It is the summer of 2007. Thaksin Shinawatra, the former Prime Minister of Thailand, has just bought Manchester City and installs Sven-Göran Eriksson as manager a few weeks later. With little time to spare before the season and a lot of money to spend, Eriksson places his trust firmly in Jerome Anderson, a leading agent, to help him to find the players he needs in the absence of an overseas scouting network. Eight signings arrive, none of whom, incidentally, is still at the club.
Fast-forward 12 months and Thaksin has gone, having sold City to Sheikh Mansour, an Arab billionaire. Reports are commissioned examining every aspect of the club the Abu Dhabi royals have inherited, although there is one finding, in particular that renders Khaldoon al-Mubarak, Mansour’s right-hand man and City’s new chairman, speechless. Despite committing up to £100 million in transfer fees, player wages, payments to agents and related costs under Thaksin, City had only a four-line report to show for the investment.
Something significant had to change, particularly if City were serious about becoming a dominant force in world football, and as the club’s newly appointed technical director, it was Mike Rigg’s responsibility to swing a plan into action.
“It was about setting up an international scouting network that keeps the bad players away but ensures that the ones we do bring in, we do so armed with as much information as we can possibly get our hands on,” Rigg, formerly the chief scout at Blackburn Rovers, said. “I felt I was working with a fairly blank canvas and, crucially, the club was 100 per cent behind it — Khaldoon, Garry Cook [the chief executive], they were like, ‘This is going to make or break us. If we don’t get this right, the rest of the club could suffer.’
“Put it this way, if I’m going to go out and spend £20,000 on a car and it’s my £20,000, I’ll want to know everything about it. I’ll want to test-drive it, I’ll want to study it, find out how it compares to other models, its specifications and history. What I’m not going to do is give that £20,000 to you because you are going to go to the sales office and say, ‘Give me that car for £2,000 and we’ll pocket £9,000 each in the process.’ But probably 95 per cent of football clubs do that and Manchester City were the same.
“This is where I can’t understand the false economy in football clubs — that they won’t invest in their own human-resources team to go out and do the due diligence; that they rely upon external organisations to bring players to the club when the risks involved in doing that are huge.”
Two-and-a-half years on, the picture looks very different. Led by Rigg, City have a 19-strong team in place, with seven scouts working across Europe, one in Africa, two in South America and Alan Watson heading a UK operation that enlists the support of about 40 star-spotters across the country. It is not so much the dramatic increase in numbers as the attention to detail that stands out, though. Where previously information was stored in someone’s head, now everything is recorded on an exhaustive worldwide database.
Rigg spent time with the recruitment department of the Miami Dolphins, the American football team, last year and was astonished to discover the levels to which the club go to acquire information on potential draft picks. In effect, teams of private investigators are hired to examine every facet of a player, not just his physical, tactical and technical abilities but his social background and mentality, behavioural patterns and character.
City are adopting a similar approach. Had they had such a database in place when Mansour bought the club, Rigg wonders whether Robinho, the mercurial Brazil forward who was sold to AC Milan in the summer, would have been signed.
Rather than the scattergun approach that ensued that day, a more calculated decision could have been made. Indeed, scouts must do more than simply find talent; detective work is required. Will a player adapt culturally? What is his family background? Are there any personal issues? What is his contractual status?
Take Jérôme Boateng, for example. Andy Sayer, City’s German scout, established that the Germany defender had a €12 million (now about £7.8 million) buyout clause in his contract that Hamburg had strived to keep under wraps. Rob Newman, City’s man in Spain, was able to relay that Yaya Touré, the Ivory Coast midfield player signed from Barcelona in July, suffers from migraines and had a swine flu scare last season.
Dossiers are compiled on all players under a 12-point plan — profile, SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis, player statistics, reports, injury record, personal information, adaptation, international records, training, marketing conditions, media and agent information. Touré’s 30-page dossier is six pages shorter than that the club have on a promising 15-year-old schoolboy.
All scouts are equipped with laptops and flip cameras. If they discover a new player, they file a report. If Rigg and Gary Worthington, his assistant recruited from Chelsea, like what they see, the scout is asked to continue monitoring the player before another scout provides a second opinion, and Rigg will regularly fly out to assess players.
Recently, he embarked on a two-week trip that involved visiting eight cities in six countries spanning two continents. Should the findings still be glowing, the information will be passed on to Roberto Mancini, the manager, Brian Marwood, the club’s football administrator, Cook and al-Mubarak. If a player is signed, all the information will be sent on to the club’s player care team so they can ensure the new arrival integrates as quickly as possible.
“We’re developing a scouting strategy that has to be uniquely tailored to that country, depending on where it is,” Rigg said. “How we scout in the UK is different to going to Argentina or Brazil, where they change a game the night before because there is a major soap on.”
Not all signings are straightforward, especially so when young players signed from outside the European Union are refused work permits. As such, Fergal Harkin, the City football partnerships co-ordinator, is in the process of forging strong links with teams abroad so that City are in a position to place budding talents in clubs where they can gain experience and, ultimately, the international recognition that could facilitate a work permit. That is what has happened to Mohammed Abu, who was unearthed by Tom Vernon, City’s Ghana-based scout, and sent to Stromsgodset in Norway.
To suggest City’s scouting operation domestically was anything less than a success before Mansour came along would be wrong, but why Jim Cassell and Alex Gibson, who led City to the FA Youth Cup in 2008 and produced a string of first-team players including Shaun Wright-Phillips and Micah Richards, were not accommodated in the new structure remains a mystery to many. As City’s ambitions grow, though, so the difficulty in finding players of sufficient calibre increases.
“If you’re talking about getting the cream of the crop to win the Champions League, it’d be nice to think we could get all the kids from the streets of Moss Side and Platt Lane, but it’s not going to happen,” Rigg said. “So that’s why our network now has to go right across the world.”
Scouting mission
£3 million Amount Manchester City invest annually in their worldwide scouting operation
30 Pages in scouting dossier compiled on Yaya Touré
11 Full-time scouts
7 European scouts
2 South American scouts
