The future of football is Africa
Plus: Manchester City's new era, fishing at the log jams, and much more in the return of SCOUT NOTES.
After almost two months away, SCOUT NOTES is back!
In case you forgot, SCOUT NOTES is my very own newsletter. It is the ying to Jake Entwistle’s tremendous Monday Night SCOUTED yang. Together, I think we provide a wicked one-two punch of detail and data on football’s future.
And where better to pick back up with than transfers! Everyone bloody loves transfers, right? Wrong, not everyone loves transfers — admittedly, I have a volatile relationship with them myself — but most people do which is why you’ll get transfers.
Anyway, after a pretty tepid start to the January window, things have started to sizzle over the past week: Jhon Durán has been the firestarter with a move to Saudi Arabia, Mathys Tel is desperately seeking a move but still rejecting Spurs, Arsenal have gone for Ollie Watkins, and various other clubs are looking to galvanise their seasons with a late, opportunistic swoop.
But what else has been happening? Read on below…
In this transfer-coded issue:
Why clubs need to start investing in Africa
Is Hugo Viana influencing Manchester City already?
The big fish to catch at elite clubs’ talent log jams
Manchester United focus on the long-term future
Sturm Graz’s Successful Striker Succession continues
Other bits and bobs you might’ve missed, and more…
I’ve zoomed out to focus on the overarching trends of this transfer window. There’s more player-specific tidbits right down the bottom, but I wanted to spotlight the prevalent themes and trends. Waffling over, let’s get into it.
The future of football is African
Yes, Africa really is the future of football. We at SCOUTED have been saying so for a while, and our good friend Tim Keech has been saying so for much, much longer. He probably posts about it twice a day — at least.
When you step back and think about it on a macro level, it’s obvious that Africa is the future of football. This is an enormous continent of some 1.4 billion people — the vast majority of which are young; the median age of its people is 19 years old per data — that is absolutely obsessed with the sport yet is relatively untouched when it comes to talent ID and recruitment.
Indeed, the clubs and organisations that have tapped into African talent in recent years have yielded remarkable and sustainable success. Perhaps the best example is that of Right to Dream, the Ghanaian academy that has expanded into three separate continents since its establishment in 1999 and owns its own clubs in Denmark (FC Nordsjælland), Egypt (FC Masar) and the newly-formed San Diego FC in the USA, who enter MLS this year.
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