It was 2am in the morning and Dean Gibson was sitting in the McDonald’s car park, just to make sure he had wifi access for an important call with an agent based in the United States. The scene aligns with some of the less glamorous stereotypes of working in recruitment and scouting: long nights journeying across the country alone, countless hours watching matches in all weather and often it will not even lead to signing the player. In women’s football, scouting is still in the embryonic stage of its development, but one Women’s Championship club is determined to change the perception of that and train up a new generation of scouts specifically skilled for the women’s game.
Gibson, recruitment manager for Southampton’s women’s and girls’ teams, is speaking to the Guardian about an initiative that his club is now running for a second successive season, named the Starling Bank Scout School, a 15-week programme that had 15 participants in 2024 and that has increased to 20 budding scouts for their current, ongoing class of 2025, and the scheme is heavily oversubscribed with 115 applicants for 2024 and now 160 applications for the latest programme.
“There’s a huge gap in the market with scouting within the women’s game. I don’t think it’s at the levels yet where it could be or should be,” the former Hibernian women’s manager says. “I think that’s probably been down to resources, really. When women’s clubs are initially growing and building, you need a manager, you need an assistant manager, you need a physio, you need all of these to make the team run or you won’t get on the pitch on Sunday. Scouts are helpful but you don’t need them to get on the pitch. I think clubs are now starting to think: ‘Right, we’ve got all of that in place, how do we now start to grow the next arm of the club?’”
The organisers are hoping to train up scouts not just to work for Southampton but across the whole pyramid to help the women’s game grow, with Gibson explaining: “The ecosystem of the women’s game is only going to get better. Last year we had scouts from all over the UK [on the course], some were travelling four or five hours to come in, so ideally for them, they’ll find a club a lot closer to them. But if we’re getting more scouts into the women’s game and there are more female players getting found, it might not help us in the short term but in 10 years’ time we might sign that player because a scout that we found, found them. I’d like more clubs to do this as well, not just us. If more clubs do it, it’s only going to improve the standard.”
The course includes a mixture of classroom and practical elements and training that includes a focus on data as well as developing an eye for spotting skill in emerging players, from a youth or grassroots level right up to potential first-team starters. Gibson adds: “The target market is hopefully young female scouts, which is great, but also there’s nothing wrong if it’s male scouts coming into the women’s game. It’s a long programme but there’s a lot of good knowledge in there. We set them tasks every week, with homework. We’ll teach them about report-writing, or we might be doing a characteristics task and give them a specific position on the pitch to study. Then they watched over 100 kids [in Southampton’s academy] and do scouting reports within the building. Ash [Ash Wheeler-Osman, Southampton’s partnerships manager] deserves a lot of credit. What he’s done proved to be a huge success last year, which has allowed it to roll on to this year and it looks like it’s going to be even bigger and better this year.”
The budding scouts also learn from Southampton’s sports scientists and analysts but it is the recruitment team from whom they’ll be hoping to gain the most wisdom, one of whom is Gibson, who also previously worked in recruitment at Hibs, for seniors and the academy. He recalls being the only ‘head of recruitment’ working in the Women’s Championship when he was first appointed a year ago, although other second-tier clubs have followed suit since, and he adds: “I realised that even though I was the Hibs women’s manager, when I was putting the cones down, I wasn’t getting that buzz or the fire in my belly, to be a manager. But I knew I wanted to be a scout and work in recruitment, because when we got to the winter and summer windows, I used to be excited.
“There are a lot of hours [in scouting] that you put in that become wasted, really, because nothing comes of it, either because you watch a game and nothing shows, but when you notice a player and they sign and then they’re successful, there’s no better feeling. That makes up for any feeling when you lose them. There are a lot of hours spent that prove to be successful.”
In the women’s game, a relative lack of data makes scouting in-person more vital than ever, Gibson feels. “Being data-driven – you can’t do it in the women’s game, only at the very top level have you got accurate data, so if you’re a Chelsea or an Arsenal or a Barcelona or Bayern Munich, it’s easier for them because they can go after the best players in the world,” he says. “For us, I don’t think the data is at the detailed enough level yet, for the players that we can attract within our remit, so it’s still a challenge for us, you’ve just got to try and find ways around it. We’re doing all right to be fair, we signed a couple of players in the summer who were data-driven, who have proved to be a success this year, so what we’re doing is along the right lines, but at the minute it’s a lot of effort and a lot of work because we’re having to do it so manually.”
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