Why do scouts come to football trials?
It is not easy to answer these questions specifically, but it might help if we explained a bit about the role scouts play at our trials, and why they attend in the first place. Every professional and semi professional club has a number of full or part time scouts. Whether the scouts are full or part time, and how many there are, depends on the size of the club. Obviously, the bigger the club, the more scouts they can afford to employ. A proportion of these scouts will be looking to find the best young local players. A lot of them work off ‘spotters’, who aren’t official club scouts, but will recommend certain players. The scouts will go and look at the player, and if he is good enough the player might get scouted. Don’t forget all the best recruitment departments have a huge range of contacts within the game. The club will be able to tap into these contacts, and ask them about promising young players. The contacts will try and recommend the right player to the right football club.
All these recruitment departments are getting bigger, because finding these talented young players is becoming such a competitive environment. It is far more competitive now than it was even ten years ago. Recruitment departments are now much more highly valued by clubs because of their ability to get the best young players into their football club.
Once they are in the academy system, they get absolutely top-class coaching, and it is not uncommon for a core group of players in a particular age group to stay together in a club through the academy system from the age of nine or ten all the way through to scholarship age, which is fifteen or sixteen.
This is the way some young players may be scouted from grass roots football. But this is all very hit and miss. The scout may have been told they need to find a 12 year old with pace who plays on the wing, If you are a great 12 year old Goalkeeper, that scout may possibly be at your game, but he won’t be looking to scout you.
That is where the advantage of attending a UK Football trial comes in. Over the years we have got to know a large number of trusted scouts from very many clubs from all over the country. They come to our trials and have an open mind about what they are going to see. After all, the players at our trials range from 8 to 24 years old. But very often a player will stand out to them, and they look at their sheet and from the bib number they know the players name and date of birth, a great start.
They then request full details from us, and we leave it to the scout to contact the player and his parents. Over the past few years, as many as 1 in 7 players who attend our trials have had details requested by our scouts. That does not mean they will all necessarily get a trial at a club, but that player is now on the scout’s radar and very often this does indeed result in an introduction to a club.
The bottom line is ”Does the UK Football Trials scouting system work?” The answer is plain for all to see. We have literally hundreds of what we call Success Stories on our website. Why not check them out? The next success story could be you!