We were talking in the manager’s office after a game and Jamie said 'you should do a book about us scouts'.

One of the chapters was on the scouting process, dealing with Jamie and a guy called Steve Jones who was there at the time. For a previous book, which is called Family, I spent a year basically embedded at Milwall FC, which is an interesting club uniquely challenging in many ways but which I found to be really rewarding. I got the idea through a guy called Jamie Johnson who is Millwall's chief scout. How long did you spend researching and interviewing people? And how did you decide who to talk to?ġ5 months is about what I spent on the road.įootball is a very big industry but a very small world. They were almost disrespected by their game and their clubs, to a degree, and that really did surprise me. That's the one thing that really surprised me in the fifteen months that I spent on the road with these guys. The thing is that they're not really appreciated by the game itself. It is a really disconnected life, a lot of time on the road, eating on the run. But no one really knows who they are, were they are, how they operate and why they do what they do.

They are the faceless men who stand on the touchline and spot raw talent. And that's strange because if you look at it scouts are central to the mythology of football. One area people know very little about is scouting and recruitment. We know every last thing that happens in the game, players present a certain image of themselves, clubs work increasingly hard at massaging their image as well. We live in a world were football is massively over exposed. What made you think of writing a book about football scouts? In it – and in this interview – he shows how the best scouts go about forming an opinion on players and why some clubs hold back from signing a player even though there is both the financial ability by the club and talent on the part of the player. As he journeys into the world of football scouting, talking to an impressive number of people who work in that area, Michael Calvin slowly shows you what goes into scouting a player, bringing down the illusion – for those naïve enough to believe it – that selecting a player to add to a squad is any easy process. There is very little which gives you real insight into how the game works very little from which you walk away feeling that you’re slightly more capable in discerning what is happening. A lot of it is fluff guess work by those who either wrongfully imply they have contacts within the game or else argumentative nothing by people trying to show how clever they are.

Each day thousands upon thousands of words are written about football.

The Nowhere Men by Michael Calvin