It was 2am in the morning and Dean Gibson was sitting in the McDonald’s car park, just to make sure he had wifi access for an important call with an agent based in the United States. The scene aligns with some of the less glamorous stereotypes of working in recruitment and scouting: long nights journeying across the country alone, countless hours watching matches in all weather and often it will not even lead to signing the player. In women’s football, scouting is still in the embryonic stage of its development, but one Women’s Championship club is determined to change the perception of that and train up a new generation of scouts specifically skilled for the women’s game.
Gibson, recruitment manager for Southampton’s women’s and girls’ teams, is speaking to the Guardian about an initiative that his club is now running for a second successive season, named the Starling Bank Scout School, a 15-week programme that had 15 participants in 2024 and that has increased to 20 budding scouts for their current, ongoing class of 2025, and the scheme is heavily oversubscribed with 115 applicants for 2024 and now 160 applications for the latest programme.
