Lee Johnson has revealed that he and Stuart Harvey ran the rule over latest signings Leon Dajaku and Ron-Thorben Hoffmann in person before bringing them to Sunderland - albeit before the Covid pandemic struck.
The Black Cats brought in 22-year-old Bayern Munich goalkeeper Hoffmann and 20-year-old Union Berlin winger Dajaku on deadline day loan deals, with clauses in place that could see those moves made permanent next summer.
Sunderland's switch of focus to the Bundesliga came as a surprise to fans, and many have wondered how those players came to the club's attention.
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But Johnson says the club has done its due diligence on both men, and he and the club's head of recruitment Harvey have seen them play live.
"We'd seen them live, myself and Stuart, but not recently because it's difficult to travel anywhere overseas.
"Myself and Stuart had both come from clubs [Bristol City and Blackburn Rovers respectively] that had strong recruitment systems, but when we came here there was nothing left for us so we have had to draw on the knowledge we had of players from our time at our previous clubs."
And as for exactly how the moves came to fruition, he added: "Any deal can happen in a number of ways.
"We've talked about data before, there's football-nous in terms of players you've seen before or that the head of recruitment has seen before or that the sporting director has seen before, and it all gets put into a system and gets reviewed and reviewed before it comes to me.
"Dajaku in particular was an agent-led shout, but he was a player that we knew well, myself and Stuart Harvey, having seen him play for Germany at youth level.
"Originally, the awareness came about via an agent - an English agent, actually - who pitched it at exactly the right level.
"The club did a great job to convince both of those players to drop to tier three in English football, because they are both very highly renowned young players and often foreign players don't want to drop to League One.
"A lot of work went into it, to bring their families over a week or ten days beforehand, to show them round.
"Everything is taken into account, the data, the eye, previous scouting reports, checking ut players' personalities whether that be via their Instagram profiles or whatever. All of it is considered before we make a decision."
Hoffmann and Dajaku completed their moves late on deadline day, but the deals had been long in the making.
They became the eighth and ninth additions of the summer, and Johnson now feels that his squad is in good shape for the season ahead.
He said: "They probably came onto our radar about eight weeks before we signed them.
"It was a long process because they were difficult deals to do.
"But that's why I said [during that time] that I wasn't panicking because I knew the kind of quality of players we were looking at.
"I think people are generally pleased with the transfer work we have done, and now it will inevitably be down to how they [Hoffmann and Dajaku] perform and what results we get - that will determine whether or not they get the opportunity to stay."
