Editorial

Winter Arc: SCOUTED

Our holiday subscription drive

Tom Curren, Jake Entwistle, Llew Davies

16 Jun 2025 — 9 min read

Dear readers,

Running a small, independent magazine is tough. We try to write balanced, informative and really deep stories our core readers love - but the result is we're often buried by those in football media who scream the loudest.

We're trying to build a space for deep thinking on football, fun storytelling, and great reading. A magazine that rejects the pace of social media and focuses on ideas, not headlines. A home for both insanely thoughtful analyses on Archetypes as well as weird essays on Riccardo Calafiori's milkshake bringing all the boys to the yard.

To keep these stories coming, we need more help. We're locking in this holiday season - this is SCOUTED's winter arc.

Currently, we're at 954 paid subscribers. By the end of this holiday season, we need to hit 1100.

If you're keep to join our mission of building a slow, thoughtful football magazine, you can simply hit the button below and subscribe. If you're not yet sold, the rest of this page is for you. Read on.

"This is seriously my favourite sports website on the internet."

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SCOUTED is a totally independent publication dedicated to introducing its readers to the future of football. Since 2014 we’ve been on the cutting edge of analysis, scouting and recruitment.

Our readership consists of decision makers at the world’s biggest clubs, federations, and recruitment teams. In 2024 our co-founder was headhunted by one of Europe’s leading clubs to work as a first-team scout. We work with bespoke, rare data from partners like SkillCorner. We’ve been recognised and lauded by writers and journalists from around the editorial world, and scouts and executives working at the very highest levels of the game.

"I don't often pay for subscription-based content but I firmly believe the team at SCOUTED are the best at making data analytics friendly and interesting."

- Ben C., SCOUTED subscriber

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But aside from those accolades, we’re just three friends who believe in independent data journalism and great storytelling. We want to create a magazine people really, genuinely care about - just like the old days. And we’d like to do it without engaging in the clickbait, algorithm-ridden, hypebeast nonsense today’s media environment has become. We want to create a great reading experience free of corporate influence.

Most importantly, we want to write for people, not machines. People who still enjoy sitting down with a coffee, disengaging from the internet maelstrom, and digging deep into an idea, story or perspective. People who want to engage with writers who sit for hours to run narratives through their heads before putting them to paper, who engage in deep and meaningful original research - not those who throw a question into generative AI and call it a day.

That’s why we’ve chosen the reader-funded model, even if it’s much harder than the alternative. It allows us to put the time and care into each story we believe great reading requires. It allows us to write for you.

"Fantastic quality of journalism produced by people passionate about the game. I wish there were more publications at this standard."

— SCOUTED Reader

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Who am I supporting, exactly?

SCOUTED is a collective of once-young, now-somewhat-grizzled football writers who own the website equally. We have no outside investors or corporate backing and started without any funding whatsoever - this is a worker-owned and operated magazine.

Tom Curren / Creative Editor
Tom is the founder of SCOUTED. He is a writer and editor living in London and interested in bridging the gap between analysis and narrative. He spends most of his time correcting Llew’s weird typos.

Llew Davies / Scouting Editor
Llew is a writer and scout with a history of spotting and breaking down top talent. He’s also our Design Lead. Joe dubbed him the ‘Michael Burry of scouting’ and it stuck. He’s most famous for his ‘non-temporal’ writing style, which means he leaves many sentences unfini

Jake Entwistle / Data Editor
Jake joined SCOUTED in 2024 after eight years of leading Squawka’s social efforts. He is the maestro behind Monday Night SCOUTED, our popular newsletter that drops - you guessed it - every Monday. He loves spotting stats nobody else does and scouring the globe for the next big thing.

"My favourite football platform by far. The quality of the writing, the look and feel are amazing."

— SCOUTED Reader

Subscribe now

What will I get?

During the regular season you'll receive three jam-packed, full-length newsletters every single week to sit down with and enjoy. Quality, not quantity.

Newsletters

MONDAY NIGHT SCOUTED is Jake's data-driven narrative breakdown of a story he spotted in the weekend's stats. You'll get it every Monday night.

The Rabbit Hole is for those who enjoy pulling on data threads and tumbling head-first into an unexpected story - that'll hit you on Tuesdays.

SCOUT NOTES is Llew's detailed breakdown of a top-level talent he thinks deserves the spotlight - so you can stay ahead of the game every Wednesday.

SCOUTED50

SCOUTED50 is our annual collection of the talents we think are most likely to break out during a given season - and you can head backwards to check out our hits and misses from years past.

Storytelling from the future

Long-form features, essays and narrative journalism from inside some of the world's most exciting football projects - crack a cold one and relax into a great read.

Archetypes

Jake's pet project and our way of recalibrating the terminology we use to understand football players, SCOUTED Archetypes help clubs - and you - map the game's future.

Each Archetype is built using detailed and bespoke datasets from our partners - and explained in perfect clarity, so you can spot your own Gamebreaker, Safecracker or Developer out in the wild.

...so much more

From Emergency Broadcasts to youth tournament coverage to deep-dive analysis to long-form, epic narrative journalism, to whatever the hell's knocking around inside Llew's weird head on any given Sunday - SCOUTED has the next generation pretty well mapped.

We think it's a great deal.

If you've read all this way, thank you so much for your interest in SCOUTED. We desperately want to make this little magazine work, and think it deserves to.

Every penny you spend with us goes right back into ensuring we can keep the lights on and pay our writers, analysts and artists, both in-house and freelance, the rates they deserve.

If you can't support us financially but like what we do, please please share this page as far and wide as you possibly can. Finding us a new subscriber is just as good as signing up yourself. Discovery has always been our issue, and word of mouth is still the king.

If you're already subscribed, please consider upgrading your subscription to a higher tier, if you can. It really helps, and the more of our readers are willing to pay a little more, the more free subscriptions we can give to those less fortunate.

Power the future of SCOUTED

Upgrade your subscription now

Thank you so much for your time. Enjoy the holidays.

Yours,

Tom, Llew & Jake

Winter Arc: SCOUTED

Tom Curren, Jake Entwistle, Llew Davies

"This is seriously my favourite sports website on the internet."

"I don't often pay for subscription-based content but I firmly believe the team at SCOUTED are the best at making data analytics friendly and interesting."

"Fantastic quality of journalism produced by people passionate about the game. I wish there were more publications at this standard."

Who am I supporting, exactly?

"My favourite football platform by far. The quality of the writing, the look and feel are amazing."