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Scouting: Anticipating spikes
- Updated: December 20, 2016
When is a player about to get a lot better? What clues can we spot? In the next part of our Changing Face of Scouting series, with clubs lining up January transfer targets, experienced scout Rob Mackenzie talks us through the importance of recognising when a player is going to enjoy a significant spike in performance…
Football is full of those success stories. The tales of the player whose career was meandering only to spark into life. Or the youngster who’d shown vast potential but had yet to prove he could harness that talent and turn it into performances.
In some cases, it’s a highly-rated superstar who has gone supernova. Think Cristiano Ronaldo scoring as many Premier League goals in his fifth season at Manchester United as he’d managed in the previous three put together.
Other times, it’s the journeyman who few had expected could rise to the top. Jamie Vardy had scored goals at every level he’d played but where were the clues that he could score the 24 goals that fired Leicester to the title having netted only five times in the season before?
Either way, football scouts all around the world have become used to those all too familiar questions that are directed their way from above. Why didn’t you spot him? And if we couldn’t get him, then how do we find the next one?
Of course, there’s a difference between a spike in performance that’s sustainable and a flare up in form. Caution is necessary. But there are always lessons for scouts to learn and working out which scenario is being played out is a big part of the battle for any scout.
“Players are typically highlighted as a result of a scout having seen them play well live or through the various processes that are now implemented within clubs’ training grounds,” Rob Mackenzie explains to Sky Sports.
“Sometimes that is the easy part, the difficult part is gaining an understanding of what that player’s usual performance level is and how suitable they are for what you are trying to achieve as a team and as a club.
“To build the most accurate picture of this, clubs tend to monitor the performance levels of a number of highlighted players over a significant period of time. They will do this through sending scouts to watch the player live, and the more forward thinking clubs will also monitor players’ performance data over time to see if there are any significant …
