How to scout the Balkans
By a scout for the scouts
Over the past three years, I’ve picked up more regular scouting roles with clubs as well as completing ad-hoc single assignments for clubs who are looking for a subject matter expert to provide addition depth and breadth to what they can see for themselves on a video. While I’m not going to go into the who that involved, I’ve completed work in the past for Scottish, Portuguese and Irish clubs amongst others so I feel confident in being able to provide a guide for those looking to know more about the region in how to go about knowing more.
It’s not like other places
The first thing to state is that the usage of advanced statistics in the region is nowhere near as prevalent as it is elsewhere. While many leagues are available on data sites like Wyscout, below a certain level or in nations lower down the co-efficient table, you will be relying solely upon your eye to make judgements given that stats aren’t available and full game footage is even more difficult to find unless you know where to look and are happy to work a lot with sources in local languages.
From my perspective, the first part of that role is to look at basic stats and then at short highlights to put together a brief pen portrait of who you might want to look at - transfermarkt is fairly reliable in this instance but even then there are limits to the depth of their database when it comes to the more obscure leagues. To show you a quick example on a pen portrait, here’s one I made last year for Drenica striker Baton Zabergja:
This would then go to whoever my main person at the club is and that would begin the sifting process of who it is worth looking at in more detail. Normally, this will come along with a couple of links to a transfermarkt profile or to a video so a bit more can be seen of the player. Ultimately, the point is to condense a couple of hours of work on my end into something can can be picked up and decided on in the space on around ten minutes.
At this longlisting process, most will be cast off. Zabergja is an example of one that went nowhere at the time but it’s good to have that sort of detail saved to revisit if needed. If the player is one that my colleague is interested in, they would then get more intensely looked at. At that point, the dive starts to go a bit deeper and will look at a selection of many things but, broadly, will go into the following elements:
Extended Video
Advanced Data
Media Stalking
Media Stalking
While the first two of those are likely self-explanatory, the last needs plenty of explaining because it’s something that’s a fairly new thing to do at scale and it’s done for a few reasons.
The first is that, fairly obviously, you can review a player’s Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, etc and get a fairly good idea over whether there are any red flags as to them fitting in with a side. People who aren’t necessarily suitable/professional in their personal outlook generally do out themselves fairly quickly one way or another. It isn’t foolproof but it is far more data than people had five to ten years ago and, with most players now being aware that scouts are doing this, is likely more data than will be available at a similar point in the future.
The second links a lot to what I’ve mentioned earlier - for many leagues, stats, etc aren’t available and, on top of that, they aren’t necessarily covered in much depth by local media (and some of that media may be behind a paywall). That means that important elements to consider aren’t necessarily known widely - specifically injury data. Going onto a profile and seeing a player in a hospital bed with a little thumbs up is something that any scout has to bear in mind. On more than one occasion, I’ve looked into good players who have a period of unavailability that isn’t explained in the normal media and then gone onto their Instagram and seen a picture and caption talking about them having had knee ligament issues. Much like our first element around personality, it can throw up big red flags.
The final one is again data based - details of agents aren’t comprehensive in the region but are often put up on social media either through a link on a profile or a picture of a player with a scarf stood next to their agent. Finding out who their representatives are gives you more than just a name to speak to, it also gives you a pretty good idea of who you’re doing business with because, much like players, certain agents aren’t ones you want to associate yourself with.
Advanced Data
If you use Wyscout, you’ll have heard of Shadow Teams (even if the UI on there is a little clunkier than some competitors). That is simply filling a team list with players you’re tracking and making it a bit easier to follow everyone, as well as moving the chat about a player from WhatsApp to something that’s reasonably more formal and makes the tracking of players a bit more automated.
To give an idea of the data points I use, I select these by position and then, in the below case, compare the players I’m tracking with the current first choice at the club it applies to:
In this example, my search is based on looking at left midfielders and was completed in late 2020. For certain roles, this is much more in depth depending on how many targets I’m tracking at any one time (particularly central midfielders) and how much I want to narrow things down by (on that spreadsheet, the central midfielder tab is using 11 different data points). This sort of document would tend to be produced from data based searches with names I liked by eye (if data existed for them) added as a comparison.
This doesn’t replace anything else, it’s a tool to use to reinforce your arguments given that the data outside of playing time data points that’s on Wyscout, transfermarkt, etc is often not all that up to date. Quite simply, if you’re dealing with somewhere like Montenegro, for example, which doesn’t even have easily accessible highlights and things like that, you are likely to be better off doing legwork and finding out contract details and agent details yourself than you are from going off any data source.
Extended Video
This, arguably, is actually the most challenging to locate. Beyond leisure watching, I watch highlights (which tend to be 5-10 mins each) from 6-7 different nations. If you take that during a double game week, you can be talking up to 14 hours a week just spent keeping up to date with what is going on in each game. That’s before any targeted work, any research into a particular player or anything else. Plenty of people do more than that and it’s important to note that certain roles are difficult to identify this way, particularly centre backs.
When it comes to services like Wyscout, things are clipped to look at individual actions but there are also limits on how long can be viewed so you end up being selective. The result is that I would end up looking for full game through other sources. Often, these just aren’t locatable due to being paywalled or not being of a high enough quality to be all that useful. The latter has been an impediment in looking at players in, for example, Serbia where games had (prior to this season) had footage made available only through single camera set-ups which varied wildly in picture quality - at its most blunt, many were the sort of set-up where a spectator getting up to cheer blocks your view!
It is, therefore, a bit hit and miss as to how to offer advice. Often, live footage isn’t available outside of the nation it’s from, many services are paywalled or limited on time and much of the coverage is not as useful as it could be and/or doesn’t offer a full view of the pitch. As such, a fairly encyclopaedic range of club YouTube channels is a must to catch a bit of everything - particularly youth level football, which just isn’t really on anything else.
Even then, remember the limitations above - below the top tier of almost every nation in the region, you are highly unlikely to have advanced statistics. On top of that, certain nations can be somewhat unreliable in their sporting integrity and, therefore, knowing the context of individual games is important. After all, a player might score two goals in a game, but if that game is commonly suspected of having been manipulated by outside sources, then a performance in that match should be viewed with more scepticism.
Getting Sourcey
So, how does one come across these players?
The obvious answer is “by watching lots of stuff”, but that is only really part of the story and only allows you to judge what you can see on first go. After all, you aren’t going to use Wyscout, etc to catch up on a game and discover someone, you’re using it as a targeted tool to help you. That can indirectly lead you to find players based on there being other names matching the parameters you’re basing your search from.
A good example here would be Andrija Raznatovic of Buducnost Podgorica. I discovered the player based on his first half season aged 19 at Petrovac as I was completing a search using Stephen O’Donnell’s (as he was breaking into the Scotland side) stats as the baseline. Raznatovic is now 22 and on the brink of the Montenegro squad having been ever present for Buducnost this season. That’s not to say that Raznatovic is some future superstar, merely to point out that you can find players based on data alone and they can be a success.
But quite aside from that, one of the biggest pieces of advice is allied to watching lots of stuff - reading lots of stuff. Accept the reality that a large part of scouting a region you aren’t located in is copying the homework of other people and basing your research from there. There are plenty of local accounts that will cover smaller leagues and plenty of independent scouts who put things out there in multiple language and (through trial and error) News sites will cover lower leagues and will speak to players for whom footage is simply difficult to find. A good example of this is Xhuliano Skuka who I first found through an article on Panorama Sport about his e Pare record. From there, I took a quick look at him and immediately recommended him for a deeper look - his move to the Superiore happened before that was fully completed but it’s fair to note that, this season, he was capped for the full Albania squad and bagged a move to Metz in Ligue 2 for a seven figure fee. Ultimately, when you are searching developing leagues, one isn’t looking for superstars off the bat, you are looking for a player who costs little, who can make an impact now and develop into a league leader (at least, from a Scottish perspective based on my experience) and make the club a healthy potential profit.
From working alone to working together
The Athletic recently published an article asking simply if scouting works. The answer to that is “if you know what you’re looking for”. Data only goes so far but so too does the eye of a scout and the research of a scout. The next element of that must be then how one standardises things at a club and how one coaches scouting. That article basically says if you get ten scouts in a room to rate one player, they’ll all disagree on that player.
Homogeneity of opinion isn’t great but it’s worth stating that if you want to work for a data scouting company actually putting together their data, then you’ll be put through a standardisation process to make sure that your interpretations of events and how they translate into the data you see on Wyscout et al. If one is standardised on how to create the data, one must also surely be standardised on how to then interpret that data as a scout and therefore change those ten opinions of ten people into likely eight very similar opinions and two outliers you can base a decision on whether to discount or research further. With that process completed, data and a scout’s eye then become matters of nuance given initial reports should be more correct. As a scout, you want to get to the point where you are being selective because your opinion is nuance rather than just looking at everything (as is the temptation at first).
From my part, I have generally been working on an independent basis with clubs rather than an employed basis for clubs. That is why scouting is a fiercely collaborative process for which as many ideas and opinions as possible be sought before you and then the broadly reliable ones brought under the umbrella more closely. So the biggest advice is to work with everyone who asks you to because you never know when that work can turn into something.
And you never know who’s reading.