Iceman10
Established Member
Probably shouldn’t be seen as a u-turn, instead part of an overall plan (scouting). I did see some reasoning behind a need to freshen things up from Cagigao et al.
He was probably busy down the local Tesco. #FlashersParadise
Man tits out screaming about Willian, scaring the kids and women.He was probably busy down the local Tesco. #FlashersParadise
I've been reading up so many articles trying to form a picture of what the Arsenal scouting network looked like and why they are making wholesale changes now.
Basically Wenger got Arsenal to invest in their scouting network with the idea of spotting talented players early. It was called the Global Scouting System. This was created in the very early days of the Wenger era with Steve Rowley and Dave Holden overlooking the entire scouting network. According to a 2008 Bleachers Report Article and 2013 Bangladesh fan blog our scouts were:
12 UK based scouts - names unknown
Bobby Bennett - Scandanavia (2013 added Balkans)
Francis Cagigao - Spain and Portugal
Gilles Grimandi - France and Switzerland (2013 added Israel & Africa)
Jurgen Kost - Germany, Czech Republic (2013 added Austria)
Tony Banfield - Italy, Slovenia and Croatia
Peter Clarke - Holland
Danny Karbassiyoon - North America & Mexico
Sandro Orlandelli - South America
Pablo Budner - South America
Everton Gushiken - South America
Basically these scouts were all responsible for their own countries and to build up a big network of contacts. They meet players, coaches, other freelance scouts, resulting in tip offs and they then go and watch, and then report back to the head scout via their database and that info is relayed to Wenger and eventually forming their transfer policy.
Tony Banfield said:
'Scouts are headhunters looking for players who are better than those we have. At the end of each year our aim is to upgrade the playing performance of the team, physically, tactically and technically.
Despite the number of scouts on our payroll in 2015 it was revealed many of our scouts were on very low wages, many of them on less than £21k a year. The scouting network was highly efficient, very affordable and saved Arsenal millions of pounds in transfer fees. What's not to like? It enabled us to sign cheap talent and selling them on for a profit, something we did quite well at once upon a time.
It was humming along relatively smoothly unearthing the odd gem here and there, until 2014 when Wenger recognised the need to incorporate stats within their scouting and as a result acquired StatDNA. This was typically forward thinking of Wenger and since he was responsible for building our scouting network he was perfectly within his rights seeking to modernise it. Unfortunately for him and the scouting network this was the beginning of the end.
The scouting network was getting old, very bloated and very ingrained with a very traditional scouting mindset. They became very inefficient and begun to fail at identifying the right players. The game has moved on and required more modern solutions. It appears Wenger unsuccessfully tried to incorporate StatDNA within the scouting network and eventually resulted in head scout Steve Rowley leaving the club shortly after the summer of 2017 where we signed Xhaka, Mustafi and Perez.
This resulted in us hiring Sven Mislintat who was supposed to incorporate StatDNA within our scouting but by all accounts he was met with resistance from our scouts and they did not have a good working relationship with each other. Sven went to Raul asking for permission to revamp the scouting network so he could do what he was hired to do. He was turned down. He soon left afterwards and replaced by Cagigao which maintained the status quo of the scouting network.
Raul hired Edu as Director of Football and eventually decided to do what Sven wanted after all and fired nearly all the scouts. Shortly after that Raul was unexpectedly fired for some unrelated reason.
Our scouting network that Wenger worked so hard to build was gone, just like that, but to be fair the scouting network simply stopped working for us for a long time. It was slow moving and inefficient and was identifying the wrong players. It wasn't doing what it was intended to do anymore. It wasn't adapting quickly to new technologies and other methods. Other clubs eventually caught up and was doing much better in identifying and acquiring talent quickly.
Tony Banfield described how he scouted Reyes:
joked regarding Reyes: 'We even watched him in training. How did I do that? With a hat and a moustache. We scouted him for two years, every minute of every game.'
Grimandi said:
We will start at 16 or 17 and then, if necessary, follow them until they are 20... and perhaps one day they will sign.
So by their own admission they scout players for a long time before making their move.
Within the same paragraph:
This attention to detail is confirmed by Banfield's admission, 'only three youngsters have been signed by the club as a result of my own scouting over 11 years, but the potential returns when you get it right justify the work I do.
Putting it that way seems such a poor return for all the work they do. The slowness of their scouting was a big reason for the increased inefficiency of their scouting network. We were missing out on players because we were too slow to make a move. Increased competition due to mega rich owners and big tv contracts changed the game and we found ourselves being priced out and missing out on talented players but that's not the focus of this post, scouting is.
Nowadays we have the internet with many HD recording of matches available with a click of a button paired with the growing use of statistics to help identify players quickly. Other teams were using this avenue whilst we stuck to our traditional scouting methods. Teams eventually bypassed us by identifying and signing talented players much more quickly.
These teams also got smarter with the way they "scout" players by using agents to do their work for them. Why use scouts when agents themselves can go around hoovering up the best talents to sign to their agency. If you had a good relationship with that agent you would suddenly be in a good position to acquire said talent and also receive recommendations of talented players from the agent. Bigger agents actually employ scouts to do their work for them. So why have scouts when you can just simply outsource it? Like I said earlier, the game has moved on and agents are now major players in the football world and Arsenal simply failed to adapt to it. One famous example is Kante. We missed out on him due to our inability to work with agents and he went to Chelsea instead.
This is where contacts/agent based scouting is useful. Not when it is abused to line people's pockets like Raul did. It was conducted dishonestly but when it is conducted honestly it is absolutely a viable method of scouting. This is an area we haven't really tapped into and to be honest it's going to take years for us to cultivate relationships with agents. Right now we don't have a good reputation among agents - we are seen as awkward customers.
So internet, stats and agents changed the scouting game. Other teams took full advantage of this whilst Arsenal fell behind. Right now we're in catch up mode.
Edu falls in the stats and analytics camp. He was quoted saying:
“I don’t want individual people working in one area or for one country. I want a group working together: less people with more responsibilities.”
It won't surprise me if the contacts/agent based scouting Raul did also rubbed off on Edu. He was hired precisely to do this and hopefully he will be able to conduct this with integrity for us.
Edu purview is to try and push us forward, modernising our scouting and player acquisition methods. Granted he's not very experienced but someone gotta have to start somewhere.
It would've been nice to have kept our scouts and retain their vast network of contacts but if they were refusing to move with the times then I understand doing what we did. At least we still have StatDNA to fall back on and the global scouting system which Wenger set up probably had its own software database too which we can continue to use. It's not as if we're starting completely from scratch.
We didn't fire all the scouts, we actually retained some. Tomasz Pasieczny did scouting for us in Eastern Europe and he's still with us. Jonathan Vidalle and Everton Gushiken the scouts for South America is still here. Edu even kept Rodger Smith as Senior video scout (he's old and yet he's still here).
Edu actually made a few scouting moves that probably went under the radar. He promoted Mark Curtis as First Team Scout who has a background in analytics. He promoted Jason Ayto as Recruitment coordinator to work closely with StatDNA. He also has Sarah Rudd, the vice president of StatDNA on his scouting team.
The first stage involved an installation of data-led processes and now they are proceeding to the next stage by looking to hire scouts for UK, France, Spain and Germany. Probably of the analytics kind rather than traditional scouting kind and he's using a head hunting agency to find these people. As long as he finds the right people I don't care how he does it.
Compared to the vast scouting network Wenger built, Edu is building something much smaller and geared towards more modern scouting methods of using the internet, statistics, video and agent relationships. Instead of scouting talents for 2-3 years we will be identifying and targeting players much more quickly and then we can dispatch our small team of scouts to scout the player to verify their information.
I know Edu is not the most popular guy right now but after reading everything and how we're trying to get where we want to be he appears to be making the tough decisions in the attempt to modernise our club. Arteta is doing the same trying to identify and remove problem players and change the culture of the team in the process. Together they're really are trying to turn it around. I don't think firing them is the answer at all and just prolong our problems when instead we should show patience with them,
Apparently there was another major reason for firing all those scouts. Before Wenger was fired he tried to incorporate 'PlayMaker' sensor technology to his scouting methods but it was never followed through. It appears we've now finally got on board with this.
This company had developed a tiny sensor which is attached to a player’s boots and tracks everything the player does. How he moves, how quickly he moves, the power in a shot, how he recovers from a tackle etc.
This system has the benefit not only of telling clubs what the player is doing, but also where improvements can be made. In short you take a player whose videoed performances look promising, and then make that player an even better player by analysing every little area where he can improve.
It appears Arsenal are now combining it with their highly sophisticated computer monitoring system of young players from around the world.
In stage 1 the player is identified in a video. In stage 2 the club to whom the player is attached is asked if they will permit the player to wear the new PlayerMaker tracker. If not, Arsenal walk away. If yes, they get the data. If the data is good, Arsenal bring the player over for a trial. The need for all those scouts is thus reduced hence the redundancies. They have just found a faster, more efficient, and cheaper way of seeing just how good prospective young players are.
It's no secret our recruitment of late has left a lot to be desired, but some questions really need to be asked about the implications of the removal of a proper scouting system,
Like how does our recruitment work now
?
Do we just take recommendations of a friend of a friend ?
Was this just to save money or did they think this was the best way to grow ?
This thread is inspired by our recent speculated transfer activity, any insight would be great from some of the more tenured posters...