Reply With QuoteSuccess stories
Pleasingly, we’ve had some good success in recent years, with a lot of our players gaining high-profile moves after a stint at Oakwell.
The most notable is probably Alfie Mawson, who moved to the Premier League with Swansea in 2016, and still plays at the top level with Fulham. It’s always great to see players you’ve helped bring to the club succeed, but it really is a team effort as so many people are involved in the success of a player.
Ethan Pinnock, who's been outstanding since we signed him from Forest Green Rovers, is a perfect example of that. He went through the full process of being initially identified through data, and was then watched in four games on video and five times live by different members of our team. I remember making the seven-hour round trip to watch him, only for him to get injured 15 minutes in. That was a long drive home.
I was back out to watch him several times before the end of the season, though, including at Wembley in the National League play-off final. Once you get the player, it’s a relief and job done for us. Then it’s up to our coaching and backroom staff who get to work on the training pitch.
The process
We like to make sure several of our staff have seen the same player, and we use different methods – including live games, video and data analysis – for each one. It’s quite fluid, and something we look at as a team as the process evolves: there’s no one person with a specific role of just identifying talent or just looking at the data.
Data is obviously an important part of the modern recruitment process. It helps you gain insight on players and can be particularly helpful in the initial trawling phase before you start to work through and look at players more in-depth. It can give you information that the eyes of a scout can’t – just like the eyes of a scout can see things the data can’t. It’s important to have a combination of the two.
Each club uses data differently, and no one wants to give much away to keep ahead of rivals.
You can never be 100% certain when signing a player, as there as so many variables, but our job is to minimise the risk.
Clubs don’t only assess their playing ability, but also gather as much intelligence and information on the personality and character of potential targets. It can be as simple as looking through his social media, or contacting one of his previous coaches for a character reference. How does he react to high-pressure situations? Is he doing extra work after training to try to be the best he can? Or is he the player who comes back to pre-season overweight, having not completed his summer gym programme?
We always want to find out what we can about any of our prospective targets, although it can be more difficult to find out about some players than others (that’s usually a good sign, mind).
It's not necessarily make or break, but it’s always beneficial to know as much as you can before a player comes into your environment. Good personalities can make all the difference in a dressing room.
