Jonathan Stoop

Eghbali asked a Director at an elite club how he uses data, he said data is his eyes, no data. Likely Luis Campos at PSG, but this clown thinks he's doing wrong and should use data. Which is why Chelsea sign players like Garnacho, now El Mala, no real scouting. It's his model.

Khusanov's USP. Context-independent skill: speed in large spaces, instant deceleration Context-dependent skill: direction of speed, timing of deceleration, angle of body shape Elite potential = elite context-independent skills + conditions to develop context-dependent skills.

I've listened to this 3 times in the past year. Each time I take something different with me, it's intensely potent with insights. This is like a user manual for living life like a work of art.

New research on head coach recruitment at MCO groups surfaces the limitations of data-driven approaches for scouting coaches. Relying on performance metrics biases the search towards established names. Young, talented coaches don't have head coach data because they have yet to become one. Filtering by head coach data filters them out. The better search method is human-oriented. Speaking to people who've worked with them. Listening to press conferences. Personality is a higher-order indicator than tactical acumen. Coaching succession planning is as consequential as player succession planning. MCOs have a structural advantage: multiple contexts. Single clubs hyper-specify roles because they only have one job in one context to fill. MCOs can find the best people and build roles around them - the role specs adjust to the coaching profile, not the other way around. The idealized coaching pipeline mirrors the player pipeline: > Build a talent pool > Place them in the right context > Develop > Promote

New research on head coach recruitment at MCO groups surfaces the limitations of data-driven approaches for scouting coaches. Relying on performance metrics biases the search towards established names. Young, talented coaches don't have head coach data because they have yet to become one. Filtering by head coach data filters them out. The better search method is human-oriented. Speaking to people who've worked with them. Listening to press conferences. Personality is a higher-order indicator than tactical acumen. Coaching succession planning is as consequential as player succession planning. MCOs have a structural advantage: multiple contexts. Single clubs hyper-specify roles because they only have one job in one context to fill. MCOs can find the best people and build roles around them - the role specs adjust to the coaching profile, not the other way around. The idealized coaching pipeline mirrors the player pipeline: > Build a talent pool > Place them in the right context > Develop > Promote

Billionaire Marc Andreessen says he has "zero" introspection, and that the idea itself is a modern invention.

The Athletic published a rare inside look at how NFL scouts write their reports. There are direct parallels to football scouting, but NFL scouting departments have solved two bottlenecks that most football clubs still improvise around. 1. Transmission: watching players and writing down observations is the easy part. Transmitting those observations from scout to decision-maker is where scouting actually influences decisions. NFL scouting departments build shared internal shorthand - coded language programmed into the system so everyone reads the same way. Most football clubs rely on each scout's personal vocabulary. When language is ambiguous, insights die in translation. 2. Decisiveness: NFL reports are built around a one-liner – what you'd tell the GM about a player in a 30-second conversation. One sentence – who is the player and why should/shouldn't we sign him? The rest of the report exists in service of that line. Most football scouting reports I read describe players in varying levels of detail without ever committing to a decision. A scouting report is an argument, not a description.