AfricaPress-Tanzania: THE maiden course for scouts is set to take place in Dar es Salaam next week, whereby more than 50 people will attend.
The course’s organizer, Afrisoccer’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Peter Simon, said the head of players’ scouts for South African football giants, Walter Steenbok, will serve as the course’s chief instructor.
He said the course is part of the coming Tanzania Football Summit (TFS) projects slated for next week at the University of Dar es Salaam.
Simon said the course is aimed at training perspective scouts on how to identify players and how they can carry on daily duties.
He said identifying new football talents in a player scout’s duty, but like other African countries, many people in Tanzania do not know the role of football scouts and how they operate, so the course will be of great help to them.
The Afrisoccer CEO said scouting is more important than ever as many local clubs are now valuing the importance of having both player scouts and tactical scouts.
He said the player scout is tasked with spotting potential players for their clubs to sign and the scouts will attend youth tournaments, internationals, reserve matches, and league games domestically (often in the lower leagues) and abroad as clubs cast their nets far and wide.
Tactical scouts, according to him, are tasked with attending other clubs’ matches and build up a knowledge base that a head coach would not be able to get them on either his or her own.
He noted the tactical scouts assess tactics of other teams, patterns of play and players who could become a threat to his or her team when the two clubs meet.
He stated: “The market for scouts in our country is growing, currently we have a local team which is doing well in the Mainland Premier League and CAF Champions League, they have a tactical scout (he did not name the club).”
According to our findings, the club is Simba SC, this season’s CAF Champions League Group A leaders.
Simba SC roped in Zimbabwean performance analyst Culvin Mavhunga.
”It’s now time for our local clubs to embrace this sector,” he noted.
“We expect 50-70 people to attend, it will involve player scouts and tactical scouts, the two are vital for clubs and our football, we have many people interested in the sector but they don’t have the idea of how the scouts work, the benefits they get, so the next week course will be an eye opener to them,” he said.
The course’s chief instructor, Steenbok, is one of the respected player scouts in South Africa as he is also a head of scouts for South Africa senior national football teams.
He recently authored a book titled ‘The Football Scouting Bible’. In the book he states scouting is an area in soccer that has not really been exploited.
He mentioned some of the roles of scouts as assessing the skills of potential signings and evaluating their general attitude.
“The scouting operation is formed by lost of factors, scouts are always influenced by the strength of the league, the culture of the club, the playing model, the owner and the supporters,” he said in one of the paragraphs in the book.
He further said scouts essentially look for two things, technique and personality. Personality involves such things as intelligence and attitude.
Steenbok advised scouts that they must have an open understanding policy that sometimes the latter might not get it right.
According to online writing by Goal.com, there is no specific route into football scouting, but it certainly helps to have had a background in football, either as a player or coach.
Such a background not only means that he or she has already possesses a basic knowledge of the game, but it means that he or she are also likely to have cultivated a useful network of contacts.
However, an individual does not need to have been either a player or coach in order to become a scout- and networks can be made in time.
