Quiet before the storm: The Technical Area, April 2024

Dear readers,

Welcome to another Technical Area, the monthly blog wherein I talk the struggle, strife and constant joy of building an independent football magazine.

Last month (christ, April flew by) I spoke a little about the financial challenges we’re facing as we head into the summer - long story short, the ad revenue on our SEO-powered scoutedftbl.com has taken a hit, and we don’t yet make enough from our subscribers or commercial partnerships to replace it.

The answer, of course, is simply to do better work, reach more people and convince them to subscribe. As I’ve said many times, I believe in this business model and I believe an audience big enough to keep us afloat is out there. The difficulty is in finding them.

That’s where you come in. On Tuesday, May 14 - exactly one month before the European Championships commence, more on those in a moment - we’ll be launching the first annual Summer of SCOUTED subscription drive. The goal is simple: to call on our community to spread the word, to introduce us to their friends and colleagues, to plaster the good name of SCOUTED across the internet in hopes it reaches an audience large enough to keep us alive.

Barring a miracle, we won’t be able to replace our website’s revenue via subscriptions in one go. We need many hundreds of people to sign up for that, and convincing readers to pay for a premium football newsletter is really, really hard. But we’re going to do as much as we can.

Currently, I’d like to aim at increasing our subscriber count to 700. We’re sitting at 526 at the time for writing. I know this sounds modest, but our initial goal was lower. We’re gunna have to fight all the way there.

After last month’s Technical Area went (by my standards) gently viral, I felt guilty. I felt like I’d framed our struggles as a sob story of sorts, as if we’re a charity in need of donations. I don’t know if this guilt was reasonable, but I feel compelled to address it. So: SCOUTED is a business and, like any other, must earn its right to exist. Our problems are my responsibility. I can always work harder to ensure our product is better, more valuable, fits more closely with the needs of our readers. We just need a little kick.

To that end, I want to share with you what we’re planning over the next few months to ensure a subscription to SCOUTED is worth paying for.

The Summer of SCOUTED

This summer, the Euros and the transfer window will combine to form a festival of football - and offer us an enormous opportunity to make a splash and establish ourselves as a sustainable magazine. Here’s everything we’re planning to do, although stuff is, of course, subject to change:

Wonderkid Wishlist

We’ve not always done the best job of connecting our work to the top Premier League clubs, which is unfortunately where the mass interest lies. So, this summer, I’m planning a series of bumper stories called Wonderkid Wishlist.

We’re going to play real-life football manager with the Premier League’s biggest clubs. I’ll be working with a group of the best club-specific analysts around to identify gaps in a team’s squad planning and suggest SCOUTED favourites to plug them. These transfer suggestions won’t necessarily be the sensible, realistic calls you’re used to from us - this is a fun thought exercise, designed to straddle the line between the rational and the fanciful.

First up: Wonderkid Wishlist, Arsenal. Gabriel Jesus is on the ropes, the left eight remains a conundrum, and Bukayo Saka needs both competition and rest so his legs don’t literally fall off. We’ll be taking a stab at these issues and more to suggest a shortlist of wonderkids from across the globe to help future-proof the Gunners. Edu Gaspar, fire up the grill.

The Shortlist

My other new newsletter series is called The Shortlist. This made its debut last week, so I won’t go into too much detail - go read it!

Our brand-new newsletter – The Shortlist: Igor Jesus

Dear readers, We founded SCOUTED with one goal: to introduce readers to the next generation of football players through great writing and professional scouting. Right now, via SCOUTED50, I think we’re succeeding in delivering depth and quality - the best on the internet, if I may. But

SCOUTED NotebookSCOUTED

The idea is simple: what if, when you fired up Football Manager or FIFA and searched for your next transfer, you received notes from a real scout who’d actually watched them in real life? Our usual, extremely detailed profiles are incredible, but they’re time-consuming to make and daunting to read. Sometimes you just want someone you trust to tell you why a player’s really good and why - in words you can understand and digest quickly.

My aim is to build a comprehensive shortlist over the summer so, if an unexpected name makes a jump to your club, we’ll have you covered. Because SCOUTED should be the best resource on the internet for learning about the players of the future in a fun, engaging way.

The Euros

This is the big one, boys and girls. To properly cover the European Championships, we’re planning something we’ve never done before.

For the first few months of this year I hosted SCOUTED Weekly, an informal roundtable podcast featuring my friends and colleagues from the team. That was, in part, practice: I haven’t been on the mic in many years and I had cobwebs to shrug off and confidence to find, because I knew we wanted to do something big this summer.

During the tournament, we’ll be live streaming regular reaction podcasts for fixtures big and small. We’ll hammer out the details of a schedule soon, but for now just know the aim is to build a space to decompress and deconstruct what is likely to be an emotional and fascinating month. Whether ten people watch or a hundred, I’ve always loved the communal feeling of reacting to a tournament with friends and I can’t wait to do it with SCOUTED.

Alongside the streams, we’ll be writing a steady flow of Editor’s Takes during the tournament, whenever myself, Stephen, Llew, Joe or Phil have something particularly spicy to say. And of course, pre-tournament you can expect the traditional SCOUTED guide of players to watch, so you know which fixtures will feature the hottest talent.

The Transfer Window

We want a subscription to SCOUTED to mean you’re always ahead of the game when wire transfers are zipping across the continent. Romano might spend the summer tweeting faster than we can think, but we’ll offer a place to slow down and absorb what each move actually means. A host of our SCOUTED50 players are likely to be on the market, and there’s no better way to understand who your team has spent big on than to indulge in one of our profiles.

Steve and Llew will be returning to the mic with their classic Talking Transfers series, and we’ll have regular newsletters flying out the door to keep you up-to-date with everything that’s happening. SCOUT NOTES in particular will have a transfer focus, and if any major SCOUTED favourites get a big move we’ll drop a newsletter with everything you need to know.

And the rest

All this is in addition to the usual editorial schedule: so SCOUTED50 profiles will continue, our analysis column will continue, SCOUT NOTES will continue. We’re gunna be busy.

We’ve got a bunch of incredible long-form stories on the way, too. Here’s a taster of those:

• IDENTITY, ARSENAL: Searching for Arsene in Arteta’s Arsenal, by Jake W. Fox: one of Arsenal’s hottest up-and-coming writers takes us on an odyssey through the past two decades of his beloved club, in search of understanding what identity really is - and how it’s shaped the club’s next generation.
• LEGACY, LIVERPOOL: How Klopp built Liverpool’s future, by Danny Corcoran: one of our favourite Liverpool writers reflects on how Jurgen Klopp’s time at the club transformed its youth policy and reformed an historic and storied identity.
• FROM ASHES: Dawn of the White Wolves, by Neel Shelat: a SCOUTED journalist explores how the collapse of the Soviet Union birthed an independent nation with big footballing dreams - and how a smart youth policy is helping Uzbekistan realise them.

So that’s it I think unless I’ve forgotten something (I have)

I’m really fired up for this summer. SCOUTED has spent so long knocking on the door - from a student blog, to a struggling print publication, to a struggling online publication, we’ve never entirely found our feet - but I’ve always believed there’s space for us. Our work is good and people will read it if we find them. The summer’s festival of football presents a huge opportunity and it’s up to us to take it with both hands.

But we need to get there first. Whether you’re a longtime paid subscriber or a new, free reader who likes what they see, your support during our subscription drive is going to be massive. We need to spread the good gospel of SCOUTED to ensure we can be around to deliver our plans for this summer.

And, of course, our plans beyond the summer. There’s so much I can’t tell you - big things are in the works, for the future of the team and the business. But for the next few months my focus is entirely on ensuring we become the best football newsletter/magazine/publication thing around, so those who spend their hard-earned money with us always feel glad they did.

We gotta make it to August, guys. August will be our ten year anniversary. Ten years of arguing with Stephen, mispronouncing Llew’s name and profiling obscure footballers. I was a teenager when we started, now I’m nearing retirement. Crazy.

Tales from HQ

Before I go, here’s what the team’s been up to this month:

Bestsellers, baby

Substack were kind enough to invite us to an event in Shoreditch mid-month. Joseph and I attended alongside the legendary Ali and George from NTT20. We drank wine then watched Arsenal get knocked out of Europe. At least half of the evening was fun.

Thanks for reading. I’ll see you again in twelve days to kick off our subscription drive. Your support and readership is, as always, appreciated more than you can imagine.

Yours,

Tom