A tour of the SCOUTED Database

Happy Friday, scouts. Welcome to The Shortlist, your weekly, bitesize download on football’s next generation.

Support us by forwarding this newsletter to a friend. Did someone forward this to you? Sign up for free. Want more detail and feature stories? SCOUT NOTES or MNS.

Enjoy this free newsletter? You can gift us a one-off tip, here.

Headline

We are so back – with something new

Hey Shortlist readers, long time no see. We've had to fiddle around with our schedule these past few weeks, hence no newsletter. In the interim, we've had a chance to think about what we want our free offering to be.

We thought this would be a great way to use our ever-growing internal SCOUTED Database, the big collection of notes and profiles we use to keep all of our scouting co-ordinated in-house. We don't want to give away too many of our secrets - certainly not in our free newsletter - but we'll share a little walkthrough, for fun.

Starting next week, every Friday until we inevitably change our minds again, The Shortlist will include a curated selection of the players who've recently been added or edited, so you can keep up to date with the names Jake, Llew and Ashwin are tracking - and perhaps add them to your own collection.

I'll let Llew introduce you to his curated Featured Player for the week. Then, stick around for a sunny little waltz through our Database - a quick tour, if you will.

831/1000

We set an ambitious goal of reaching 1,000 paid subscribers by September, which would change the outlook of SCOUTED forever - and now we're over half way there! Help us keep going.

Find out more

Short…listed:

A short recommendation from Scouting Editor Llew Davies

Pre-season is an exciting time because it gives emerging prospects an invaluable opportunity to take people by surprise, breaking into the team and sticking there with the competitive campaign to come.

One up-and-coming talent who could have a season-defining summer is Mohamed Kader Meïté at Stade Rennais.

He broke into the first team last season, racking up just over 500 minutes across a dozen appearances in Ligue 1. There were a couple of starts in there too, including against Paris Saint-Germain where he put himself about and gave Marquinhos and Lucas Beraldo an uncomfortable afternoon. He also captained Rennes' U-19 team to their fourth triumph in the prestigious Coupe Gambardella, scoring six goals in five games and a late winner in the final.

What you'll notice first about MKM is his hulking size: he's tall, leggy, limby, with a big, broad frame. He uses it to bump and barge on the last line, making himself a nuisance with stretchy runs in behind, posting up to pin-and-roll with his back to goal, and dunking on centre-backs to attack hung-up crosses. A lot of Ligue 1 defenders had a lot of trouble trying to contain him in his cameos last season.

You should read this, from the excellent Sébastien Chapuis, for an extensive breakdown of MKM and his eye-catching profile and brutish abilities.

☁️✨CLOUD 9: Mohamed Kader Meïté

The Temptations: reviewing Chelsea’s prospective strikers 1️⃣

Sébastien’s SubstackSébastien

And you should absolutely watch out for Mohamed Kader Meïté in the 2025/26 season. The ingredients are there for a breakout campaign. You heard it here first.

The Database

SCOUTED's brain

This is the homepage of our Players database. We have a sister database for our match notes too, and the two are linked so we can quickly share information between them.

The above screenshot is sorted by 'recently edited' - as you can see we've been largely involved in curating our notes on U21 and U20 players from the summer's tournaments, as well as Thierno Barry, whom Ash so ably covered this week.

You can sort and filter the database by any of the data values. So if we wanted to figure out who our tallest player is, we can do that:

Shock horror, it's that massive German.

Let's click into a player page and see how they look.

Here's Kees Smit's entry, with all his data values. Thrilling stuff. Scrolling...

Here you'll get into the bread and butter - the team's top-level thoughts, meant to be useful as an immediate internal reference tool. It's really useful for me to know what Llew thinks about a player at a glance, without having to pull him into a call and interrogate him - and if Jake, Ash or any of the team are writing an article, having a one-stop-shop for our previous thoughts is handy to stress-test their discoveries. Scrolling...

Then we have the collection of links and sources, including summaries of relevant match notes. Each drop-down toggle under 'matches' is a link to the corresponding entry in our match notes database, so we can return to the game and read the context, and our entries on other players from the day.

And those pink buttons beneath 'featured in' take us straight to the website, so we can keep track of our past coverage on a player. All our articles are stored in a separate 'Editorial' database, which is also linked to this one.

That's all we'll share for now. At the moment, we're working on automation - so the team can focus on watching and writing about the players, and the database will parse and sort that information correspondingly, without much manual input. As a small team, managing a behemoth like this - and ensuring we still meet our editorial targets - is a colossal undertaking, so ensuring we have to do as little work on upkeep as possible is a key goal.

It's a fun little project regardless, and hopefully you found that look under the hood interesting.

Stick around to The Shortlist - next week, we'll start introducing you to the Database's new additions.

That’s all, folks. See you next Friday.

For everything on the next generation, stay tuned to SCOUTED.

Upgrade to paid to unlock all our writing.