8. The Nowhere Men Michael Calvin
Do you think you have a good idea of how football clubs scout prospective signings? Read The Nowhere Men by Michael Calvin and you will drastically revise your opinions. With access to a range of scouts from vastly different walks of life and levels of the game. Littered with anecdotes, The Nowhere Men makes for compelling reading and is a real eye-opener in terms of the struggles smaller clubs, even at Championship level, have in terms of keeping hold of starlets they have nurtured. Calvins book delves deeply into the differing scouting methods employed, from the old school scouts who watch a game and scribble their notes on the back of a fag packet, to those obsessed with the Moneyball culture fostered in baseball and worship the statistics. What becomes evident is that scouting, while not an exact science, is still an art, albeit with some exponents of it struggling with increasingly uncertain futures.