The goal of this research was to study the football player scouting process and better understand both scouts and players needs and desires.

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A football scout attends football matches on the behalf of clubs or independently to collect intelligence. Primarily, there are two types of scouts: player scouts and tactical scouts.

Player scouts or physical scouts evaluate the talent of footballers with a view to signing them on a professional contract for their employers. Some scouts focus on discovering promising young players and future stars, others are employed to run the rule on potential signings. While smaller clubs might only scout within their own country or region, larger, richer clubs can have extensive international scouting networks.

However, relatively few football scouts are employed full-time, even in the largest professional clubs. By and large, their numbers are made up by talent scouts, the vast majority of which work part-time, and a club may hire several hundred - it has been reported, for example, that the Spanish Primera Liga team Sevilla FC has a global scouting network of about 700 player scouts.
Not all scouts are actually employed by football clubs. A player scout is looking specifically for young footballing talent, with the purpose of helping them to sign a contract with the football club in which they are representing. A contract in the eyes of the scout will be either to join the youth academy after a successful trial, or even to join the youth squad or first team itself.

A player scout will look to:

- Discover future stars. This can earn the most money for the scout since the higher the level a discovered player reaches, the higher the pay-out for the scout.
- Find potential signings. This pays less, but enables a scout to get paid from a number of different players. In this case, a scout may already know that an academy is lacking certain positions, and therefore will look for local talent playing in those positions and push them through even if they aren’t ‘stars’, since the opportunity is still there and the club needs to fill all positions.

Where Will Football Scouts Be Looking?

Small clubs generally use scouts in their local areas due to budgets, but large mega clubs like Manchester City and Arsenal will use scouts from all over the world. The bigger the network of scouts that the football club operates with, the more chance they have of finding talent before their competitors.

A football scout will be looking in obvious and less obvious places, and often turn up unannounced to places where matches or training session are being held:

- School sports teams
- Local football tournaments
- Local parks and recreational facilities
- Local football clubs
- By attending as many football games as possible
- Attending lower-league club games to compare young talent to older peers
- Under-16, 18 and 21 international tournaments
- Tip offs from teachers, agents, peers and club colleagues
- Youtube, where young talent upload their videos directly, in hope of being spotted