Responding to your feedback

Hey readers,

I'm back! Kinda. First off: The Technical Area will not be returning on a month-to-month basis. Writing those blogs was an amazing experience that I miss very much - hence, being here right now - but we want to be careful about how and when we reach your email inbox. We only have 12 publication slots a month (!) and we need to ensure all the football-related writing you pay for has its place.

But this column is great fun and incredibly fulfilling and genuinely very useful, so expect it to begin dropping sporadically again - whenever the opportunity or need arises.

Whenever we write something not in a newsletter, we will point you towards it in a newsletter. So keep opening your emails!

I'm also going to attempt to respect both mine and your time by being a little more succinct. To that end:

Responding to your feedback

The problem with SCOUTED has always been that it grew out of a few teenager's shared hobby: we are here for passion, not profit. That's corny, but the point is our focus is and has always been 95% editorial quality, 5% business, when the split should be much closer to 50-50.

So we have to close that gap significantly. This isn't us selling out, it's a necessity. Sadly, we simply don't make anywhere close to enough money to survive.

Step one was learning more about you guys: our readers. Why do people even read SCOUTED? Where did they find us? And how can we use that knowledge to find more of you? Last Friday we published the first in a series of surveys aimed at answering that question, and the response has been wonderful.

There were so many great items of feedback, but what struck me most was the care you all feel for this website. So many of you had clearly put a lot of thought into your suggestions; many more just said nice things. This means the world to me, and I felt it was only fair I wrote back in return. So here we are.

I've selected a few points I felt compelled to respond to. If your response isn't included below, please know I have certainly read it (probably multiple times) and appreciate it hugely. Thank you so much - I hope we can repay your faith by building something great.

If you'd still like to respond to the survey, you can do so here.

On: reference, collections and the SCOUTED database

A few answers threw up a recurring theme:

"As a student/aspiring analyst, I would love a section where I can "access" a collection of past reports/sections of reading. For example if I were to search Saka, I would get all the existing written pieces on him (if this already exists then fair play)."

"...organize the information in a navigable manner. I think being able to pull out and organize these scouting reports you've published elsewhere on the site into one central hub (organized by league, club, age, etc.) would be incredibly helpful for readers to revisit/learn more about a particular player."

"Have a database on the website whereby all reports can be easily searched."

"Create a web app. Reading articles is fine. But an interactive webapp that paid users can play around and consume the information... that will be better imo."

Thanks to everyone who wrote in along similar lines. All I can say to the above is: yes. We have been thinking about this for a long time and we are actively working towards building a 'database' on scoutedftbl.com.

The vision is to disseminate all the work Jake & Llew do into an easy-to-filter reference tool: so if you run a search for a high-potential Power Forward in Europe, it'll throw up everyone we've found.

The problem is, as it's always been, resource. We've experimented with building manual player pages but we want, ideally, to cover hundreds of players: you're talking about hundreds of hours of building pages and disseminating information, to say nothing of the thousands of hours of actual scouting work needed to generate that insight. Difficult.

The solution is, hopefully, some sort of streamlined and semi-automated system. Currently, everything we write and every insight we generate goes into our Notion database. We're actively experimenting with ways to bring that database online. This is easily done in principle, but there's significant lift required in design and development to ensure it exists in the SCOUTED branding, has a newsletter attached, and is properly paywalled. Resources, money, skills and manpower are needed.

This is a large focus of my work right now - stay tuned. And if you're reading this and thinking 'I know exactly how to make this work' please get in touch.

On: readability

Another theme that cropped up more than once:

"In accordance with the data analysis, sometimes the abbreviations can be confusing and you need to keep scrolling up to the glossary section in order to understand what the abbreviation is, not sure if they is a way of implementing a key/glossary that runs along the side of the article while scrolling."

"Scouted stats can feel overwhelmingly stat-heavy. I know that's the point, and it's likely just not for me, but I can get lost in the sheer number of stats & get disengaged."

Thanks for this feedback! It's really valuable for me in particular: being a writer mostly interested in editorial who has somehow ended up running an analysis magazine, I have long held a sense of imposter syndrome. I'm not a stats guy either, and I too get overwhelmed.

It's long been my mission to ensure our stats and analysis work is legible, engaging and fun for people like me who enjoy football but faint at the sight of algebra. It sounds like I've been slipping in this regard, so I appreciate the nudge.

Part of the issue is the sheer speed at which we're working these days. Our turnarounds are much shorter than they were, and I don't have the luxury of getting really into the weeds with editing. But this is as important to me as it is to you, so we'll keep it in mind moving forward.

And on the glossary: I very strongly agree, and think having a pinned glossary is a brilliant solution, but would likely take some development lift. I think this can alternatively be solved by stronger editorial process on my end: great analytical writing should narrativise metrics, and ground them in concepts you can understand. We're trying to write shorter articles which means less space for this kind of work, so a glossary is a neater solution. Maybe we'll try both!

On: longform

"I particularly enjoy when you guys go deep into a topic, whether that's a really thorough scouting report of a team or player with loads of advanced data, or narrative pieces about a team or player (like the Union St. Gilloise piece). The current almost list format with stats snippets is still fun and I'll keep paying for and reading them, but isn't what really grabbed me. I particularly look forward to the occasional deep dives we get, but understand the myriad reasons such pieces can't happen all the time."

Music to my ears. I'm really glad people still like big, detailed stories like Modern Renaissance. They're my favourite thing to work on, as a writer and editor.

But yes, the reason they're few and far between is they're immensely resource-intensive and simply don't pay the bills. This is not a problem unique to us, of course, but the publishing industry at large. As long as I'm here, we'll continue to fund detailed articles like this. I'd love to commit to producing one a month, but at this stage even that is ambitious.

The 'list format' you mention felt more appropriate to newsletters, and allows us to expand our coverage at the cost of depth. But it's a balance: we've built our reputation on depth and I promise we won't entirely forgo it entirely just because 80% of the internet can't consume anything that's not in a listicle. I am incredibly passionate about ensuring SCOUTED remains a magazine, and a place for long-form writing to survive and thrive. We just need to do enough of the short-form stuff to pay for it.

All that said, I'm currently working on a sequel (of sorts) to Modern Renaissance. I spent almost a week at RB Leipzig last month and am plugging away at a long, detailed and very narrative story on what it feels like to be inside one of Europe's most modern and forward-thinking clubs. Soon!

On: the product

"Keep the great work coming! I think it would be good to understand the difference between free/paying, as I'm not 100% sure what I get now with the new format, some clearer messaging would be fantastic."

Thank you! Yes, I think you've nicely encapsulated a problem we face: what exactly are we selling?

The problem is we're a tiny team of three, and our time is largely taken up by the client work we need to do to keep the lights on. Because this is already paid for by the client, we always make that free to read. But that means a lot of our best analysis work is not paywalled, and we need to do even more work to 'sell' to our readers.

The solution is a mixture of things. Certainly, messaging can be improved, and that's relatively easy to fix - thanks for the nudge, we're on it. But building a more robust product is also key here. If we sold access to the database and a concise, clear online magazine for one fixed fee, I think that'd go down pretty well. We'll work on both!

On: paper

And finally:

"...as someone that is a new member I would happily purchase a magazine such as the SCOUTED50 list each year. I see the SCOUTED50 list as one of the biggest products SCOUTED has to offer and I am sure there are people out there that would love to purchase this sort of product. The magazines provided by 'These Football Times' would be a good reference to how it can be designed. Might be worth doing a questionnaire about this subject."

Funny you should mention that. ;-)

SCOUTED existed for three years in physical form and it has always been my personal goal to bring the magazine back. The problem: print is very expensive, shipping is astonishingly expensive, and the margins are razor thin - people will only pay so much.

The more work I do the clearer one thing becomes: if we can stabilise the business as a digital-only venture first, print makes much more sense. Relaunching it as a core pillar of the business, as a foundation, is a nice but immensely fragile idea. Print should be additive, not all-consuming.

So although I am desperate to re-launch print this summer, I think it makes more sense to go all-in on ensuring our digital efforts expand first. Here's a promise: the minute we hit 2000 subscribers, we'll bring the magazine back. Get your friends to subscribe ;-)

Thanks so much for reading, and thank you to everyone who responded to our first survey. It was immensely useful, and there are more to come as we plot our route forward. Everyone's feedback was incredibly valuable, not just the stuff I've shared above.

I wanted to leave you by immortalising some of the other comments I didn't include. I'm sure you'll see why.

If you wrote one of the below or similar, please know you made a huge difference to my day. Thanks from all of us.

From you:

"It's amazing already."

"Thanks for your time and all the work you do. This is seriously my favorite sports site on the internet."

"Genuinely think it’s some of the best football journalism about I wouldn’t normally pay to read articles but I’m fully behind the work you do and greatly admire it."

"Love it! Really hope it works out for you guys."

"I just want to say thank you. You guys are great - keep it up."

"Very good writing, very accessible. I have watched football since I can remember, I am highly analytical and work in quant research, but I am always amazed at how little of the complexities of the game I actually see when watching. SCOUTED is great for bringing the underlying structures into view."

"Fantastic quality of journalism produced by people passionate about the game. I wish there were more publications at this standard. Can't wait to see the Scouted empire grow."

"I absolutely love SCOUTED. Please keeping doing this as you are."

"I am really rooting for you guys."

"I've only just started reading, but it feels ideal for my tastes."

"The amount of detail and effort is staggering and incredible."

"All positive. Great job."

"I think your humour & quality detail is perfectly on point."

"It’s the best, most informative thing out there of this type lads. You really deserve for it all to work out."

"My favourite football platform by far, the quality of the writing, the look and feel of the different platforms you've been across and the magazine are just amazing."

"Love you guys xoxo"

Love you too. We'll see you soon.

T