SCOUTED Notebook

It’s been eight days since the announcement, and Diego Luna hasn’t stopped. “I haven’t taken a break,” he laughs. “I’m continuing to work. I have goals to come back into pre-season ready to go. It won’t be pre-season for me. I wanna land in Salt Lake ready to play.” Real Salt Lake is his club but he’s not in the city when we speak. It’s RSL’s off-season and he’s just arrived in El Paso, Texas, after a 14-hour drive from the place he currently calls home.

After the first round of UEFA Champions League and UEFA Europa League fixtures, I published a full benchmarking of every relevant Stathead metric and introduced a few NBA-style statlines to watch out for. Instead of cataloguing every single metric in the article, I am diving straight into the watchlist concept. But you can be sure I have been through every single metric myself. Each night of UEFA Champions League action features nine games.

Through fires of conquest, tragedy and empire, football in Uzbekistan survived. Now, a forward-thinking crew of scouts and coaches are ushering their country towards a golden age. In this special, narrative epic, Neel Shelat chronicles the fall and rise of one of world football’s most remarkable underdogs - and talks to the people engineering it.

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Dear readers, Running a small, independent football magazine means always swimming against the tide. Finances are tough all the time, but especially right now. In March, our ad revenue collapsed on our Google site. Right now, subscriptions to Notebook aloneare not enough to support our small team of three. To survive and thrive this summer (and to reach our ten year anniversary in August), we need a plan - and your help. So: welcome to our first ever subscription drive.

SCOUTED50 is our collection of the fifty young talents we believe are best positioned to break into the mainstream during 2023/24. Throughout the season, we’ll be detailing all fifty in definitive profiles. Read the full list here. This one drills down on João Neves. This profile was produced as part of a commercial collaboration with SkillCorner, SCOUTED’s official data partner.

Dear readers, Welcome back to The Technical Area, one editor’s monthly blog about his team’s journey to create an independent football publication that, yaknow, doesn’t die. This month: an explanation and an urgent appeal for help. Then, a glance at what’s next - and a couple of recommendations. First, the explanation. We’ve been quiet these past few weeks. On staff we have two full-timers, one part-timer and three whenever-we-get-a-spare-second-between-our-real-job timers.

This is a publication about young football players. As some of them will be wearing Nike’s new England home shirt this summer, I felt the topic falls under our purview. Also it’s our newsletter and we can write about whatever we want. So here’s an Editor’s Take about the current insanity swallowing football discourse.

The train fares, caffeine hits, taxis - every expense we needed to turn this story into a reality - were paid for by those who subscribe to our journalism. If you appreciate independent football writing on the sport’s next young stars like this, please consider becoming a paid or free subscriber. Thank you! Adam Wharton is just 19. He’s tall, his head is shaven, his words are soft and well-measured.

The festive season is my favourite time of year. I associate winter with, discordantly, warmth: of fire, and the shine it leaves on blood-red baubles; and of contentment, the kind that allows my brain a rare of a rare peace from work. December is also the month of my birthday. On Friday, actually, I turned 28. Which means I’m ten years older than I was the first time I scribbled the words Scouted Football in a little black notebook.