of our opponents' throwing actions.” Such is the curse of a massive nerd.

The following is an edited transcript of our conversation on the basics of scouting.