FootyChatter.com

EPL Players scouted by Dave Worthington include Karim Benzema, Rodri and Mousa Dembele Photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton The reports are beautifully presented, meticulously preserved in ring-bound notepads. Each match is recorded over two pages: home team on the left, away on the right. Next to each player’s name is his shirt number, his height, his age and the date his contract expires. There is a space next to each player’s name for observations on his performance. Some merit one or two lines; others, occasionally, are left blank. The ones that really make an impression get four or five lines. And where the old scout has used his highlighter pen, you know he was ready to make a firm recommendation. Advertisement Dave Worthington operated like that for years while working in France and then Spain as a scout for Bolton Wanderers, Chelsea, Hull City, Blackburn Rovers, Sunderland, West Ham United, Leicester City and Everton. “Not many people did it this way, ” he says. “Some of the other scouts used to giggle at me. ‘Have you got your book, Worthy? ’” He sure has. Worthington, now 80, has boxes and boxes of these reports. We are looking through them at his home in West Yorkshire — three crates already out on the kitchen table — when he mentions there are many more in the attic. Leafing through one of the files, from the mid-2000s, familiar names jump off the page: Karim Benzema, whom he first saw as a 16-year-old at Lyon, alerting Bolton to the possibility of a €1million deal and later telling Chelsea, “This boy will go to Real Madrid, Barcelona or Milan if we don’t get in quick”; Manuel Neuer, then a teenage goalkeeper at Schalke, and former Tottenham and Belgium midfielder Mousa Dembele, then a teenager at AZ, both of whom he proposed to Chelsea. Another file contains more recent reports, urging West Ham to sign Marco Asensio from Mallorca before (as with Benzema) Real Madrid arrived on the scene. A list of his firm recommendations for Everton in 2017 includes Pedro Porro, Bruno Fernandes and Rodri, then at Girona, Sporting and Villarreal respectively, now at Tottenham Hotspur, Manchester United and Manchester City. Rodri gets the highlighter treatment again and again. A typical example is Worthington’s assessment of the midfielder, then 21, in a La Liga match against Deportivo La Coruna in January 2018: “Easily won headers, always makes himself available, won tackles, good positioning + awareness, strong, keeps ball well, does not make a pass if tackled, wants to help everybody, rarely wastes a pass, brilliant changes (of) play etc, movement superb”. Advertisement The letters “AP” in the right-hand margin signal an unequivocal recommendation for Everton to try to sign Rodri, who has gone on to become one of the pre-eminent players in world football with Atletico Madrid, City and Spain, and the winner of the 2024 Ballon d’Or. “He stood out so much, ” Worthington says. “He could do everything and play anywhere — not just midfield but at the back, across any of the defensive positions. I’m pretty sure I saw him play up front in one game. Had the lot as far as I was concerned. A clever, clever footballer. ” It is natural to wonder whether Everton were really in a position to sign Rodri, given he ended up rejoining Atletico Madrid later that year in a deal worth an initial €20million (£17. 4m/$23. 3m at today’s exchange rates). But this was near the height of the Merseyside club’s spending under Farhad Moshiri’s ownership. What’s more, they spent €30million that summer on Barcelona and Colombia defender Yerry Mina — a player Worthington had, after scouting him extensively, specifically advised them against signing, warning that his aerial threat from set-pieces did not outweigh the reservations the scout had about other areas of his game. All of that came at a time when Worthington could feel the tide of opinion turning against older scouts and traditional methods. He didn’t last much longer at Everton, out of tune with a regime that on one hand extolled the virtues of a more sophisticated approach to player identification and on the other seemed to be driven by the whims of Moshiri. It had been similar at Sunderland after they appointed Roberto De Fanti, an agent, as their director of football in 2013. Worthington looks back now on the strange final years of his career and wonders whether, as recruitment methods have changed, something has been lost. There is, Worthington says, a certain image of the old-school scout: a guy in his seventies with a notebook under his arm — or in some cases with everything in his head, claiming to have forgotten more than the younger guys on the beat will ever know. Those scouts are commonly dismissed as relics these days because they lean on their intuition and what their eyes are telling them. Advertisement In an age when data and analytics offer detailed insights without having to leave your desk, the reputation of traditional scouting has taken something of a battering. If Billy Beane’s initial success with the Oakland Athletics baseball franchise more than two decades ago didn’t challenge scouting orthodoxy immediately, the success of Michael Lewis’ Moneyball book and the subsequent movie adaptation starring Brad Pitt as Beane — depicting sporting talent-spotters as a closed community of neophobes whose received wisdoms and surface-level assumptions had gone unchallenged for too long — certainly did. Even in football, a conservative sport in so many ways, data and analytics have begun to hold sway over subjective evaluation. Worthington sighs at the suggestion. He isn’t anti-data at all; he was part of a Bolton recruitment department that he feels was years ahead of most other Premier League clubs in embracing analytics under Sam Allardyce’s management in the early 2000s. He talks about the influence of Dave Fallows, who later became one of the architects of a data-led regime at Liverpool. “Dave joined Bolton from Pro Zone and he was a wizard when it came to using the data and identifying the best young players from South America, so that I could go as chief scout and watch them in France or Italy or wherever it might be, ” he says. What Bolton did not have was much of a scouting budget. Very few English clubs did in those days; even most of the bigger sides relied primarily on agent tip-offs or media coverage to alert them to exciting talents elsewhere in Europe. Worthington spent his first years in France on a meagre wage, grateful that the club paid his expenses for trundling up and down the autoroute in his Fiat Punto: a 14-hour round trip to Lyon, a 16-hour there and back to Marseille. “It would get to 2am on the way from Lyon or wherever and I would pull over, somewhere in the mountains, get my sleeping bag out and sleep in the Fiat Punto, ” he says. It was in this period that he first spotted Benzema playing in Lyon’s youth team, having been tipped off that the forward might be available for as little as €1million. But Bolton could barely afford transfer fees for first-team players, let alone long-term prospects. The challenge was to find battle-hardened players, at affordable prices, who could make an immediate impact in the Premier League. It is why even now, two decades later, his eyes sparkle at the memory of discovering Senegal midfielder-cum-defender Abdoulaye Faye at French club Istres, on loan from Lens. Advertisement He felt Faye ticked every box for Allardyce — and told the Bolton manager he was willing to stake his job on the player. Faye joined Bolton on an initial six-month loan, then a permanent €3million deal and made such an impact that Allardyce later signed him for Newcastle United, too. When a scout has put his own credibility on the line to recommend a player, that must feel quite like an endorsement. When it comes to identifying talent, Worthington had an early start. The oldest of three brothers, he was followed into professional football by Bob, who played for Halifax Town, Middlesbrough, Notts County and Southend United, and then by Frank, who, from a very early age, could do things with a ball that would leave his siblings open-mouthed. Frank, who died in 2021, became one of the most gifted and flamboyant footballers England has produced, starring for Leicester City in particular and entertaining crowds in the 1960s, 1970s and well into the 1980s. What would a scouting report on him have said? “Oh, our kid was unbelievable, ” Worthington says. “He was doing all these tricks and skills on terrible, muddy pitches we had at that time. He was way ahead of anyone else. He could have played anywhere, in any league, in any era. ” Worthington hopes his newly released autobiography Worthy, charting a lifetime in football — first as a journeyman player with Halifax, Barrow, Grimsby Town and Southend, then as a manager at non-League level and finally as a scout in the higher echelons of the game — will help to shed some light on what scouting really is. We have all watched matches and seen players we feel could operate at a more advanced level. Social media is full of would-be scouts, eager to assert their knowledge of hidden talents and untapped markets, certain that a prospect in Vasco da Gama’s under-17 team is the next Lionel Messi because he looks great on You Tube and turns out even better in Football Manager. But that’s not what scouting is. For much of Worthington’s career, it was about finding players at knockdown prices who could — like Faye or Abdoulaye Meite at Bolton or French midfielder Steven Nzonzi at Blackburn — make a seamless transition to English football in a team whose priority was to avoid relegation. “Talent usually stands out easily — and it would stand out to most people watching, ” Worthington says. “But in scout mode, you’re thinking, ‘He’s got the talent to do this and that, but what’s he doing off the ball? ’ There are scouts who watch video after video, but they’re only seeing that player when the camera is on him. What happens when the ball is at the other end of the pitch? What is that player doing once he’s made the pass and his team-mate loses it on the edge of the box? Is he racing back to win the ball? What’s his body language like? Is he a good team-mate? Does he work? Does he work just as hard at 2-0 down away from home? ” At Chelsea, it was about finding players with the rare combination of mental, physical, technical and tactical attributes to enhance a squad challenging for the biggest prizes. He recalls being entranced by Samir Nasri at Marseille but concluding that the youngster’s game was flecked with inconsistencies of a type that would not suit Chelsea’s requirements. Worthington gives the example of a player he was sent to watch as a prospective signing. To his disappointment, having driven across France for that purpose, he learned on arrival that the guy had been left out of his team’s starting line-up. “But I watched him in the warm-up and he was just messing around, trying to disturb his team-mates rather than getting ready for the game, ” he says. “He struck me as selfish. I wrote in my report that he would be disruptive. ” Advertisement By contrast, Worthington was sent to Turkey in 2006 to assess a player, Nicolas Anelka, whose reputation as a sulky, difficult team-mate — which had seen him fall out of favour at Paris Saint-Germain and Manchester City and sold to Fenerbahce at the age of 25 — preceded him by that stage of his career. He travelled to Istanbul with a certain scepticism, conscious that he could not risk being seduced by Anelka’s goalscoring talent alone. But after watching him over a series of games and making background checks, he came back with glowing reports in the belief — which was proven correct — that Anelka was a reformed character. Bolton took the plunge and signed him for a club-record outlay of £8million. The £15m Chelsea paid for him 18 months later remains Bolton’s record sale. By that stage, Worthington was at Chelsea as part of a vast new scouting operation. Rather than scouring Ligue 1’s bargain basement, the emphasis was on finding elite-level players who could improve an already successful team. Worthington’s input in that period included firm recommendations of Anelka, whom he gave an ‘A’ grade (“sublime touch always, graceful and athletic, linked brilliantly, stretched defenders”) even on an off-night for France during a European Championship qualifying defeat by Scotland, and Serbian defender Branislav Ivanovic. Other recommendations included Brazilian playmaker Kaka (“his touch, pace and strength, vision, inventiveness and awareness would be wonderful for Chelsea”) and Benzema, only for Real Madrid to sign them both in 2009. One of those he pushed hardest for at Chelsea was Dembele, the subject of a numerical evaluation which included marks of nine out of 10 for pace, mobility and off-the-ball movement but a mere five out of 10 for heading and effort shown to win the ball back. An overall rating of 179 out of 250 might not sound like much, but Worthington was adamant: “plenty to work with and would be an investment. Sign him. ” Worthington was not the type to sit on the fence, not even when under interrogation from the big boss. During the 2008 European Championship, he and other scouts were invited for dinner with Chelsea’s then owner Roman Abramovich, who at one point turned to him and asked about the club’s interest in Gomis — presumably French striker Bafetimbi Gomis, a player Worthington had watched extensively at Saint-Etienne that season. Worthington furrowed his brow and shook his head. “Gomis? No, not for us, ” he told Abramovich. “Decent player, but he’s not good enough for Chelsea. ” Advertisement Abramovich looked appalled and said the club’s sporting director Frank Arnesen had told him Gomis was a top priority. Worthington felt embarrassed and confused as his ultimate boss left him to it. Only then did the penny drop; Abramovich had said “Gomez” (Mario Gomez, then in free-scoring form for Stuttgart and about to lead the line for Germany in that night’s quarter-final) rather than “Gomis”. In desperation, Worthington sought to clear up the misunderstanding by reassuring Abramovich they were on the same page regarding Gomez. Even now, Worthington wonders whether that mix-up might have counted against him when Chelsea made a number of cuts to their scouting department later that year. Worthington’s book, like time spent in his engaging company, is not an exercise in trumpeting his successes. As well as those who went on to have outstanding careers, he admits there have been many others who did not live up to his evaluation of their potential. He willingly reels off a few names: Moustapha Bayal Sall, who became a stalwart at Saint-Etienne but not the elite-level defender Worthington thought he might develop into; Lucas Evangelista, who excelled on loan from Udinese at Portuguese club Estoril but is now back in Brazil with Palmeiras; Sandro Ramirez, whom Everton signed on his recommendation after an excellent season at Malaga, but who did not adapt to the physical rigours of the Premier League. “Before I packed in, one of the players I really thought was fantastic was Riqui Puig, ” Worthington says. “I had seen him in Barcelona’s youth teams and he looked to me like they had cloned Messi. His brain was far ahead of anyone else on the pitch. He was small — tiny — but I felt he would have created so many chances in the Premier League. I told everyone to have a look at him. But for one reason or another, it hasn’t quite come off for him the way I thought it would. He’s playing in America now (for LA Galaxy). Maybe that was a misjudgement on my part, but there are so many different factors. ” It is why Worthington feels the best scouting operations — like that in which his son Gary now works as head of player recruitment at Manchester City — embrace data and all the opportunities that modern technological advances present … but not to the exclusion of subjective, in-person analysis by scouts who have been around the block. Advertisement “Data can only be used effectively when it’s placed in context and used in conjunction with a knowledgeable observer — ideally someone who has played to a decent level and understands the intricacies of the game, ” he says. “If you’ve not played the game, do you know what a tackle — a real tackle — feels like? Do you know the difference between a ‘successful’ pass that puts a team-mate under pressure and an ‘unsuccessful’ pass that keeps the pressure on the opposition? ” Again and again, he comes back to the word ‘context’.  Subjective analysis allows for context in a way that data does not. He welcomes the sophistication and insights that data has brought, but he wonders — not unreasonably — whether it has resulted in better recruitment when the hit rate in the transfer market, in the Premier League and beyond, seems no higher and is quite possibly lower than in the past. There is one experience, relayed in his book, that upsets him to this day. After he was let go by Everton in 2018, he continued going to games in Spain, still looking for talent, still compiling his reports, even if by this stage of his career, at 73, they were largely for his own benefit. On one particular afternoon in Barcelona, watching their B team, he found himself distracted by an unfamiliar younger scout a few seats down, laughing and joking with his partner, appearing to pay little attention to the game other than making an occasional tick on his i Pad— “literally a box-ticking exercise”. “I was steaming, ” he says. “I had lost my job and this lad just seemed to be having a jolly-up in Barcelona for the weekend. ” Even in retirement, spending a Saturday afternoon watching Halifax or Grimsby, Worthington’s scouting radar is switched on. Occasionally, he will accept an invitation to join Gary at a City game. “Where I can spend 90 minutes giving my player insights to a man who has spent the last 15 years as a leading recruitment figure for arguably the world’s most successful football operation, ” he laughs. “I’m sure he appreciates it! ” Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms Play today's puzzle Before joining The Athletic as a senior writer in 2019, Oliver Kay spent 19 years working for The Times, the last ten of them as chief football correspondent. He is the author of the award-winning book Forever Young: The Story of Adrian Doherty, Football’s Lost Genius. Follow Oliver on Twitter @Oliver Kay