Football recruitment strategy has become increasingly sophisticated.
Clubs have invested heavily in player identification. Scouting departments are more specialised. Data allows recruitment teams to evaluate larger markets. Video has reduced geographical barriers. Meanwhile, clubs increasingly combine live observation with performance data, physical profiling, psychological assessment and market intelligence.
Yet better information does not automatically produce better recruitment.
A club can identify a good player, negotiate a reasonable transfer and still make a poor recruitment decision.
The explanation lies partly in how recruitment is understood. It is often treated as a function concerned with finding and acquiring players. In reality, recruitment depends on decisions made across the organisation.
What is the club trying to build? What does the squad require? What financial exposure is acceptable? What capabilities does a particular role demand? Can the coaching environment use those capabilities effectively?
As a result, the scouting process can function well while the recruitment system around it does not.
Player quality is not recruitment quality
The distinction is fundamental.
Player quality asks whether an individual possesses sufficient technical, tactical, physical and psychological capability.
Recruitment quality asks something different:
Was acquiring this player, at this moment, under these conditions, the right decision for this organisation?
A player can satisfy the first test and fail the second.
Consider a technically accomplished midfielder recruited for a coach who requires specific positional behaviours. The coach leaves. His successor uses a different midfield structure and values different attributes.
The player’s ability has not necessarily deteriorated. His functional relevance has changed.
It is tempting to conclude that the transfer failed because the wrong player was identified. However, that diagnosis may miss the more important issue.
Why was a substantial, multi-year investment so dependent on assumptions that disappeared when one individual left?
The question shifts attention away from the player and towards the architecture behind the decision.
Why football recruitment strategy begins before scouting
Most recruitment analysis happens relatively far downstream.
Clubs debate which player should be signed. They compare candidates, assess valuations and consider whether a player can adapt to a particular competition.
However, several more consequential decisions should already have been made before a scout produces a shortlist.
What type of football is the organisation trying to enable?
Which elements of that approach should remain relatively stable?
What does the existing squad lack?
Which positions require immediate performance and which require succession planning?
What level of financial exposure can the club tolerate?
And what, precisely, must the incoming player be capable of doing?
When these questions remain unresolved, greater scouting sophistication can produce increasingly precise answers to a poorly defined problem.
The underlying issue is decision coherence.
A football recruitment strategy can instead be understood as a sequence of dependent decisions:
Sporting direction → Financial parameters → Squad architecture → Role requirements → Player identification → Coaching compatibility
Each decision constrains the next.
When those relationships are clear, recruitment becomes more selective. When they are not, different parts of the organisation can optimise for different objectives.
A coach may prioritise immediate tactical utility. Recruitment may identify high-potential talent. Finance may focus on acquisition cost and wages. Ownership may value future trading potential. Performance staff may identify physical risk.
None of these perspectives is inherently wrong.
The organisational challenge is deciding which considerations take precedence, under what circumstances and who has the authority to resolve the trade-offs between them.
Recruitment is therefore not simply a scouting problem.
It is an organisational design problem.
Sporting identity should create boundaries, not rigidity
One response is to give the club, rather than the head coach, greater ownership of its sporting direction.
The principle is useful, but it can easily become too rigid.
A club-driven approach should not require every coach to use the same formation or reproduce identical tactical patterns. Nor should it mean recruiting interchangeable versions of previous players.
Instead, sporting identity should establish decision boundaries.
Some principles can remain relatively stable. Others should adapt as players, competition and strategy change. Tactical execution can remain considerably more variable.
This creates three levels.
Stable: the broader sporting principles and characteristics the club consistently values.
Adaptive: squad composition, positional profiles and the interpretation of individual roles.
Variable: selections, match plans, combinations and much of the team’s day-to-day tactical execution.
The precise boundary will differ between clubs.
What matters is that the organisation knows where that boundary sits.
Otherwise, a managerial appointment can unintentionally become a change in recruitment strategy.
The squad usually outlives the coach
This creates an important structural tension.
Players are commonly acquired as multi-year investments. Coaching leadership can operate on a much shorter cycle.
Research on managerial turnover consistently shows how frequently clubs change coaches. The CIES Football Observatory, for example, has documented substantial differences in managerial stability across leagues and clubs. That wider evidence reinforces the organisational problem: clubs often make long-term player commitments within much shorter leadership cycles.
When the coach effectively owns the recruitment logic, these different time horizons can collide.
A new coach brings different ideas. Those ideas can change the perceived usefulness of players acquired under the previous regime.
Some players become peripheral. Different profiles are requested. The club returns to the market. Existing contractual commitments remain.
The organisation can then enter a recurring cycle:
New coach → New requirements → New recruitment → Squad reconstruction → Coaching change → New requirements
The visible consequence is additional recruitment expenditure.
More importantly, the organisation repeatedly resets the assumptions behind its previous investments.
This does not mean clubs should protect existing decisions from change. Some strategic resets are necessary. A squad may genuinely require reconstruction, while a new coach may expose assumptions that should have been challenged earlier.
The important distinction is between deliberate change and accidental drift.
Recruitment continuity does not mean preserving every previous decision. It means ensuring that changes to the underlying logic are conscious organisational choices rather than automatic consequences of managerial turnover.
Finance should shape the search
The same principle applies to finance.
Financial scrutiny often appears near the end of recruitment. The sporting department identifies a player, negotiations develop and the organisation determines whether the transaction is affordable.
However, affordability is only one financial consideration.
A club’s economic model should influence recruitment before individual candidates are discussed.
Age, contract length, wages, acquisition cost, development potential, residual value and the concentration of capital across the squad all influence the nature of an investment.
Consequently, two players of similar sporting quality can represent fundamentally different organisational decisions.
The question should not only be:
Can we afford this player?
It should also be:
What type of investment should this squad position represent?
For a club prioritising immediate competitive performance, limited future resale potential may be acceptable.
By contrast, an organisation whose economic model relies partly on developing and trading players may reach a different conclusion.
Neither model is inherently superior. The recruitment decision must make sense within the economics of the organisation making it.
Therefore, sporting and financial strategy should meet before the approval stage. Financial logic should help define the search itself.
The squad is a portfolio of different intentions
This also changes how the existing squad can be understood.
Squad planning becomes more useful when the organisation can articulate the intended function and trajectory of its major player investments.
Some players provide core competitive performance. Others are developing towards larger roles. Some provide specialist capabilities or succession options. Certain players combine sporting contribution with development and future-value expectations. Others may be approaching a planned transition.
These categories should not become rigid labels.
Football remains uncertain. Development is not linear. Injuries intervene. Competitive circumstances change. Markets move. A player acquired for one purpose may develop into something different.
Nevertheless, defining the intended function of an investment creates useful discipline.
Before adding another player, the club has to answer:
What is this player supposed to change within the existing squad?
Without that clarity, recruitment becomes additive. Clubs repeatedly ask whether a potential signing is good enough without first establishing what the signing is supposed to accomplish.
Squad architecture changes the unit of analysis.
The incoming player is no longer evaluated only as an individual. Instead, the organisation evaluates what adding that player does to the system.
Scout the requirement before the player
This leads to a different conception of scouting.
Player-centred recruitment tends to begin with a familiar question:
How good is this player?
By contrast, requirement-centred recruitment begins elsewhere:
What problem are we trying to solve?
The questions are related, but they are not equivalent.
A player can possess impressive overall capability without possessing the specific combination of attributes required by a particular role.
Conversely, a player who appears less exceptional against generic benchmarks may provide considerable value because his capabilities correspond closely to a clearly defined requirement.
Therefore, the recruitment function has a more demanding task than ranking talent.
It must translate organisational needs into precise player requirements and then identify candidates capable of satisfying them.
That places responsibility on more than the scouting department.
If sporting leadership cannot define the requirement, scouts are being asked to search before the organisation has decided what it needs.
More data cannot resolve that ambiguity.
It can only analyse the available market more precisely.
The manager is part of the recruitment system
There is one further implication.
Managerial recruitment is also a squad decision.
Clubs can devote considerable analytical effort to determining whether a player fits a coach’s requirements. Yet they may apply a different standard when determining whether a prospective coach fits the squad the organisation has spent years constructing.
The asymmetry matters.
One player affects part of the system. A head coach can change the functional value of much of it.
Coaching appointments should therefore be examined partly through the same logic used for player recruitment.
What behaviours does the role require?
How compatible is the candidate’s approach with the existing squad?
Which players are likely to gain or lose functional relevance?
What additional recruitment would the appointment require?
Where does the candidate align with the club’s sporting principles, and where would they deliberately change them?
This does not mean appointing coaches who preserve the status quo.
A club may need a different direction. A new coach may be selected precisely because the existing model is no longer sufficient.
However, the consequences should be visible when the decision is made.
If a candidate requires a fundamentally different squad architecture, the club is not simply choosing between coaches. It may also be choosing between different recruitment programmes, different uses of existing players and different levels of future financial commitment.
Coaching compatibility is therefore not about finding someone who agrees with the organisation.
It is about understanding the organisational consequences of the football they intend to implement.
Recruitment quality is organisational quality
When a signing underperforms, asking who identified the player is necessary but insufficient.
Leaders should examine the chain of decisions that preceded the acquisition.
Was the sporting requirement clear?
Did it follow from an identifiable direction?
Was the squad need established before the search?
Were the financial characteristics appropriate for the intended investment?
Did the player’s capabilities correspond to the actual task?
Was the coaching environment compatible with those assumptions?
And who had the authority to change them?
Together, these questions reveal a different type of recruitment capability.
Strong recruitment is not simply the ability to gather more information about players. It is the ability to convert organisational intent into coherent decisions across sporting, financial, recruitment and leadership functions.
Better scouts matter. Better data matters. Better player evaluation matters.
But none can fully compensate for an organisation that repeatedly changes what it is recruiting for.
A recruitment decision should therefore not be judged only by whether the player was good.
It should be judged by whether the organisation had a coherent reason to acquire that player — and whether the logic behind that decision can survive beyond the circumstances in which it was made.
About the contributors
This analysis draws on practitioner thinking developed by Devy Rigaux and Andre Zanotta around recruitment strategy, squad construction and sustainable sporting decision-making.
Rigaux also teaches Recruitment & Squad Building in FOCUS’s MBA in Football Strategy & Leadership, where these questions are examined through the practical responsibilities of building and managing a squad.
Key implications
Define the problem before searching the market. Better player identification cannot compensate for unclear sporting requirements.
Make recruitment decision rights explicit. Clubs need clarity about what belongs to institutional sporting strategy, what coaches can adapt and who can change the underlying recruitment logic.
Treat the coach as part of squad architecture. A managerial appointment can change the functional and financial value of existing player investments.
