The FA’s drive to professionalise scouting can curtail the terrible waste of talent in the game - Glenn Moore

The Weekend Dossier

Flat cap, definitely a cap, old, or at least he seemed it to us, and alone, always alone. These days dark suspicions would be aroused by a solitary middle-aged man watching a boys’ football match, but in those innocent times he could only be one thing: a scout.

Being spotted by a club scout was an obsession then for schoolboy footballers, and still is now, though with clubs scouting players at six, and signing them to academies at eight, the boys start dreaming much younger. Arguably too young, for them and the clubs.

For decades a club could not gain access to schoolboy players until they were 14, prior to that their footballing abilities belonged to the school, district and England schools teams. In 1984 clubs gained permission to coach nine to 14-year-olds one evening a week at centres of excellence. Seven years later the time restriction was eased. Regular overhauls of coach education and youth development mean an academy player should now be better trained than any of his forbears.

And yet young English players are still not being produced in sufficient numbers, so attention has turned to recruitment. While the better-organised clubs have the names of precocious local eight-year-olds on computer, there is not the data to operate a Moneyball-style system. As Michael Calvin’s The Nowhere Men illustrated, talent spotting remains an industry that relies on a network of often unpaid scouts scouring windswept playing fields.

As the players being scouted have become younger, and the competition for first-team places has gone international, success rates have declined. James Bunce, the Premier League’s head of sport science, has revealed a player taken on by an academy at eight has a 200-1 chance of making the first team. He added: “Football still doesn’t know a lot about what it takes to become a top player.”

Such wastage is bad for the clubs, and even worse for the kids and their families, who have often made a huge investment in time and emotion. Unforgivably the majority of players who do not make it drift away from the game completely.

But football is not like rowing, in which Helen Glover could progress in four years, albeit by dint of working tremendously hard, from non-rower to Olympic gold. Football is a complex sport requiring technical ability, physical bravery and spatial awareness. Then there are the psychological aspects of surviving in a highly competitive, insecure environment. Assessing whether an eight-year-old can make that journey requires more than the ability to spot a good player. Unfortunately due to football’s incestuous nature, and miserly pay, those doing the talent spotting are not often best equipped to do so.

In an attempt to improve success rates, the Football Association has teamed up with the professional game to develop courses in talent identification. This week Nick Levett, the FA’s talent identification manager, delivered a seminar to members of the Surrey Football Coaches Association at, appropriately, Fulham’s academy.

Levett began by describing what talent identification was, then debunked myths such as the “10,000 hours rule”, as popularised by Malcolm Gladwell (which, was used to support the controversial Elite Player Performance Plan in 2011). This is now seen as misguided when it comes to football, with Levett quoting research done with Bundesliga players to prove it.

He moved on to emphasise the variety of factors that contribute to players’ development, such as home and educational environments, the quality and nature of their sporting activity and coaching, plus luck. Case studies with young England players highlighted the fact that every player has an individual pathway. Some have the support and security of a settled family background, others come from single-parent homes in which they were latchkey kids. Some benefit from consistency and excellence in their coaches, others needed parents to found teams for them to play in. As for luck, Nathaniel Chalobah did not play an organised match until aged nine, then he did so by chance and was instantly signed by Fulham, later joining Chelsea.

What linked these boys was attitude; they were fiercely competitive and determined to make it. Most also played street or cage football, as well as organised matches.

Levett pointed out that talent ID spotters need to be open-minded. One scout has admitted he overlooked Stan Collymore as a teenager because his behaviour on the pitch did not conform with the scout’s attitudes. Young players change physically – and we need to be aware of relative age bias (which benefits kids born September-December) and the less well-known bias of biological age (the speed at which players mature). Most of all, he stressed, players must have their talent underpinned by the ability to learn, to cope with setbacks, and to adapt to changed circumstances.

Then we watched youngsters with Fulham’s community programme being coached. Beforehand we were told to pick a player to focus on and study aspects such as his body language when he lost possession rather than technical qualities.

Afterwards Levett explained the FA’s involvement: “We haven’t had a role in talent ID for 150 years but it is a vital part of what we do in terms of getting players for the national teams. Scouting has been a lonely dark art. There was a guy here who said he scouted for a club and admitted ‘I don’t really know what I am looking for’. We are developing a series of courses we hope will professionalise the industry.”

These go from Level One for grassroots coaches to Level Five for technical directors. Along the way students will be taught the soft skills – observation and communication, building effective relationships, as well as how to assess potential, governance, leadership and negotiation skills.

Levett added: “Scouting can be a closed shop at some places with people giving jobs to mates, partly because there is no pathway. We hope with these qualifications someone can develop a career in talent ID. Clubs are scouting younger and younger. We want to make sure people are looking for the right things like those psychological traits: good learners, kids who can adapt and cope. They are the ones who will make it through the system.”

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@GlennMoore7