Report: Tottenham to update scouting network under Paratici and Conte

There’s plenty that Tottenham Hotspur fans can criticize about the way the club has been run the past few seasons, but right up there is Spurs’ scouting and player identification processes. While the acquisition of Managing Director of Football Fabio Paratici has helped to alleviate some of those concerns in the recent term, in general it has felt as though the method by which Spurs identify potential transfer targets has been extremely opaque and has lagged behind other Premier League clubs that have been open about their methodology (looking at you, Leicester City).

That may be starting to change. Alasdair Gold, writing in Football.London, is reporting that under Paratici and new manager Antonio Conte, Spurs are planning to overhaul the club’s scouting infrastructure, including hiring new analysts with the goal of creating one of the best scouting networks in Europe.

As part of that process and with that expected increase in investment, numerous new recruitment roles are set to be created at the club as they seek to bring the best and brightest young players to north London for new head coach Antonio Conte to have at his disposal in the seasons to come.

This week a new video scout role was advertised online, with the successful candidate set to report directly to the club’s chief scout Brian Carey.

—Football.London

There’s been some online chatter about the job description of that particular position, which describes “irregular working hours” (a BIG red flag for anyone who isn’t a genuine workaholic) but notes that “the primary focus will be identifying younger talents with help from the analysis and data departments to filter players” from less-represented countries.

That goal sounds good to me. Tottenham should 100% be a club that purchases young, promising talent on the front edge of their development curve and then, under Conte, turns them into excellent players. That’s supposedly been the club’s ethos for a while now, but their actual transfer dealings haven’t always lived up to the promise. But Paratici does feel like a change, and if he can continue the forward momentum he started this past summer and also increase, improve, and modernize Spurs’ scouting network, then maybe Spurs can start landing some of those players that seem to always end up going to Leicester and impressing.