Club football is back: SCOUT NOTES, August 1
The free newsletter for scouting aficionados — and transfer addicts.
Club football is back! Pre-seasons are in full swing, the qualifying rounds of the UEFA competitions have produced some beautiful stories, and eveything isn’t constantly transfers, transfers, transfers. Hell, even some actual league seasons have kicked off!
Some of you will point out that it’s never been away, there’s always club football going on somewhere around the world, and that is very true — but we’re coming at it from a Euro-centric angle. It would also be true that club football has been going on all summer in Europe too, but shut up.
Anyway, with that in mind, SCOUT NOTES will be pivoting back to the actual football again. We’ll be focussing on the eye-catching storylines from our youth football perspective as the domestic game ramps up. There’ll still be the transfer stuff, obviously, just not as much.
We would like to take this opportunity to septuble-down on our call to get out and watch your local non-league team as well. This is the perfect time to do so: leagues are starting up and the weather is nice-ish, so cobble together a few mates and get out to watch local footy with a pint and pie in hand.
Above is a photo of CPD Felinfach — a fifth-tier club managed by SCOUTED’s own Llew — playing in their first-ever FAW Welsh Cup tie taking on five-time winners Chirk AAA last Saturday. They lost 3-1, but it was a historic day and also loads of fun. Get out and support stuff like that.
Wherever you are, please do so. They deserve your support. You will have fun.
And before we go on… if you’re completely new to SCOUTED Notebook, welcome. Please subscribe below for the best youth football journalism anywhere on the internet. If you’re not new but are yet to subscribe, you have 10 seconds to do so before this messa— *explosion*
Yankuba Minteh looks mint
Brighton’s acquisition of Yankuba Minteh for a club-record fee raised a few eyebrows. He’s far from a household name – he only left Gambia a couple of years ago before rocketing through Danish football and getting gobbled up by Newcastle, then going on loan to Feyenoord last season.
That said, I’d be happy to bet quite a lot of money that he will be a household name by this time next year, whatever a ‘household name’ actually is.
He’s been electric on Brighton’s pre-season tour of Japan so far, scoring a couple of eye-catching goals that promise plenty for when the Premier League returns.
The first is shown above: Minteh latches onto a through ball in behind before driving at the goal, standing up a defender, cutting inside, sitting another defender down with a deft little feint, then finishing calmly.
The other was quite similar, angling off the right onto his left foot, but this time he uses the defender really well to shape the finish across goal after a little shif to create the separation needed.
Digging for some StatsBomb data, I found that Ted Knutson has already dedicated an entire edition of his excellent The Transfer Flow newsletter to Minteh which substantiates the sentiments above.
But the basic rule is: if Brighton are spending big money on a player, then that player must be pretty good. Minteh looks good already, and he has the profile and potential to do very good things this coming season.
Breakout: Konstantinos Karetsas
If you’re looking for breakout talents ahead of the 2024/25 season, look no further than KRC Genk’s Konstantinos Karetsas.
The 2007-born playmaker started his side’s opening game of the new Pro League campaign and is likely to continue to do so, the leading name of a new batch to emerge at a club renowned for its talent development.
Karetsas isn’t new to senior football, though: he played 1,400 minutes across 20 games for Jong Genk in the Belgian second division, playing against competitive teams and fully-grown men on the regular as a 15-then-16-year-old. He looked entirely at ease, racking up 10 goal contributions in total, before stepping up to start the final couple of first-team games.
Find his highlight reel from last season and you’ll be excited to watch more of him. The 16-year-old is a small, sharp, tricky left-footer that has the technical talent to impact games as a dribbler, creator, and scorer of great goals.
Get used to hearing a lot more about him, not least from SCOUTED.
Doesn’t do it, or can’t do it?
After sealing the big move to Unai Emery’s Aston Villa last week, some Amadou Onana quotes to Belgian publication La Dernière la Heure, translated by SportWitness, caught our eye.
“The European Championships have boosted my value. I’m convinced of that
“My performance at the European Championship was in balance with the player I am and the qualities I have. At Everton we often played a completely different type of football. I was able to show all my qualities at the European Championships. I was enjoying myself on the pitch, I think it showed.
“I was very confident that the European Championships would accelerate my future. Mentally I was fully ready to give the best of myself and I think I did my job well.”
Read between the lines, or just take his words at face value, and it’s clear that he felt the way Everton play under Sean Dyche — which is very effective, and I like it a lot — didn’t make the most of his full breadth of abilities.
But it drills down on an adage we use a lot at SCOUTED: just because a player doesn’t do something, it doesn’t mean they can’t do that something. In a football analysis landscape dotted with data viz and player radars, it’s important to keep in mind that players (and their data) are a product of the environment they play in. Team style is a huge factor to consider when looking at the green bars on FBRef or the colourful StatsBomb radar.
Three Interesting Transfer Things
A hat-trick of intriguing happenings, organised into a trio of quickfire sections.
→ Monaco making moves
In George Ilenikhena and Lamine Camara, Monaco have made some very sensible signings that are worth getting excited about.
The former is coming off a breakthrough season at Royal Antwerp, where he filled the role of supersub and scored a famous winner against Barcelona in the Champions League. The latter is an esteemed young talent in African football, recently winning the Young Player of the Season
Both have the ability to make immediate impacts and the potential to become high-performing starters and high-value assets in two or three years. These are deals that hark back to the Monaco of old, when they were pinching the likes of Aurélien Tchouaméni and Youssouf Fofana. Lots to like.
→ Jan-Carlo Simić to RSC Anderlecht
When this one popped up on the Latest Transfers page on Transfermarkt, I had to double-check it. When I sent it to Stevie on WhatsApp, his reply was:
“Sorry... What the fuck???”
That sums this transfer up. It came out of nowhere and genuinely took us by surprise. The prospect of the teenager leaving Milan on a permanent deal this summer never crossed our mind, especially for a measly €3 million.
Simić has been a standout at age-group level for AC Milan and Serbia for a good while now. He’s been a very accomplished prospect at the heart of impressive defences, captaining good teams in major tournaments like the UEFA Youth League and UEFA U-17 EURO. He even played first-team minutes last season, stepping up in the second half of the season as a regular in Serie A squads.
The teenager is the archetype of a ‘modern’ defender: he’s compact and mobile with an aggressive mindset and ease on the ball that is perfect for the outside defensive roles that are more and more prevalent in the modern game. The point of interest is whether Anderlecht see him as a direct replacement for Zeno Debast, or something a little more versatile.
Whatever it is, he has all the potential to be a key starter — and if that happens, everyone will wonder how Anderlecht got him so cheap.
→ Spurs are Spursing again
A couple of SCOUT NOTES ago, we highlighted Spurs’ in-sync approach to recruitment and squad building. The gist of it was that they’re bringing in top young talent and giving them to a top coach that is renowned for developing top players. It makes perfect sense, which isn’t always expected of Spurs.
And now you can add Yang Min-hyeok to their increasingly impressive hoard of emerging prospects. The South Korean attacker will join the club in the new year following the culimation of the K-League season.
I don’t know loooooads about him other than he is very highly-rated in Asian football circles, and that he caught my eye at last year’s FIFA U-17 World Cup. I thought I’d attach a couple of clips that may be of interest to the Suprsmen amongst you.
That’s a very nice disguised pass.
And that’s a great needle dribble that really piqued my interest.
In case you missed it…
This is where we link to all the stuff that you may have missed on SCOUTED Notebook over the past week or so. Tuck in!
Emergency Broadcast: Dean Huijsen to Bournemouth, by Stephen Ganavas
The plucky Cherries have picked up a juicy one in Huijsen. Who better to give insight into than Stevie, our resident Huijsen Enjoyer, and peerless friend of SCOUTED Jon Mackenzie, the All-Knowing Iraola Oracle.
João Neves: straight to the very top, by Llew Davies
Paris Saint-Germain are adding to their plethora of central midfielders by signing João Neves, a SCOUTED favourite, for €70 million. That’s actually a remarkably cheap deal. Read our definitive profile to find out why.
Welcome to the Wharton age, by Tom Curen and Phil Costa
Adam Wharton is back on the pitch for Crystal Palace in pre-season, so you can expect to see his 108-second long match compilations going viral across Twitter very soon. Read our exclusive interview with him. It’s fantastic.
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Spurs have been doing great business lately. But the transfer that catched my eyes was Lucas Bergvall. Seeing him in preseason will make you think like he has been in their academy for so long
SPURS⚽️⚽️⚽️ Err…Gudminson..?Yan Cuto..? Scouted