John Carver reveals more on Newcastle United’s scouting techniques.
Posted on October 8th, 2011 | 55 Comments |
Whilst awaiting a call from agent Pardew on where his next scouting mission will take him (apparently), Carver spilled the beans on the kind of things the club will be looking at in it’s current current talent quest for players who may have the NUFC ‘X-Factor’.
He revealed:
“We’ve made a decision on the players we grade highly, we will put together the data on them,” said Carver. “We’ve got a couple of analysts beneath the backroom team who put that together.
“If he’s a centre-forward we’ll look at his movement, his scoring, his fitness stats. Then we’ll look at his value in the current market depending on age. We’re quite thorough and we compare them to players in the Premier League.
“We also have a section where we tap into as many contacts as we can about personality and character. You can have a top, top player who might have ability, but you don’t know whether his character might unsettle the group.”
Carver then went on to stress the importance of the club’s academy and reserve teams, taking a look back to the Keegan days when the Magpies lost players such as Michael Carrick due to the lack of opportunities outside the first team. In what some may describe as a bit of a swipe at Keegan’s lack of interest in matters at the grassroots level of the club, Carver continued:
“We lost Michael Carrick because Kevin Keegan didn’t have a reserve team. His parents asked me “Where’s he going to play John?” I said the first team and they told me to come off it. We had the entertainers here, he was never going to get in. So they took him to West Ham.
“The reason why we’ve had a problem since then is because we’ve had so many people in charge of the academy. We haven’t had people to see a certain development programme through.
“Now the kids are seeing the young Sammy Ameobi coming through, Haris Vuckic, who’s been in the system a long time. Shane Ferguson is the same. The encouraging thing for the club is that there’s a pathway for them now, which there maybe wasn’t when the club was spending a lot of money on new players. The culture is changing. The manager has said he will play them if they’re good enough – like he played Ferguson at Stoke.”
Some good stuff from the assistant there, however I do wonder about the “personality and character” bit. Of course, Hatem Ben Arfa was a potentially great signing for the club, however he does have a fair bit of history on the primadonna front, including throwing all of his toys out of the pram at Marseilles to force his move to the Premiership. The same is also true of current hitman target, Modibo Maiga, who has also been engaged in similar toy throwing antics at his current club, Sochaux. Who’s to say that they won’t do they same thing if they are a great success on Tyneside and even bigger clubs make an attempt to sign them?
NUFCBlog Author: workyticket
workyticket has written 1096 articles on this blog.
Great article worky, thanks. Only part of the story of our progress is what happens in the 1st team – all our teams are doing realy well and this type of serious (and presumably well funded) R & D could result in future success – not just this & next season but for years to come – fantastic!
HWTL