EXCLUSIVE | Former Arsenal scout Gilles Grimandi on changes in scouting and his role in signing Olivier Giroud

EXCLUSIVE | Former Arsenal scout Gilles Grimandi on changes in scouting and his role in signing Olivier Giroud Get French Football News sat down with former Arsenal FC and AS Monaco star Gilles Grimandi to look back on his time as an Arsenal scout and how much the job has changed in modern football. You worked as a scout for Arsenal for many years. The stereotype of a scout in England used to be someone watching matches in the lower leagues in the rain and cold. I imagine that has changed a lot. Is the job now more about sitting in front of a computer and working with data, especially at a big club like Arsenal? Could you describe what recruitment work looks like today?   I think scouting is the area of football that has changed the most over the past 15 years. Originally, it was a job that required you to be out on the pitch all the time, watching every division because a talented player could potentially be found anywhere. Today, talented players can still slip through the net, but generally they are identified by clubs very early. They follow development pathways where they are visible.  Data has now overtaken the human eye. It has become much more important and has more influence on the final decision than a scout’s opinion, I think. Clubs now have so many tools available that it’s sometimes difficult to go against the data. There are armies of people working behind computers who can identify players, and they have more influence than a scout going to watch a match. There are fewer scouts doing that now. There are so many tools available, including physical statistics and all sorts of data, that the job has become about understanding which data will be useful for the club’s project and configuring it properly to identify the ideal profile of player the club is looking for.  The days of simply going to matches to look for a player you’d heard was talented are largely over. That may still happen, but I think it will be very rare.  I read that you were the person who recruited Olivier Giroud for Arsenal?   I knew Giroud well. I gave my opinion on all the French players, of course, because French football was my area. Sometimes I thought certain players weren’t good enough to come to us; sometimes I thought they were, but we didn’t sign them. My opinion was one part of a wider discussion.  I always thought Giroud was an effective player, but I never thought he would reach the level he eventually did. I felt he could have a place in any squad. He was someone who could come on and provide a solution when the team was struggling. I thought he offered a different profile from the players we already had. But I didn’t think he would be able to adapt as well as he did. Throughout his career, that’s what he’s done: adapted to each level and performed. He surprised people year after year.  At Robert Pires’s testimonial, I met Samir Nasri. He said, “ What are you doing now? You’re not recruiting any more, even though you were a great scout. ” I told him, “ You know, Samir, scouting involves making lots of mistakes. ” He said, “ No .” I said, “ Look, Franck Ribéry is ten metres away from you, and I missed him. I went to watch him ten times and still missed him. I didn’t believe in him, and look at what he went on to achieve.”  Scouting is very difficult because sometimes you have to project how a player will develop, and some people adapt in surprising ways. There are so many factors that can make you sceptical at a particular moment. People misunderstand how much guesswork is involved in scouting. You can get it wrong, just as you can misjudge a child and their future. There are so many factors that affect a child’s life that you can’t really know how things will turn out. But it’s a wonderful, fascinating profession.  I often went to Metz to watch Ribéry. I often thought he wouldn’t succeed over the long term. I knew he was talented, but I thought he might be a flash in the pan because he could sometimes seem all over the place. He wasn’t a particularly structured player, although he was talented. Players like Giroud, who were overlooked at first and then went on to reveal their ability, are examples of that. You see it much less today, but it still happened back then.  Recruitment has changed, and data is not my speciality. I understand it and know how it works, but I’m more of a man of the pitch, instinct and feel than of data.  Gilles Grimandi was speaking exclusively to Get French Football News courtesy of BetVictor Online Casino GFFN | Jeremy Smith