Five ways to exercise a scout's analytical power

Practice and experience are essential in scouting when it comes to obtaining more accurately and easily the precise data of a footballer being evaluated. To do this, we address some exercises that can serve to train the mind and the eye.

Training the eye when analyzing the activity of a footballer on the field never stops being important. When a scout is temporarily away from work or intends to improve his work techniques, there are some basic exercises that can serve as support to sharpen the analytical power.

1. GENERAL VISUALIZATION

This consists of observing a game taking particular notes of all the players in each of the aspects of the game. This not only allows you to work on the speed of analysis and the global view of the game, but also develops techniques for identifying players through physical details, their clothing, their movements and, obviously, their number.

This exercise is done on video. The possibility of pausing, rewinding or advancing provides flexibility to the work. With time and training, the length of the analysis time will be reduced, in direct relation to the ease that practice will provide when detecting technical, tactical, physical and attitudinal details of the footballers.

2. INDIVIDUAL VISUALIZATION

This exercise involves the permanent monitoring of a player during a match, trying to take note of all the actions of the footballer, with and without the ball. This training attempts to distance the analyst from the overall game and the movement of the ball to focus exclusively on the actions of the selected athlete.

The analysis can be carried out both on video and in the stadium, taking into account the permanent data collection of the footballer's actions in the four aspects of analysis (technical, tactical, physical and attitudinal). The difficulty of this exercise consists in centralizing the analysis on a single player, paying secondary attention to the movement of the ball when it moves away from its sector in order to observe what our object of analysis does when it does not actively participate in the game.

3. SEARCHING FOR DETAILS IN A PLAY

The level of depth of analysis is directly related to the detection of details in all aspects. In this sense, training consists of observing a play five times, trying to find in each repetition new technical, tactical, physical and attitudinal notes that the footballers involved express in the action.

This exercise focuses on the sharpness of the scout's eye. The idea is to reach the deepest point of analysis possible. While seeking this analytical depth, the scout will also be able to understand how he has arrived at this data and will be able to detect the details in each aspect. The repetition of the experience will allow the analysis to be accelerated, based on a greater mental speed to understand how the information is obtained more easily.

4. VISUALIZATION OF DIFFERENT LEVELS OF PLAY

It is important to exercise the eye through the diversity of styles and levels of play available. The possibility of watching matches from different countries and categories, from television platforms or tools such as Wyscout, allows the type of analysis to become unfamiliar with common game patterns of a single format. In this way, the scout will have an easier time evaluating footballers from different areas without having to suddenly change his attachment to a game style established in a country, region or category.

For this, planning is important, while it is crucial to have time spaces dedicated to carrying out this exercise. Viewing matches from around the world, from different categories and ages, will impose different levels and technical-tactical concepts and can even banish certain prejudices when trying to hire players from regions where football has less historical and popular relevance.

5. EVALUATION ASPECTS

It often happens that scouts have greater difficulties in evaluating certain aspects of analysis within the game, mainly in their first steps in the activity. To try to solve this problem, first of all, it is important to be clear about what each analytical aspect includes. A checklist that determines what is sought to be defined in the technical, tactical, physical and attitudinal aspects is a good starting point as a support when highlighting certain characteristics.

A fairly effective exercise to take notes and to know in depth how to detect everything that each of the four fundamental aspects involves, consists of watching a portion or the entire game, dedicating oneself only to exploring one particular aspect. The decision to leave the other aspects aside, tries to centralize the vision on those points that are most difficult for the scout to detect, so that, through total concentration on one of them, the task of finding them and, mainly, of interpreting at what moments of the game they are most visible is facilitated.

Di Pasqua Nicolas