Building a class by position

Recruiting one player at a time produces a board full of whoever happened to come across your desk. The board's position structure exists to stop that.

Start from the holes, not the names

Open Field view and read the zeros before anything else. The positions with nothing saved are your actual recruiting plan for the next month — more useful than any list of names you already have.

Then read the clusters. Four saved at one position usually means a coach went deep on one country or one contact, rather than that the position genuinely needs four candidates.

Recruiting position, not the player's position

Every player sits at the position you selected when running their report. That is deliberate: you are building a class of roles you need filled, not cataloguing what clubs abroad call people.

It also means you can assess the same player for two roles. If you are unsure whether someone is a full-back or a winger in your system, run both reports — each is scored against that role, and the player appears in both columns.

Class year

Each report is run for a specific recruiting class, so a board can hold players for more than one intake. When you are planning, be clear which year you are filling: a board that looks deep at centre-back may be deep in a class you have already closed.

Spread the countries

Your bundles cover 24 countries and there is no limit on reports, so a class assembled entirely from one country usually reflects where your contacts are rather than where the players are. Filling a position from three countries costs nothing extra and gives you three independent options if one falls through.

How many per position

There is no correct number, but the useful question is how many you would actually pursue. Two or three real candidates per open position is a working shortlist; ten is a research project you have not finished. When a column reaches ten, that is usually the signal to prune rather than to keep adding.

Prune deliberately

Remove players you have decided against. A board that has been pruned is a shortlist your staff can act on; one that has never been pruned is a list of everyone you have ever looked at, and it stops being read.

Removing is program-wide, since the board is shared. Nothing is lost — the report stays in the history of whoever ran it, and the player can be saved again.

Review it as a team sheet

Once a month, open Field view with your staff and go position by position. Three questions per position: do we have candidates, are they realistic for our level, and who is chasing them next. Staff view answers the last one — and shows whether the research is spread across your staff or resting on one person.

Let the board maintain itself

Reports re-generate every 14 days, so a player you boarded in October is not showing you October's football in January. Your job between reviews is adding and pruning, not refreshing.