Your guide to SCOUTED50 2025/26
Explaining our annual list - questions answered, myths busted
Hello again!
It's an honour and a delight and something of a relief to be writing a third SCOUTED50 explainer. Every year I sign off with the hope we'll be back to do this again, and here we are. Existing as an online magazine that only publishes non-clickbait, long-form writing is still very fragile, but we've improved at it in 2025 - this has been our best year yet. So we're still here, and grateful to be.
The first thing to know about SCOUTED50 is, as our existence remains so wobbly, you must pay us to access it. We want to be upfront about that: this is our flagship collection, and the single piece we put the most time into across the year.
Our prices are as low as we can reasonably keep them, and now is the perfect time to grab an annual membership. You'll get an entire season's worth of coverage from Jake, Llew and myself, ensuring you stay ahead of the game from now until the leagues are settled and next summer's window is done.
You can grab said annual deal for 20% off, and read SCOUTED50 as soon as it drops. If you need more convincing, read on - let's dive into the details.
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What is SCOUTED50?
Simple: SCOUTED50 is our annual list of the fifty talents we're most excited to watch as the new season unfolds.
SCOUTED
We think it differs significantly from other lists of this kind. This is not 'the best U-21 players in the world, ranked' or anything like that. This is not meant to be predictive or prescriptive, but a watchlist: a curated list of recommendations, by the SCOUTED crew, for you.
This year, the list was compiled by our in-house scouting/analysis duo of Jake Entwistle and Llew Davies. Although they followed a set of loose rules, the most crucial criteria was somewhat ethereal: does this player give SCOUTED vibes?
Over ten years, we've developed - and are very proud of - a sense of, for lack of a better word, taste. You can go and ask ChatGPT right now to list you fifty great young players. Anyone could collate a list with Lamine Yamal at the top, or whatever. What we have that nobody else does is the decade Llew has spent sniffing out talent, and Jake's eye for an Archetype. This is the SCOUTED taste, the vibes, and is the number one most important factor we considered when deciding the final list.
You'll notice a bunch of big names missing from the final collection: no Lamine Yamal, no Franco Mastantuono, Ethan Nwaneri, or Willian Estêvão. This is because we never repeat a name between lists. If they appeared last year, or the year before, they're immediately ineligible. Every year we get comments about 'no player X hahaha you're frauds' from people who can't read, so it's worth saying again.
The only other hard rule was that players must be born in 2005 or later. Then there were a number of much looser, more vibey guidelines, which we also put to our voters:
- Which players could secure a surprise spot at the World Cup next summer (à la Theo Walcott, England 2006)?
- Which players could become the a transfer target for the biggest clubs in the world within a season (à la Dean Huijsen, Real Madrid)?
- Which players could become a key member of the senior squad way before their time (à la Lamine Yamal, Barcelona)?
That was it! Nothing too strict.
How does the ranking work?
We rank the players because it's fun (and admittedly a little provocative). Every year we ask a bunch of our friends, colleagues and peers to list their top tens from our curated fifty, and assign each position a number of points (ten for their first pick, nine for second, etc). We total those points and a final order is formed.
I know putting a number next to a name obliterates any sort of nuance, but I'll try to instil some anyway: we don't think ranking the players is good for much but entertainment, and we try not to pretend otherwise. We actively encourage our voters to let their natural biases influence them - if we only asked those who had watched all fifty players extensively to vote, we wouldn't have a very large pool (it would likely be one person: Llew).
I really enjoy seeing how bias influences the final positions; I think it's interesting. For example, two years ago, Evan Ferguson finished above Lamine Yamal, because he'd just, a week before voting, scored a Premier League hat-trick. That's fine! The pursuit of objectivity here is a fool's game.
The final order therefore naturally leans towards those our voters have already caught wind of. Premier League players will probably place higher. We try to offset this slightly by asking as wide a pool of peers to vote as possible, including writers, scouts and analysts with all sorts of expertise. But it's certainly not a perfect science, and the final order should not be taken too seriously. Have fun! Argue! Call us (polite) names!
Who voted?
This year we tried to cast our net further, and ask a broader spectrum of our peers to get involved than before. The only prerequisites for being asked were as follows:
- Be a nice person (non-negotiable)
- Be a friend of SCOUTED, either by working with us previously or supporting our work
- Be reasonably smart at scouting & analysis
- Reply to our DMs!!
We probably forgot some people, and for that we profoundly apologise. Organising all this is hard!
This year, our voters were as follows:
- Llew Davies (SCOUTED)
- Jake Entwistle (SCOUTED)
- Phil Costa (SCOUTED, FootballVision Podcast)
- Ashwin Raman (SCOUTED, RIP)
- Joe Donnohue (FourFourTwo)
- Ali Maxwell (NTT20)
- Jon Mackenzie (The Athletic)
- Billy Carpenter (
Edu'sBilly's BBQ) - Adam Clery (The Independent, ACFC on YouTube)
- Mark White (FourFourTwo)
- Alex Collings (PotShot Pod)
- Ryo Nakagawara (Shogun Soccer)
- Tom Maston (Goal)
- Kristijan Plazonja (SerbFootyScout)
- Mohamed Mohamed
- Danny Corcoran
- João Miguel
- Jake W. Fox (PotShot Pod)
- Neel Shelat
- The Danish Scout
- Seb Hutchinson (Sky Sports)
- Kees van Hemmen (Devils in the Details)
- Statman Dave
- Alexander Barker (The Athletic)
- Jamie Kemp (Opta, La Pausa)
- Ninad Barbadikar (Bundesliga)
- Bence Bocsák
- Alex Stewart (Analytics FC)
- Nathan Clark (The Extra Inch)
- Spencer Mossman
- The Football Economist
- H (@htomufc, The Overlap Breakdown)
- David Cartlidge (ESPN)
- Nicolas Achabal (Pitchside Analysis)
- @saundzo
Corr, what a bunch. Thanks so much to everyone who took the time to put a list together this year - we're very grateful.
If any readers take issue with the order of the final list, can you complain to one of these chaps please, and not this editor. I literally just work here.
If you've read this far, here's a treat - we're delighted to say SCOUTED50 will be published tomorrow, October 1st. How's that for timing?
We'll see you then.
Tom, Jake & Llew
