SCOUTED50: A definitive guide to the next generation

Welcome, dear readers, to your SCOUTED50 for the 2024/25 season. We’re so glad to have you.

SCOUTED50 is our guide to scouting senior football this season. We are not trying to be prescriptive of predictive - think of it as a curated list of recommendations, by us, for you. We don’t believe ranking football players is useful for much other than having fun, but that doesn’t mean this collection is not a result of hundreds of hours of scouting. Just don’t take the final order too seriously.

To understand how we collated the list and ranked each player, please read the below blog. It will likely answer any quibbles. There’s an additional section at the end of this page for notable omissions, of which there are a few.

Explaining SCOUTED50 2024/25

Dear readers,

SCOUTED NotebookSCOUTED

If you’re new here, SCOUTED is a small, worker-owned, independent publication collectively run by a small group of friends. Our work is largely paywalled because we rely on the support of our readers to survive - we want to write for you, not for advertising revenue or corporate interests. Paying to unlock SCOUTED50 will also grant you the entire breadth of our journalism: insight on hundreds of players, deep analysis of systems and teams, and stories from the cutting-edge of the game.

You’ll also unlock last year’s list, so you can marvel at our (very many) successes and laugh at our (very few) failures:

SCOUTED50: A definitive guide to the next generation

Once upon a time, we collated 100 of each year’s most exciting young talents and analysed them, via gloriously detailed print, in the Scouted Football Handbook.

SCOUTED NotebookSCOUTED

That’s it, waffling over. Thank you so much to each and every reader who has helped SCOUTED survive into its tenth year. We are immensely grateful. Here are your 50 breakout players to watch this season.