What Recruitment Teams Are Doing Right Now

Today is a wayback machine post, courtesy of a bunch of saved files I have from a decade ago (March/April 2015) when we were really just getting rolling at Brentford and FC Midtjylland.

The working conditions were incredibly chaotic. The owner and Head Coach + Director of Football had fallen out. Brentford might or might not make the playoffs. Meaning they also might or might not need Premier League-caliber players on a far larger budget… or they might need Championship-quality players on one of the five smallest budgets in the league.

And the PR war between Warburton and Benham was something to behold.

Aside from the Neil Custis air conditioned offices article about Liverpool, this remains one of my favourite pieces of football writing from the pre-Moneyball days. (And Taylor is actually one hell of a writer.)

Imagine someone writing shit like this about Bloom or Benham now!

It took something like six months to get broad data access from Opta at the time, and then a bunch of database, tech, and model work to create the baselines for most player evaluation. Plus endless validation and bug checks to be sure the multi-million pound decisions we were making weren’t the result of AI hallucinations mistakenly calculated metrics.

If it seems prehistoric, that’s because compared to now, it basically was. Expected goals barely existed. StatsBomb data and IQ wouldn’t exist for four more years. Tracking data… bahaha.

Avoiding this whole experience is exactly what we designed StatsBomb to do, letting analysts and recruitment people go from 0 to access to massive amounts of useful data and visualisations in no time at all.

I think we negotiated access to 30 Opta competitions at the time — StatsBomb now cover more than 120 on the men’s side alone. Wyscout are likely a multiple of that. But the world was holding firm to the idea that players that “knew the league” were clearly superior to their foreign counterparts, even when the same quality players were available on huge discounts.

And that young players were definitely less valuable than older ones who had experience. Age curves were essentially unacknowledged outside of maybe five or six teams in the world.

If it is March 3rd and you are really still grinding the scouting options without having a deep database of already scouted and stack-ranked players, you are HORRIBLY behind. As in, your summer will be an absolute shitshow, so good luck to you.

But back then… it was how almost every team outside of Germany still operated. Hilarious inefficiency! By the time I left Brentford a year later, we had basically done all the recruitment work a year ahead of time, which is how I tend to suggest every team operates if they can swing it.

Brentford needed… everything. The team had been promoted from League One a season prior and had some outstanding parts, but players were paid under £8K a week, meaning everyone else could afford to try and poach our best players across the board. Which obviously made it much harder to plan ahead for the squad we would have on September 1st.

Some of the guys who were in the squad were good enough for Premier League teams (James Tarkowski and Andre Gray were the standouts), while the midfield in particular was slow, iffy at passing, and a particularly bad influence on certain young players.

I scouted literally thousands of players in those months, looking for profiles that might be good enough to send along to scouting. It’s a different story, but in the case of Midtjylland, we closely reviewed 100 left backs alone after they won the league and made it into the CL qualification stages.

(Please do not ask me who they lost to — it’s too painful. But that loss resulted in the eventual victory over Manchester United in Denmark, before the Memphis Depay and Marcus Rashford party proved too much at Old Trafford.)

Centre Forwards
In an ideal summer, we would have bought Seb Haller or Mark Uth, and then a 19-year-old kid playing in Germany’s 3. Liga for Cottbus named Tim Kleindienst as a development option.

Haller was on loan at Utrecht from Auxerre at the time, but they exercised his option for €800K just as we were starting to get in touch with the agent. We were willing to double that or more if he was interested in coming to England, but could not get any traction.

Uth ended up with a pretty decent career in the Bundesliga, partly as a striker and later as a 10, which would have been a surprise.

But Kleindienst…

Scouted well and looks good on the Instat data. 194 cm tall and still able to dribble and create occasionally. Quick enough and good enough on the ball that he played a 3rd of the season at right wing. Should be cheap out of Bundesliga 3, so we view him as a very strong talent buy that would also be a 3rd choice forward next season for either club.

Nailed it.

Probably would have cost €500k, but he didn’t want to leave Germany.

There were lots we did not nail. Left Wide Forward was impossibly hard to sign — anyone really fast was too expensive. We had a bunch of guys on the list that did well in their careers including Fullkrug, Vincenzo Grifo, Jacob Murphy, and Karim Onisiwo (remember, this was a decade ago and these guys were babies), but most could only be signed if we were in the Premier League. While players liked London, they were not overly-excited about playing for Little Old Brentford.

Right Wide Forward was just impossibly expensive (I was overly smitten with Steven Berghuis), and Defensive Midfielder was a bit of both. Brentford would actually struggle for many more seasons to find a DM that made the whole operation fly.

I remain proud of our centreback evaluations though, especially given the tools available at the time. Our all-round midfielder evaluations were good and interesting as well. Pascal Groß was number one with a bullet, but would only come to England if we were in the Premier League. Everyone else here we were trying to sign for £1.5M or less. I would heavily downgrade players from Norway in later years, but they also produce world class talent somewhat regularly.

Yes, we wanted young talent, but in some cases we just needed moderate upgrades from older players (Jonathan Douglas, Toumani Diagouraga) that would shore up the leaks and be sold on in a year or two.

Where we ended up was a mixed bag. We definitely could have done better - and would do better our second summer - but given the circumstances, it could have been far worse.

(I’m allegedly pretty smart, but at almost every point in my life I wish I had been smarter and made fewer mistakes. Life is mostly failures and turtles for everyone, all the way down.)

Nearly every player we bought was sold on for a profit, and the few that weren’t either had massive injuries, or played plenty of minutes to justify the purchase before running down their contract and signing again somewhere equivalent or better.

tl;dr — This stuff is really hard on a tiny budget, even when there’s plenty of low-hanging fruit. It takes time, focus, and expertise to get great at it. For doing it on a tight clock for the first time ever, I don’t think it was that bad.

In fact, the work we did in 2015 and 2016 provided many of the building blocks and future player sales to help propel Brentford into the Premier League… eventually.

—TK

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