Casting the Net Wider

Football's talent problem is not finding the best player in Saturday's match. It is that the system for recognising potential is narrow, biased in ways it can name, and almost entirely without memory. Players are seen once, judged against children who are a year older or a year further into puberty, and then either signed or forgotten, with no record surviving either decision. This paper argues that the honest opportunity is capacity and memory rather than prediction. A system can help people observe more players, record what they saw in a usable form, hold the context that makes a comparison fair, and prompt somebody to look again. It argues equally firmly that no model should rank a child, score their potential, or be trained on a club's own past selections, because such a model learns the club's history rather than the game.