Trainer’s Boyfriend or Scouting: Which Path?

• Bass is with

  football editor

How it should go: a Premier League club is selling its striker and has received a list of five possible replacements from scouting. Those five players were meticulously scouted for months, via video footage and in real life. The technical director goes down the list and selects a growth brilliant.

How it often actually goes: scouting provides five well-considered options. But a day before deadline day, the technical director receives a call from someone in his network. The scouting list goes through the paper shredder and the ‘great opportunity’ is achieved.

It’s today deadline day for the eighteen clubs in the Dutch premier league. And on few days are the relationships between technical directors and scouts under so much pressure.

“There is an ideal picture of how you bring in a player,” says Sjoerd Ars, Fortuna Sittard’s technical director between 2018 and 2023. “But the transfer market is like a chessboard with moving pieces, a living process. You cannot therefore make a well-defined plan and simply implement it. The force field is too large for that.”

By that force field, Ars mainly means the pressure that comes from within and without on a football club. A series of bad results, angry fans in front of the players’ bus, critical pieces in the media: it has more consequences for decisions on the transfer market than people often think.

And then as a technical director you also have to deal with a trainer. “There are those who just really like to work with people they know. You also have to find a balance between give and take. Sometimes you want to please a trainer and afterwards you choose the wrong players.”

“If player A and player B are approximately equally good and the coach insists on player B, then you sometimes get B. Because if you are unlucky and you don’t listen, the coach won’t draft your player anyway. That can go very wrong and you can break things off very quickly. You saw that happen at Ajax between Sven Mislintat and Maurice Steijn.”

In the chaotic final phase of the transfer period, things often go the wrong way for scouts. Some top scouts don’t leave it at that and, after a ‘no’ from the technical director, turn to another director to get their player through.

Marcel Bout, now chief scout at Newcastle United and previously employed at Manchester United and Feyenoord, among others, opts for a different approach. “I am now so experienced that I start looking for the next player. But I am 63. When you are 33, I can imagine that you will lose your control at some point.”

According to Bout, as a scout you should not overestimate your own role. “You are a reporter, the left winger who gives a striker a cross. The decision ultimately rests with the director. You have to get involved with players early, write a great analysis and then ensure that that cross arrives: spit on the technical director and ensure that you and your player remain on the radar.”

Scouts used to have a lot more influence. “When I was a scout at Feyenoord and I wanted to get Paul Bosvelt, I called our trainer Arie Haan. He took a look and then we brought him in. Now there are many more people involved in that process. And the more opinions, the longer it takes and the greater the chance you have of catching a player behind the net.”

Ars also sometimes clashed with scouting. “Then you have to have a conversation and substantiate your choice as best as possible. Scouts do not always have a good understanding of what else is going on in the club. If you explain everything well and have done expectation management in advance, everything usually turns out fine.”

And sometimes there is also understanding if, as a technical director, you opt for such a golden opportunity. “When we signed Burak Yilmaz (via the chairman of Fortuna, ed.) from Fortuna Sittard, I obviously did not have to ask the scouting whether he can play football well. Then the five options that had been looked at for six months were also eliminated at once.