âWeâve found players everywhereâ - the rise of international football scouting
2025-01-13
Category: sports

A new year always brings new opportunities in the world of football - but any player receiving a call from Russell Gurr or Alastair McLae in 2025 could be in for a truly unexpected adventure.Together, Gurr and McLae run the International Football Consultancy, providing expertise in scouting and recruitment to clubs and national federations around the world.That also includes overseeing the heritage scouting strategy for some of the world's most remote footballing nations, including Samoa, Fiji and the Cook Islands.Through the use of artificial intelligence technology, they identify players with qualifying ancestry and connect them to the relevant football association. Essentially, they are international football matchmakers.In numerous cases, they have uncovered players from thousands of miles away who have no idea of the nations they are eligible to represent. The success of their work has led to ongoing advanced conversations with nations in Europe, Asia and the Caribbean, as developing football nations in particular attempt to become more competitive.Samoa head coach Jess Ibrom, who has worked with Gurr and McLae in his current role and during his time with the Cook Islands, can attest. "It's a way of bridging the gap to the nations above us," England-born Ibrom tells BBC Sport."A lot of players don't know they're eligible to represent a country. We've found players everywhere and it's really exciting unearthing them."
Gurr, working remotely from Scotland, and New Zealand-based McLae kick-start conversations between players and federations which have led to several senior international breakthroughs.Gurr's experience includes time spent as a coach, scout, and video analyst - but it was a volunteering role for the Football Federation of Samoa, aiding the nation of just 200,000 people in its search for players, which kindled his current venture."We're trying to grow this and help as many nations as we can," says Gurr."With Samoa, from 2021 to 2023 we found over 350 players. We found players in the Manchester City academy that are eligible, players in Spain, Qatar, China, Brazil, New Zealand, Australia. "You wouldn't believe where they are."Gurr estimates that from the players identified as eligible for Samoa, across all age groups in men's and women's football, about 60 debuts have so far been recorded.Their work with the Cook Islands, a nation of just 10,000 people, has identified 50 players and led to 10 debuts in just one year.Samoa coach Ibrom, who last year led the nation to back-to-back World Cup qualifying victories for the first time, said: "When Alastair reached out to me in 2021, it opened a conversation around what strategy we could develop in Samoa to enhance player identification. "Once they're identified, conversations can be facilitated by Alastair and Russ, or it can be as simple as a cold call - just this week I received a message from a potential player in the United States. "We've had massive success as a result. Every country is trying to do this now to compete at a high level on the international stage. It has really positively impacted the Samoa football federation."
So, how do they do it?Gurr and McLae developed their own AI heritage scouting system, allowing them to identify possible candidates through their extensive database and determine the probability of which nations a player could be eligible for.Combined with time-honoured, traditional scouting methods through their own research team, their standing in the sport has grown to the extent that they have even assisted popular video game Football Manager in updating its own database in the regions the pair operate in."About 50% of the players don't know they are even eligible," says Gurr."There's not one way to go about it, it depends on what the federation wants and how they want to operate. For example, with Samoa, because a big part of our focus was on youth players, we could go public and do a lot of work in communities."If you're after a professional player, you probably want things to be a bit more discreet. We can do both. We're speaking with bigger nations at the moment."Elite football is quite small, so once you're well thought of, you can get a good network quite quickly. But the other part of the process is being credible and having the ability to strike up a relationship with a player, parent or club."
One success story is that of Pharrell Trainor, who was identified as a teenager while at Australian club Newcastle Jets.The 18-year-old, who now plays his club football in Germany, has since progressed through Samoa's youth sides before breaking into the senior squad for last yearâs World Cup qualifying campaign.And while Samoa men's team achieved a nine-year high in the Fifa rankings in 2024, the work of Gurr and McLae has impacted at all levels. Of the women's squad who have qualified for the Under-17 tournament in Morocco later this year - the first time Samoa has ever reached a Fifa World Cup tournament at any level - 10 players were identified by them.Their most recent partnership with Fiji has so far connected them to players in England, the United States, Germany and Australia. With smaller nations keen to explore such routes to help take them to the next level, it is hoped that expansion into federations in Europe, Asia and the Caribbean will soon provide further success stories."We've had a really good reaction because we don't push a pathway to anyone. We purely tell them they're eligible and inform the federation that this player is eligible," Gurr explains."It's up to the player if they want to go down that avenue, and then it's up to the federation if they want to select the player."A lot of the time, the players are really excited to have that pathway open up to them. âA lot of them are excited to reconnect with that heritage."