The pre-technological era, from newspaper clippings to VHS

In the era before scouting became professional, buying and selling players was a much more informal and personal process. Here are a handful of stories, accounts of protagonists and anecdotes from scouts in their time as professional footballers. At a time when there was no Wyscout, web, or email. With a “critical eye” and trust as the only resources.

For Luciano Zavagno, (Lead Latam Scout New York City at City Football Group), “the professionalization of scouting goes hand in hand with technology. Scouting is supported by technological changes that allow obtaining privileged information to cross-reference it with data and provide a network. But before, the situation was different because there was no internet. It was all on VHS,” Lucho Zavagno opens this talk.

It seems obvious to say it, but with the arrival of home videos, coaches could have a first reference of the players to hire. A video had to be made and the video had to travel like a package by mail, or from hand to hand, over long distances, from town to town, from club to club.

Francisco Pancho Ferraro (coach who won the Under-20 World Cup in the Netherlands in 2005, the first tournament that Lionel Messi won with the Argentine national team) received a video when he was managing Belgrano de Córdoba. “I received a cassette. They sent me a video of Guillermo Farré (327 games as a player and two promotions to the first division, as captain and as coach) who at that time was playing for Central Córdoba de Rosario. I saw him, I saw his abilities and he really touched me, he satisfied me and I said yes, let’s look for him and that was how we found him and brought him to Belgrano and he really played very well, it was his place in the world,” says Ferraro. The story goes that his physical trainer, Rubén Olivera, asked a journalist from Rosario for references. Trust in the journalist and Pancho Ferraro's eye for recognizing a player on VHS.

Jonathan Vidallé, Lead Scout for Arsenal FC in America, remembers a video that reached the hands of Inter Milan president Massimo Moratti. “Players were sold via video, contacts that agents generated with some sporting directors, or they had brought a recommended player and it went well. “When I was at Inter, I went to some trials and it was the time when the Uruguayan Álvaro Chino Recoba was there. They told me how they hired him. Chino Recoba was bought by President Moratti after seeing a video. And he liked him so much that he bought him directly, without consulting the sporting director, it was that simple,” Vidalle is still surprised with ten years of experience managing scouts from all over America for the London club.

The VHS showed images of a player, it could be an entire match, a compilation of goals in the case of a goal scorer, but there was no uniformity of criteria when it came to putting together the video. In some cases the production and the script were authored. “I made my own videos at Unión de Santa Fe. I was 17 years old, I watched the matches, I wrote down the times of the actions I wanted to include,” describes Luciano Zavagno. “I got a comprehensive idea of ​​the video and then I went with all the material to an editor. I tried to have my game represented in a video but then that video was offered by an agent and that modified things a bit, the agent gave his imprint to the thing. I remember that I arrived at Racing de Strasbourg in France with 8 goals but I only had 1,” the person in charge of scouting for the City Football Group in America recreates the situation amusingly.

Going further back in time, José Toti Iglesias (206 goals, with spells at San Lorenzo, Racing, Huracan, Estudiantes, Junior, Valencia, among other teams) remembers a more peculiar method for selling players. The collection of clippings. “The relatives, my wife in general, would cut out my notes or interviews, which appeared in newspapers and specialized magazines, Goles, El Gráfico, Clarín newspaper, everything that came out and they would stick it in a folder. And thanks to this collection of clippings I came to Barcelona Athletic when I was 19 years old. José María Minguella, who years later had to do with the negotiation of Diego Maradona, took me thanks to my collection of clippings, I insist, nobody saw me play. The coach Laureano Ruiz told me that he didn’t know me, that they only showed him a folder with photos of me scoring goals. I had already traveled, I was there, it seems incredible,” says Toti Iglesias, still moved.

Other times, as always, you had to be in the right place at the right time, because surely the conditions and luck enhance everything and are timeless. Matías Córdoba (he played for Argentinos Juniors, and for teams in the United States, Venezuela, Mexico, Chile, Australia, Bolivia, El Salvador, Malaysia and Indonesia) was playing on the Tigre reserve team, a friendly against a team of free players, without a club. “I was in Tigre, playing for the reserves in a friendly against the free players and there was a guy who worked in the MLS who was a fan of Argentinos, he knew me from playing in the lower divisions. We played two games against the free team and in the second game he was with the assistant coach of the first team of Real Salt Lake, because at that time there was no scout. It was not a great game for me, I had not scored any goals. The next day I met with the people of Real Salt Lake and they hired me,” describes Córdoba.

The pre-technological era of scouting may seem far away, but its legacy lives on in the stories and experiences of those who lived through it. And it is precisely this experience that can give a scout the perspective and intuition necessary to discover talent in an increasingly digitalized world. If headline clipping and VHS are part of the evolutionary chain in professional scouting, trust and a “critical eye” are the cornerstone, the method and the way to bring so much information to life.

Ger Gustavo