My Name is Diego Parada and I am a Football Scout Trained By One of the World’s Best Academies for Developing World-class Players
San Francisco, Calif. — My name is Diego Parada and I am a football scout trained by one of the world’s best football academies for developing world-class players.
From 2017 to 2019, I spent my summers in the Portuguese town of Alcochete, the home of the Academy of Sporting Clube de Portugal.
Sporting, established in 1906 and donning green and white stripes, are most known today for football products Cristiano Ronaldo and Luis Figo, who marked world football with their talent and genius. While these two players serve as the club’s ambassadors, tens and hundreds more have gone to play professional football and achieve world-class heights.
Barely 20 years old at the time, I knew football through the lens of a young academic who once paid more attention to MLS transfer rumors and Twitter updates on the next football club to come to San Franciso Bay Area than to AP Literature or college-level Astronomy. Heartedly, I was a recreational player in my adolescent years and as a young adult, I would be the first to show up to local professional football events as a founding supporter or as a retail associate.
At Sporting, I was exposed to the real world of football. My first morning was under the stern and witty guise of Nuno Mota, then head scout of the academy and the person who oversaw my curriculum before accepting me into the department of recruitment, responsible for identifying players across all 13 districts of Portugal from ages 6 to 20 years old.
I learned over the next few weeks how the academy was organized and how players were brought into the academy teams, usually playing one or two years above their age. With a paper notepad in hand and an excited mind in my brain, I followed my intuition on what to ask, what to observe, and how to be informed.
My mornings were dotted with routine espressos and heated chocolate croissants, followed by extraordinary periods of morning training. In 2017, they were chaptered by a budding Rafael Leao, in 2018 by Matheus Nunes, and in 2019, by Nuno Mendes among many others.
My lunches featured cheerful lunch ladies serving me more than I could chew while my ears attuned to the dialogues of my colleagues and mentors with Senhor Aurélio Pereira.
Not only did each year provide me with a highlighted perspective into what today’s football would look like, it also showed me that the “regular” world-class player is not an overnight success, it is a process.
While grasping the lengths the academy took to integrate players from their individual biological and socio-psychological backgrounds, I also understood that the recipe for an elite recruitment process is the categorization of information and your most precious observations.
In 2018, while organizing the academy’s three-room scouting archive, I found the treats of Cristiano Ronaldo’s and Luis Figo’s original observation documents. But that was not my most exciting find. It was the categorization of the more concurrent files where I had found the report for Mohamed Salah — this came to the academy’s surprise.
Whenever the summers ended, I would return home to Pinole, California, a town as similarly peaceful as Alcochete. While at the University of California, Berkeley, I would send back to Sporting reports of prospective teenagers and professionals from the United States and Mexico, while attending player combines and tryouts offering recruits insights into the combine’s top players.
Football in the United States, while having closed the gap many times with big signings, new clubs, modern stadiums, and international tournaments, is still reasonably far away from becoming a football potential. From my lens, it came down to the need for more understanding and subsequent funding of football scouting methodology.
And its effects remain large. There is not yet one singular unanimous academy giant to the level of Barcelona’s La Masia, Amsterdam’s Ajax, or Portugal’s Sporting that recruits to develop the talent that defies the sport and the history of football.
After graduating from UC Berkeley in the summer of 2020, I joined Richmond Sol Football Club based in Richmond, California to implement my insights into the club’s adult player recruitment over a two-year course while youth coaching across the Bay Area.
Throughout this time, I oversaw the grassroots structure of adult regional football, recruiting players with academy and professional backgrounds onto the adult team resulting in an environment where players put on their “game faces” during practices. While doing this, I identified youth players at the NorCal Premier levels sending recommendations to MLS Next academies.
These were roles that were non-existent at the amateur or youth level and even at the local professional level for some time. If they were developed, it would be limited to a coach or a sporting director for the scouting, a common trope in the low-cost and American football landscape.
And then I returned to Portugal at the end of 2021. I reconnected with my old cohort and we exchanged our experiences and observations, but I felt something was amiss.
There was much more that I should be able to do with my experiences. After a trip to the newly established Sporting school in the Algarve, it left me wanting a new way to emerge but “how” was not in the picture yet.
I returned home to coach exclusively youth football for the rest of the year. I encountered the problems an inexperienced coach would have, but under the direction of Joey Almeida and the Rappolt family at the San Francisco Vikings, I found outlets that would help me merge my experiences with football theory.
The first course I enrolled in was the United States Soccer Federation “D” License taken after the subsequent completion of the grassroots courses, but it was Raymond Verheijen’s Football Coaching Evolution where the dendrites in my brain started to glow and multiply.
Verheijen’s coaching courses follow a very unique and simple approach. Even as a former student from UC Berkeley, I learned critical theory practices and political sciences would not have been able to make for the Dutch football coach and consultant’s comprehension of the use of deductive thinking and philosophical approach as a compass to understand the rationale of the invasion sport we know as football.
While enrolled in these courses in the winter of 2022, I visited Europe twice to watch more academy football. One trip to Lisbon and the other to Eindhoven, to partake in the PSV Coaching Academy, sharing my insights and gaining more clarity from the words and worlds of football methodologists as I continue to grow my vision.
Following two more trips in the spring and summer of 2023, I landed to the conclusion by way of a former UC Berkeley classmate who had moved to Barcelona, Spain. He urged me to look for master’s programs and it was through his suggestion that I tie my vision and experience together.
While my father had deteriorated in health from his battle with a glioma brain tumor in late August, I was in Milan applying to the two Portuguese universities that I felt aligned with what I have been trying to accomplish. When I was accepted in early September, I started my flights home to be with family for the last month of his life.
Since his passing and my temporal grievance, I have been steady at work raising funds to take myself from Pinole to Portugal to study at the Lusophone University of Porto for the Masters in Football Coaching which grants the UEFA B certification. This, while cross-learning Italian and French on Duolingo to develop my linguistic profile to be ready to engage in more challenging and rewarding environments.
Whether it be in scouting where I was traditionally mentored and trained by the department of recruitment of Sporting Clube de Portugal, or by way of coaching, using my analysis from scouting to generate coaching actions within myself to guide high-level players to their next 101% — I know that European professional football is the environment for me.
