Charlotte MLS wants to build roster with world’s best young talent. Here’s how they scout
Charlotte MLS director of scouting Thomas Schaling said that five years ago, he might not have considered making the jump from PSV Eidhoven, a soccer club in the top Dutch football league where he previously served as an international scout, to Major League Soccer in the United States.
“I might’ve considered it more of a league to end your career,” Schaling said.
But Schaling said that he has watched MLS develop into a destination market for talented, young international players, and that was part of the appeal when taking an overseas job in Charlotte. That will also likely become a selling point that he and his team employ when building the roster for the city’s expansion team, which is set to take the field for its inaugural season in a little more than eight months.
“MLS is not a retirement league anymore,” Schaling said. “It’s somewhere you go to be competitive, whether it’s the last few years of your career or the first few years. I think MLS is becoming a viable option for young talent in Latin America and even in Europe to come and play for a few years and make a jump from there.”
Despite the global coronavirus pandemic that has postponed his move to the United States (he was originally planning to move from Amsterdam to Charlotte with his family in late April or early May), Schaling’s team of scouts is still actively working to build a 30-man roster so a full lineup is ready to take the field for the 2021 season.
Schaling said he is probably doing more scouting now with his team, which includes special advisor Steve Walsh and three new additions, by watching footage of the most recent matches before the sports world shut down using the soccer video and analytics provider Wyscout instead of traveling to attend live matches.
“Now that we’re all stuck at home, at least we can watch a lot more than we could when doing live scouting,” Schaling said.
The budding team’s scouting director said he is also having daily calls with sporting director Zoran Krenta and technical director Marc Nicholls about potential players, which is a promising sign that the coronavirus pandemic has not significantly altered the team’s launch schedule. Charlotte MLS owner David Tepper and president Tom Glick have not yet commented on how COVID-19 will impact the expansion team’s launch and the construction of the team’s future headquarters and practice facilities at the former Eastland Mall site.
From a recruiting perspective, Schaling said COVID-19 has not changed the initial plans for signing players during the MLS transfer windows. Ideally, Charlotte MLS will still begin signing players during the league’s Secondary Transfer Window this summer, Schaling said, but the bulk of player signings will likely come in the winter right before the season begins.
The league’s transfer windows are periods when teams are able to register international players, as well as when in-season trades between MLS clubs can take place. The Secondary Transfer Window is open July 7 through August 5. Additionally, since 2016, MLS has allowed clubs to add five players during the expansion draft, which usually takes place in November.
“It’s really a unique position that we’re looking for so many new players all at once,” Schaling said. “Usually you have the foundation of players and then one to four might leave and you try and find the right replacements.”
“And now we just have to lay the whole puzzle within a year and look for the first few pieces on that and build from there.”
As parties across sports navigate the impact of coronavirus, roster-building at Charlotte MLS continues, and Schaling said he is implementing a methodical and thorough approach to scouting with his team.
“The way I kind of envision it is that we find interesting players, statistics or video analysis,” Schaling said. “And we try to get the whole team involved in watching these players once one of our people is excited about him.”
The team is then using a rating system to cull down its list, but all scouts are involved in the process, which includes hours of video analysis. Even though consensus is key, there is flexibility in terms of the player’s region and style of play.
“We’ve decided not to be too open about the style of play just yet, because we want to give the new manager the space to talk about his vision more freely,” Schaling said.
In addition to cutting out live scouting, Schaling is also getting acclimated with the rules of U.S. soccer, which differ from international leagues. For example, MLS uses a “Discovery List,” in which teams present their top seven seven prospective players not currently in the league to MLS. There are also more rules around salary caps and team budgets than what Schaling dealt with at PSV, he said.
“It’s basically the only league where you have a real specialist in your organization working on this allocation of transfer fees and a salary,” Schaling said. “It’s something completely different.”
But Schaling said it has been an interesting challenge learning a new system and that he is remaining optimistic in terms of landing the players he’s seeking despite more restrictive salary caps. Schaling wouldn’t give any names in order to keep prospective players on the table.
“Unless I’m talking about the biggest stars in the current European soccer landscape, I would probably still think that there might be opportunities for us with a lot of these players now or in the future,” Schaling said.
He said the team is looking for guys who are “hungry” at the core, and that while it’s interesting to talk about “big names,” there is a whole world of underrated talent that can have a serious impact in MLS.
“Obviously, I know that it’s appealing to talk about the (Wayne) Rooneys and (Zlatan) Ibrahimović’s, or (David) Beckhams,” Schaling said. “But in the end, I think it’s more about the quality and current level. Some of those stars that have come to the U.S. have done fantastically. Others have not done as well.”
That means that Charlotte’s initial roster could consist of players that, like Schaling, never imagined themselves in the league five years ago.
“If there’s anything I’ve learned in 10-plus years of soccer is that there’s a lot of things that can change really quickly,” Schaling said.
This story was originally published April 17, 2020 at 10:03 AM.
