How do football clubs find players?
It depends entirely on the tier. Elite clubs run funded scouting departments and identify targets long before they are available. Everyone else finds players through their existing network: agents they have dealt with before, coaches in their own league, and recommendations from their own players. No governing body publishes how a signed player was identified, so the split between scouted and agent sourced signings is unmeasured everywhere.
On this page
At the top
Structured departments of full time scouts, screening on video and data before going to watch in person. The buying club initiates. Even here the direction is fewer people and more data: Brighton, one of the most data advanced clubs in the world, had seven full time scouts when it made three senior ones redundant in November 2024 (Training Ground Guru).
Everywhere else
The club is the receiving party, not the initiator. What actually happens:
- A sporting director's own contacts. At this level recruitment is often one job among several. Sarpsborg 08's sports director personally handles player logistics, scouting, agent contact and negotiations.
- Agents who already have the number. Once a club's requirement is known, it travels through WhatsApp groups where agents share requests with each other, and an agent who does not hold a suitable player will pass it to one who does.
- Recommendations from inside the squad. A player suggests a former teammate. A coach remembers someone he managed against.
What that means in practice
A club's realistic pool is the size of its network, often a few dozen people. FIFA's 2023 report counted 128,694 professional male players at 3,986 clubs worldwide. Every signing at this level is a decision made from a fraction of one per cent of the available market, and nobody involved thinks that is strange, because it has always been that way.
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Questions people also ask
Do smaller clubs use scouting data platforms?
Increasingly. In 2020 the Canadian Premier League set up one shared database of international prospects for all its clubs, presented as a cost effective addition to each club's own scouting.
Who makes the final decision?
Below the top tier, commonly the head coach, the sporting director or the president, often the same person who controls the money.