What's up?

Volume I in print, Volume II, and more updates

Tom Curren

19 Mar 2026 — 7 min read

Dear readers,

How we feeling? It's been a while. We have so much to tell you. Stuff has happened, is happening, will happen. Volume I. has been out more than a month, can you believe it. We promised a slower, more intentional future for SCOUTED, and we're certainly delivering on the 'slow' bit. We hope you've enjoyed digging into the longer, deeper writing we've done so far this year, without our spamming your inboxes in the space between. Feels pretty good to me.

If you haven't read Volume I. yet, it's yours to download and keep, or to read online at your leisure. If you haven't signed up to read yet, get stuck in! You can still get a whopping 60% your first month. In the meantime, here's everything we've been working on.

In this Editorial Update:

SCOUTED in print? (Yes, really)
Our plans for Volume II
A big decision on our future

Before we get into the news and updates, I want to take a moment to reflect on what we've learned from the early months of this year. The short answer is this: Volumes, so far, are a success. We were not betting on the switch to magazines to instantly deliver us fame and riches but we were hoping they would allow us to deliver better, more intentional work while holding a solid floor. So far, so good.

I'm happy to say SCOUTED has more paid subscribers today than at any point before Volume I's release. The numbers aren't huge, but they're enough for now, and they're holding very strong. So before we get any further I'd just like to say an enormous thank you if you're among our paid subscribers, and especially if you held your subscription as we made the transition. Your faith in us has allowed us to take a big swing, and that swing has made us happier and healthier. We have the room now to pursue new things, crucial things, which I'll detail in brief below. For now, thank you so much. We hope to repay you with every release.

Mini-update 1: the Podcast is back!

It's true! We did this quietly and without fanfare, but the podcast has returned. It's an hour-long conversation Jake and I had on his new Archetype, the Berserker, designed to act as a Director's Commentary for the written piece. Every Volume release will have at least one attached conversation like this, and we hope to do more than that. You can find it wherever you care to. Let us know what you think!

Mini-update 2: an editor on stage for some reason

A quick note to any Arsenal fans: the editor of this publication (i.e. me, Tom Curren), will be speaking on a panel at the British Library this month as a part of the Football Writing Festival: Arsenal Special. He'll be appearing alongside Clive Palmer (ArsenalVision) and Ed Fenwick and Max Giles (Eighteen86), while the festival itself features names like Amy Lawrence, Martin Keown, Nick Hornby and more. The full program and tickets can be found here.

Update 1: Volume I in print

No, this is not a hoax: Volume I has been printed, for real. I'm looking at a copy right now. I can touch it if I want. There. I just did.

Jake and myself were invited to Paris last week to attend the new HQ of our wonderful data partners, SkillCorner, alongside a host of Premier League and Bundesliga analysts and data scientists. For the event, we designed and printed a handful of limited edition copies of Volume I, including an amended version of one our recent data essays. It was incredibly cool to see our work in people's hands again, and we got a bunch of great reactions.

I'm not just cruelly dangling this out of your reach: I smuggled fifty copies home with me from France. I would love to find a way to offer these to you, our subscribers. So: if you're interested in purchasing a printed copy of Volume I, please let us know in the comments below. I'd like to make this happen before the release of Volume II.

The tentative long-term plan is to to make a very limited number of printed copies available for each release. We need to run some serious hard numbers before we commit to this - running small batches is a money, time and resource sink, and can quickly creep beyond just a 'nice thing to do' and into 'holy shit, I'm a full-time postman with no time to do anything else and I'm losing money and sanity like it's a professional sport'. Still, it'd be cool!

We'll have more details to share in the coming weeks, once we've properly gauged interest. Let us know what you think and stay tuned!

Update 2: Volume II

Volume II is well underway. We learned a lot from the process of writing and designing Volume I, and have emerged with tighter, faster workflows that will allow us to keep curating original little magazines on a regular cadence while also doing the work to keep our business growing towards sustainability. Things are good.

Volume II is lightly themed around 'the future of midfield,' which is all I'll say for now. We landed on this theme for a Very Specific Reason, which is incredibly exciting, and we're doing our best to keep under wraps (some of you are way too good at guessing our surprises, so that's all you get).

This Very Specific Reason, however, comes with its own Very Specific Challenges, chief among which is that Volume II now requires sign-off from several third parties. These third parties are about to go on a significant break, which happens to coincide with our planned release date. This is a long way of saying we cannot get sign-off as we'd hoped, and probably need to delay Volume II by a week or two.

We'll of course share more information when we're able, including a final release date and cover reveal. For now, thanks for your patience. Holding this work until we're ready only makes it better, and we're so grateful you're sticking around.

Update 3: A new future

With all the time we've saved doing meaningful long-form work rather than spamming inboxes, we've done a lot of thinking about the long-term future of this business, and what shape that might take. I'm burying this weighty information this far down because we're not ready to talk publicly in much detail yet, but it's only fair our dedicated readers know the shape of our intentions.

SCOUTED has always straddled the line between trade magazine and entertainment product; the scouting and analysis team here generate an extraordinary quantity of insight every month, and then shave bits off the top for readers at £5 a month, often much lower. Many of those readers are working professionals at clubs, agencies and federations, and we know our work is applied regularly to live, high-stakes football work, because we're told so. We don't want to raise our prices and damage our casual readers, but we can't keep going this way, either - we are simply running out of road. So, we've decided to make capturing our value to the industry a key part of our future.

Here's the headline: alongside continuing Volumes as an entertainment product, SCOUTED are concurrently building an editorial product designed for live scouting and recruitment work.

Working with a handful of clubs and partners, we've designed a player discovery and intelligence product to help clubs and agencies widen the breadth and depth of their scouting without compromising on quality and address several pain points we've learned from our industry readers. It's intended as an additional scouting input to spot new players, a filter and validation tool for existing internal workflows, and a means of easily communicating insights between departments and teams. It's built with a blend of cutting-edge data scouting, led by Jake Entwistle, and the classic eye-test scouting approaches of Llew Davies. It takes every insight, system and process SCOUTED has developed over a decade of industry-leading research and analysis and puts them directly in the hands of clubs in as simple a form as possible - no long-form narratives or storytelling, just useful and digestible insights.

This product is absolutely not designed for our casual readership, and we won't mention it here often except to point any new industry readers towards it. We're still deep in R&D, but a pilot will be rolling out to a select number of clubs in the coming months.

If you'd like to be among them - and learn more about how what we're building, and how it could help your club or agency - please reach out to Jake, the project lead, directly.

PROJECT ENQUIRIES: jake@scoutedftbl.com

And to those worrying this might effect our editorial output here: fear not! This split has actually freed me up to do much more intentional and deep work on the magazine. Stabilising the business financially is our priority and will mean better, more consistent magazines to enjoy every year, and more resources to build them with.

Thanks for your time! There's a lot going on here, and we're trying to juggle a bunch of things, as we know you are too. Life, eh!

The world is crazy. Stuff moves so fast, and each disaster feels only a precursor to the next. We hope you find some small relief in sitting down for an hour with a nerdy football magazine - it's certainly a relief to write them.

Speak soon,

Tom