Interview with Tommy Johnson: The Ins and Outs of Scouting

Our guest is ex-player and current scout Tommy Johnson. Johnson was a famous player representing Notts County, Aston Villa, Derby and Celtic in the 1990s and early 2000s.

But today we will be speaking to him exclusively about his time as a scout. He got his break in scouting when he was U-23s coach at Northern Ireland.

He then was a European scout at Cardiff, before becoming the Head of Player Recruitment at Blackburn. Most recently he was a senior UK scout at Watford before there was a restructuring at the club and he was let go.

In this episode he'll discuss: scouting Gary Medel, how scouting differs amongst various clubs, how data has influenced scouting, the biggest challenges of the job and other insights into what the life of a scout is actually like.

Due to the high demand of the work, I will now be doing episodes bi-weekly, therefore every other week. This will ensure that I can spend more time making every episode as good as it can be. I do the show by myself and as of late I feel like I haven't been able to put in as much time as is necessary. So the next episode will come out on March 12th.

Listen Here:

Timeline:

5:08 Scouting Gary Medel

12:45 Scouting in Spain

21:22 How many times he sees a player before they're signed

28:05 How data has influenced scouting

31:30 Scouting department sizes

38:39 Day in the life of a scout

46:04 Networking

53:31 Defining characteristic for being a scout

59:08 Biggest challenge