About
About
I work in football. I spent several years coaching in youth football, and I am now a scout at CF União de Lamas.
01Who I am
Where I am and what I do
My job is to find and assess players, and to keep the department's information in a state where someone can act on it. That means watching matches live and on video, writing up what I saw, keeping the player database current, and keeping a shortlist that reflects what we actually need.
What interests me is the judgement itself — how you decide what a player is from a limited number of viewings — and how a department organises what it knows so that judgement survives contact with a season.
I also write software. I built the two tools I use every week, which is a long way from where I started, and the reason is in the last section of this page rather than at the front of it.
02My journey
From coaching to scouting
I started on the training ground. Two seasons as a trainee coach in Vila Real, at Abambres and then Diogo Cão, while I was studying Sports Science at UTAD. Later, two and a half years as an assistant coach at Cucujães.
Coaching is where I learned to watch. A coach sees the same players every week, in training and in matches, and that repetition teaches you something a single viewing cannot: the difference between what a player did on a given afternoon and what he is. You see who solves the same problem twice, who needs the ball in front of him, who disappears when the game gets tight.
It also teaches you what a coaching staff can actually work with. A report that describes a player in the abstract is of no use to someone picking a team on Friday.
Scouting asks for the same habit under harder conditions. You are watching players you do not train, usually once or twice, and you have to be honest about what that is enough to tell you. The step from one to the other was gradual: I found that the part of coaching I thought about most was the assessment, and I went looking for work where that was the job.
In July 2026 I joined CF União de Lamas as a scout.
- 2018/2019Trainee coachAbambres
- 2019/2020Trainee coachDiogo Cão
- 2024/2026Assistant coachCucujães
- Since July 2026ScoutCF União de Lamas
03My approach
How I see scouting
Scouting starts with watching, and watching starts with understanding the game the player is in. I am not trying to tick attributes off a list. I want to know what a player does, when he does it, and what his team is asking of him at that moment — because the same action can be a good decision in one structure and a poor one in another.
That is why I pay attention to behaviour more than to moments. Anyone can pick out the pass that broke the line. What tells you more is what the player does in the twenty minutes around it: where he stands before the ball arrives, what he does when the move breaks down, whether he repeats the thing he just got right.
Live viewing, video and data each show me something the others do not. Live, I can watch a player away from the ball and see the whole pitch he is reacting to. Video lets me go back over a decision until I understand it, and check whether a habit is really a habit. Data covers ground I will never be able to watch, and it is honest about volume in a way memory is not.
I use data to decide who is worth watching, not to decide whether a player is good. It narrows a league to a list, points out the player whose numbers do not match his reputation, and makes me check a profile I would otherwise have ignored. It does not tell me whether he can play in a particular team, and I have not found a number that does.
A good part of the job is not watching at all. It is choosing what is worth recording, writing it in a form someone else can use, and keeping it somewhere it can be found six months later. A scouting department that cannot explain why it dropped a player last season will make the same decision again.
04Technology and data
An additional tool
I did not learn to program because I wanted to work in technology. I learned because the work kept running into problems that software could solve, and the software either did not exist or cost more than a club at this level can spend.
The first problem was organisation. The department's information lived in a spreadsheet that could answer one question at a time and remembered nothing about why a decision had been made. So I built something that holds players, observations, assessments and reports together, and keeps the reasoning attached to the verdict.
The second was data. A statistical export is hundreds of rows and more than a hundred columns, and on its own it answers nothing — a per-90 number means little until you know who it is being compared against. So I built something that sets up the comparison properly and lets me read a profile and put two players side by side.
Both run on my own machine, on data the club already has. I describe how they work, and what they do not do, under Projects.
I treat this as a complementary skill, not a second career. It is useful because I know what the work needs, not because I am especially good at writing software.
05Education
Education and development
Academic
- Sports ScienceUniversidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro2016 – 2020
Scouting and talent identification
- Scouting & Game AnalysisLiga Portugal Business SchoolOctober 2026
- PFSA Level 1 & Level 2 — Talent IdentificationProfessional Football Scouts Association2025
- Introduction to Talent IdentificationEngland Football LearningYear to confirm
- Introduction to Football AnalyticsHudl StatsBombYear to confirm
Technology
- Full Stack DevelopmentProvider to confirmYear to confirm
- Python applied to footballProvider to confirmYear to confirm
06Contact
If any of this is useful to you
I am glad to talk about scouting, recruitment, player assessment, or building tools for this kind of work — whether that is about a role, a project, or simply comparing how we each go about it.