Interesting article in todays Times. I wonder if Charlton (or the Network) use this tool.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=xUI-pqYmjqQRory Smith views the new way that teams are doing homework on potential signings, as they use technology developed by Prozone to scout their players
Anyone who has given over part of their life to Football Manager’s narcotic charms will recognise the scene: a dimly lit room, illuminated only by the glare of a computer screen. A screed of figures, statistics, rankings, all of them meaningless to the untrained eye, being pored over endlessly in the hope of finding that one perfect player, the piece that would make the jigsaw complete.
This, though, is not a game. With fewer than three weeks until transfer deadline day, this is the scenario being played out in the offices of a host of the Barclays Premier League’s most powerful clubs. It may look like Football Manager — and it may lean on it for a lot of its data — but this is for real. This is Recruiter, the programme starting to change the face of the transfer market.
Developed by Prozone, football’s premier data analysts, and supported by Sports Interactive, the company that developed the game it resembles, Recruiter has attracted so much interest that it is already being used by the scouting departments at more than 20 clubs, across England’s top three tiers and into Europe, despite it not yet officially being out of its final testing phase. TheTimes is the first media outlet to be afforded a glimpse of its undoubted power.
The level of detail it contains is extraordinary. Recruiter boasts video footage of every game played by every club in 35 of the world’s best leagues; there is partial coverage of 40 more competitions, too. More than 2,500 individual actions in each of those matches are coded, every single touch of the ball. Then there are the details — contractual, physical, personal — of more than 250,000 players. Every individual is assessed according to 400 separate criteria.
It is not just how intricate it is that marks Recruiter out as different, though. It is also its accessibility. The statistics it contains are drawn from real life games, but also from the data supplied by Sports Interactive. Over the past two decades, the team behind Football Manager have built up an army of 1,300 scouts across the world. Their database is regarded as the most extensive in football, stretching to 584,000 players. Recruiter allows Prozone, and its client clubs, to benefit from that crowd-sourced wisdom.
And, just as importantly, to do so with relative ease. It works like this: let’s say Arsenal, as was the case this summer, are after a right back. They can search the vast database by age, by ability, by certain strengths. They can see how players rank in comparison to their peers. They can even plot a search to find players who have the same strengths as Bacary Sagna. They can whittle down a quarter of a million players, and find exactly what they want.
“There are four stages of scouting,” Jens Melvang, Prozone’s head of product strategy, says. “The scanning phase: looking around for players. What they call visualisation, where they go and see them. Then monitoring — watching those of interest over a long period of time — and finally in-depth, where they begin to assess how they would fit in.”
As Jordan Garbutt, Prozone’s UK general manager, says, the last two of those will always rely on the expertise of professional scouts. It is in the first phase that Recruiter is a game-changer.
“It does not remove that human element,” Garbutt says. “But it saves time and it saves cost. It pinpoints the process. It is part of the due diligence.
“Big clubs will actively consider 50 or 60, and they will look at maybe 20 in depth, but they probably have only a pool of 200 that they can be aware of at any one time.
“Now the visualisation stage consists of 250,000 players. It is a constant check on who’s around. We are not going to tell teams who to sign, but we can help with the filtering process, and we can make sure they have not missed anyone.” It removes the need, in other words, for clubs desperate for a right back — say — to listen to the snake-oil sales pitch of agents desperate to pitch their client, or to spend a fortune sending scouts out on fishing trips, conducted more in hope than expectation. In their stead comes a dash of science.
To some extent, Recruiter is a natural progression in the story of football, slowly, surely, embracing technology, of how it is changing in an ultra-competitive world, becoming truly global. But there is another story here, too, about the engines that have helped to drive that change. It is a story about how games such as Football Manager, as Miles Jacobson, Sports Interactive’s director, says, have gone from “being a computer game about football to being part of the game itself, part of the landscape”.
“We’ve always had clubs getting in touch,” he says. “I remember Ray Houghton, when he was at Crystal Palace, would call us and say they were looking for a centre back, and if there was anyone we could recommend.
“That still happens: managers calling up when they are about to spend an awful lot of money on a player, wanting to know what our scouts think of that player.”
That link, though, is no longer surreptitious. There are countless high-profile professionals who play the game; David Moyes, while at Everton, was one of many managers who consulted its database as part of his scouting. It is easy to scoff at their enthusiasm for this mere game — Moyes’s support is probably no longer the endorsement it was — but that view is, perhaps, both a little outdated and a little disrespectful.
“We started out with a scout at every club,” Jacobson says. “We started with fanzine editors, but now we have about 1,300 scouts around the world, some fans, but some employed within clubs. It is a crowd-sourced database.”
The view that the game has a habit of over-promoting certain prodigies — the name of Cherno Samba, here, races to mind — is one that he rejects. “They’re legends to fans of the game, but to me they’re failures,” he says. “But we only have, what, 20 or 30 a year, out of hundreds of thousands. We get the majority right.” Those involved in the game have long noted that. “There are at least two scouts at Champions League clubs who started out with us.”
Things have come full circle. Games set out to mirror football. Now football is starting to try to mirror the games. 
Comments
But with all seriousness aside, it's been kind of an open secret that the Football Manager database is referred to by scouts for years now so no surprise that a digital solution to scouting is being developed by the same team that makes the game.
It is amazing that I only heard of our interest in Yannis Salibur on Saturday night but immediately I was able to form an opinion of what sort of player he is and the fact he is left footed.
That said , I hope the old traditional scout is not lost completely . I recently read Michael Calvin's book the Nowhere Men http://www.amazon.co.uk/Nowhere-Men-Michael-Calvin/dp/0099580268/ref=la_B0044DJ7UI_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1407759367&sr=1-2 . It is illuminating about the old fashioned football scout and the battle they are having to survive . These guys are only paid peanuts and they almost rely on favours from each other to survive to compete with what is being discussed here.
There are quite a few Charlton references in the book . Phil Chappell (sic) gets mentioned a few times ,he is described as 'organised' and Charlton were felt to be on the way back when this was written during our promotion season . He even gives work to one of Calvin's subjects Roger Smith the father of former Stevenage manager Gary following his dismissal from Cardiff.
Steve Gritt also features on the circuit and when AFC Bournemouth dispense with his services and he gets work with Birmingham . Calvin also follows a Sheffield United scout Welling resident Steve Jones who was on a wage of 40p a mile for a less than 10 mile journey to our game at home to Colchester when we lost in the promotion season. Calvin shows his report of the Colchester team as the Blades were due to play them soon afterwards.
Pardew is a step ahead and just uses youtube.