How to organise a club's scouting department

1. Start with needs, not players

A disorganised department watches lots of matches and finds little, because it does not know what it is looking for. The first step is to write down the needs of the first team and the academy for the next windows: position, profile, age, cost range. Each need becomes a tracking list.

2. Split the territory

Regions, competitions or age groups: what matters is that every scout knows what is theirs and that the director sees which competitions nobody is watching. The gaps are as important as what is covered.

3. Work through missions

A mission is a specific assignment: "watch this full-back twice before the end of the month" or "find a left-footed holding midfielder in the third tier". It has an owner and a deadline. Missions turn scouting into measurable work: you know what is open, what has been done and who is overloaded.

4. One report format

The same sections and the same scale for everyone. Without that, reports from two scouts cannot be compared. Here is a scouting report template with an example.

5. A decision process with deadlines

Every recommendation has to end in a decision: sign, keep watching or discard. What is not decided goes cold, and the market does not wait. It is worth measuring how many days pass between the recommendation and the answer.

6. Knowledge that belongs to the club

Reports, ratings and decisions have to live in a club system, not on each scout's phone. It is the only thing that protects years of work when the staff changes.

Signs that something is wrong

• Nobody knows how many players the club follows.
• The same player gets watched twice without anyone knowing, and others never.
• Recommendations arrive by WhatsApp and get no answer.
• Preparing a board meeting means rebuilding the information by hand.
• When a scout leaves, their work leaves with them.

SquadOffice is built around these six steps: the decisions inbox, missions, AI reports and the profile as the club's memory.