The Nowhere Men: The Unknown Story of Football's True Talent Spotters Paperback – November 1, 2014

A great narrative look at what scouting entails in the lower leagues of England. While I wish it got into a little more of the technical details of what scouts look for and how they compile information, Michael Calvin does a great job of humanizing these men and highlighting the struggles of making a living doing what they do.

Terrific analysis of a misunderstood breed, and their fight for relevance. Terrible job, but they live for the day they see that special talent, the one they've been looking for

Got a real understanding of what motivates the scouts and how much effort is required all for the chance to stay in the game most love

Having heard the author on the BBC I thought this sounded interesting, but would not recommend this at all, it would make for an extended essay based around one or two scouts, but this is incredibly repetitive, and not well written. Scouts are salt of the earth, work for nothing, no security of employment, and various other common threads which are repeated over and again from the mouths of one scout after another. Where the author does interject his own voice it is often a combination of clunky metaphor (the match struggled over the finish line like a dehydrated marathoner) or just plain poor writing, rarely have I had to go back in a book of this level so often to try and figure out who he's talking about.Save your money, and if you haven't read it, buy The Miracle of Castel di Sangro instead!

Loved this book - great (but a little sad) description of scouts’ lives.

Michael Calvin does it again. You already know the quality of writing to expect from a writer as accomplished as him.

Bought his as a gift for my husband and he loved reading it. A must have for a soccer/futbol fan!

Great read. It's been weeks since I've finished this book and I still find myself thinking back to the stories that Michael Calvin shared.

This is arguably Michael Calvin's best book on football as it dispenses with the glamour and gets to the real heart of the game and the men who travel up and down the country in the hope of spotting the next big thing. You can almost feel the wind blowing on your face and the rain running down your neck as you stand alongside some of the scouts as they run their eye over a player on behalf of their clubs. Well worth a read.

Amazon currently offer over 15,000 books on football and I am sure that the overwhelming majority are the ghosted memoirs of the latest pampered Premier League brat and originality is hard to come by.Mike Calvin has been around Fleet Street for many years and has established a reputation for pithy columns that get to the nub of the matter and for his ability to eviscerate cant and hypocrisy.His previous book "Family", a year in the life of Millwall took us inside the heart and soul of a football club and made us look at the club in a totally new light. The book was rightly acclaimed even if it wasn't totally original as he was following the example set by writers such as Hunter Davies but "The Nowhere Men" is totally different in every way.Calvin has broken new ground and cast light on a hitherto ignored and unknown segment of the game, the scouts who are responsible for identifying and maintaining the pipeline of young talented players, some as young as the age of six.He follows a group of scouts and becomes the fly on the wall, recording their conversations, insecurities, fears, whinges and even paranoia as they strive to discover the next potential superstar.Like most people who spend an inordinate period of their lives working alone on the road and then on their backsides at football matches most scouts are garrulous individuals and their stories are explicit, razor sharp and do not spare the guilty and Calvin is an excellent listener and this book gives them their voice.There are many footballers who will shrink at the honesty of the withering verdicts of their ability or heart or lack of it and their weaknesses are laid bare by the group of scouts whose job it is to assess em.Men like the evergreen John Griffin and Mel Johnson are seasoned watchers of the game and able to make detailed assessements of a player's ability and likelihood to make a living from the game within a few moments of watching them.You learn to watch the player and not the game itself which apparently is why many managers make poor scouts as they lack the singleminded ness required.What is amazing is the cavalier fashion in which many scouts are treated, disposed of like old socks when a manager loses his job, working for expenses only and likely victims of the next palace revolution.Calvin gives them their voice and reveals them as the unsung heroes that they are.We hear fisherman's tales of the ones that got away and for all their camaraderie. and sense of togetherness the scouts are competing against eachother and try to pull the wool over their rivals' eye.Calvin also lays open the current debate regarding the value of the traditional scout who trusts his eye, experience and judgment when assessing a player and the new breed of performance analysts who follow the Moneyball tradition of using statistics to make their choices.There is an uneasy relationship between the two and this is a struggle that will continue.The rich get richer but it is gratifying to read of smaller clubs such as Brentford who are punching way above their weight and are outperforming the bigger boys in the way in which they structure their youth development programme.The book is 390 pages of pure gold dust, well written, sympathetic and insightful.It did beg a few questions. Are there any female scouts and if not, why not as women are now contributing so well at all levels of the game?We learn about the extraordinary range of player performance statistics provided by companies such as Prozone which are used by clubs to learn so much about how their own players perform in matches and training. Can clubs purchase such data about players at competitive clubs to help decide who best to purchase?As you can see I finished this book bubbling with enthusiasm and having learned so much more about the Nowhere Men.This is a totally original book that breaks new ground and it is sure to cause a stir within the game as well as provide rich entertainment to those who choose to read it.I said at the time that Mike Calvin would do well to better "Family" but in this reader's opinion he has totally surpassed it.

As has been mentioned in a couple of reviews many football books are ghost written memoirs and are full of the usual stock phrases that footballers use. This is as far from that as it is possible to be and all the better for it. It uncovers the unfashionable, rarely talked about and job security wise, unstable world of the football scout. The meticulous research carried out by the author is clear from the start. It doesn't concentrate on the flashy world those who aren't in the know think scouting covers. It looks at the job warts and all including the many scouts who get 40p per mile as their payment. My brother in law is a scout and I've seen first hand that the scouting business isn't the staying in 5* hotels and watching a top premier league game from the posh seats whilst being wined and dined in the hospitality suite. Usually it's a long drive to a non league or reserve game, a place in an uncovered stand watching in sub zero temperature with a self bought rancid pie for company followed by a lonely journey home punctuated by calls on the mobile to your manager or agents and then writing a detailed report before you go to bed. Rewards? The most unstable employment status in football with the knowledge that should the manager leave or the c.ub needs to tighten the purse strings the first to be cut is the scout. All this is fascinatingly described in the book. It also highlights the growth in the "football manager" chairmen and owners who have played the PC game and think they can do it all from a computer screen - the analyst approach covered so wel in Michael Lewis' Moneyball. What these owners and chairmen don't realise is that good scouting and recruitment needs both and Michael Calvin vividly makes this clear. The one thing that shines through the whole book is the camaraderie that the various scouts share (even though this is sometimes guarded because it is a dog eat dog world) and how they help and support each other in tough times. It really is a superb book written by a superb writer and one of the best football books I have ever read. I HIGHLY recommend it! It made me read his earlier book following a year in the life of Millwall - another superb book.

To add context I read this book in a week, and if I'm honest, I think that's how it needs to be read.It's a fascinating insight into the world of scouting, and more importantly, the people who give so much, for so little, and are being marginalised more and more, as football becomes richer and richer and attempts to become more risk adverse.It's a book that for me started slowly, with good reason. It builds characters which comes to fruition halfway through as you feel as though you know the main characters (I think I can almost visualise Mel and his son Jamie Johnson).Overall I found the book to boil down to the age old battle, between art and science. The art comes from the traditional scout, who can watch a player time and time again, and their "gut" will tell them if they are top quality (take the story about Rocastle as a perfect example) while the science element comes from the data analysts, the new boys, the "geeks".It provides a brilliant balance, and while I feel Michael errs towards the traditional scout as his favourite, he essentially gives good arguments for both.In the end, I know a lot of people who would enjoy reading this book. I don't think it's necessarily one for the "Championship Manager" generation, but rather those who feel they understand the intricacies of football, but after reading this, will probably admit, myself included, they haven't got a clue.A thoroughly brilliant holiday read and I would easily read another of Michael's books in a heartbeat.

The best thing that can be said about this book is that it is largely inoffensive. Then again, that's probably the worst thing that could be said about any book on football. It is not provocative or challenging, thought-provoking or startling.The author, essentially, speaks to a variety of scouts, largely in the south of England, and gets their views on what their job involves. Key points are made early on in the book. One is that scouts appear to be very poorly paid - Calvin portrays them as "anoraks" who are addicted to attending numerous low-grade football matches in the hope of spotting a rare talent. In return for such - largely-unrewarded - dedication, they are frequently jettisoned swiftly by the clubs when a new manager takes charge. His other major point is that, in the 21st century, there is a scouting conflict between using technology to assess and buy players and the traditional use of eyes, ears and gut instinct on the part of scouts. I have reached page 159 in the book and that's about all that can be gleaned from it. I won't be reading any more. Calvin simply interviews a series of scouts who huddle at the back of stands and are treated shabbily by host clubs but none of the scouts is distinguishable as a character, largely because the author, a journalist, lacks the ability to describe them as rounded individuals, instead seeing them as providers of endless "quotes", the way a newspaper hack tends to do. In one chapter, he simply stands back, runs his tape recorder and transcribes a three-way conversation between three experienced scouts. That's not writing - that's acting as a stenographer. That symbolises just how there is no real author's voice in this book. How it won The Times' Sports Book of the Year for 2014 is one of the great mysteries of our time.