TFG may be considering Sam Jewell as recruitment guru

Looks a lot like him.

It didn't take a genius to "spot" Estevao because he was starring at age 15 as a potential new Neymar in Brazil's u17s 2 years before Chelsea bought him for £30m. Given his price and promise, he was always destined to sign for one of the richest clubs as per Vini Junior, Rodrygo etc.

Similarly, there was nothing remarkable about "spotting" Caiceido – because Caiceido was linked with about 100 clubs across Europe before Brighton secured his signature. Indeed, we were very closely linked to Caceido before he went to Brighton – so we had already spotted him then too (along with thousands and thousands of football nerds because he was all over YouTube in scouting clips).

These days the incredible availability of data means teenagers in Ecuador or South Korea will all be very well known across the market.

Perhaps Jewell's track record has not been "spotting" the talent – but in securing the deals. That presumably is more about relationships with agents and selling clubs – and convincing the player that there is a route to the first team via a development plan (such as strategic loans etc). Wages and fees on offer presumably also help...

There are a few clubs that genuinely engage in talent spotting such as Nordsjaellend in Denmark and the RB empire – since they bring in young teenagers from academies in Sub-Saharan Africa before some of them have been recognised at U15 level for, say, Mali or Burkina Faso.

With everyone else, the players are all hiding in plain sight in major international youth tournaments. There's not much "spotting" to be done.

What Brighton have done well though is use Tony Bloom's betting technology to detect value in the market, which helps them identify value in players which human "spotters" have overlooked. So perhaps Jewell's role also involved overseeing the data analytics output from the technology solution.

That database will be powered by AI with a user interface that will simply allow a club to say we want a 30 year old left back with these attributes at this price and salary with this growth potential over 3 years etc… the players names and agent contact details then get displayed on a dashboard that can be shared, printed, presented to the Board for agreement.

10 minutes work done by the office administrator.

The real skill and value from these guys will be negotiating power, painting the picture to the player, convincing ( paying) the agent and getting the deal over the line.

You can say everyone else knew about player A or B but everyone else didn’t sign them. Brighton did. Where other clubs maybe weren’t convinced Brighton where and their record is inarguably the envy of the premier league.

The great shame is clubs outside the top 6 have to employ this model. Fantastic recruitment to develop players for super league teams. Arguably if Brighton hadn’t sold all these players but instead added to them, they’d be a champions league team themselves.

Pay me to watch games for free and I’ll give you twenty top talents (min) per season.

I would prefer a steady hand on the tiller like Thelwell right now.

This is the kind of person that we should be looking to find.