Character is one of the most cited reasons for signing or rejecting a player, and one of the least defined. The clubs doing it well have worked out how to turn it into something a scout can actually verify.

Character starts as football behaviour

A senior Premier League scout framed the first recruitment question simply: “Is he better than what you’ve got?” The answer is not supposed to come from one viewing. Players who move in a window have usually been watched “countless times” by multiple people, in person and on video, with data shaping the search and scouts still feeding the decision.

Character sits inside that normal watch. Many clubs use a broad four-corner approach: technical qualities such as ball control and positioning, psychological qualities such as decision-making and awareness, physical qualities such as movement and balance, and social qualities such as communication and teamwork. One Championship club template marked targets out of 10 across 25 categories, creating a score out of 250 and an average ranking from all viewings. One Premier League manager using a similar model wanted a target to score over 200 before pursuit.

The useful recruitment distinction is between a vague personality label and behaviour that can be watched inside the player’s job. A Premier League scout with more than 20 years in the industry said many clubs now assess players through the game itself: in possession, out of possession, transition, set pieces and work rate. His attitude test was specific: will the player press, tackle and lift others when the score, venue and game state are uncomfortable?

Character has to survive different situations

Monchi’s Sevilla process shows why one impressive attitude read is thin evidence. Recruitment was split into gross tracking from September to December, across nine top domestic leagues, and net tracking, when targets were reduced to a definitive list. Players had to be watched in different situations: home and away, internationals, strong opposition and weak opposition. Fresh eyes had to judge a player after the initial scout had flagged him, and the aim was six or seven viewings “to avoid surprises, to avoid that luck factor.”

The same behaviour changes meaning by context. Pressing hard in a dominant home win is useful, but it is not the same evidence as pressing when the player’s team cannot get out. Communication from a centre-back in a settled back line is different from communication when his full-back is being overloaded. A holding midfielder’s calmness under a slow press is not the same as calmness when the first pass is rushed and the next duel is coming.

The observation is also player-specific rather than ball-specific. A scout may attend a game for one or two players only, watching their positioning and communication at the expense of watching the match normally. Warm-ups can contribute too: goalkeepers get more touches there than in the game, and attackers’ finishing focus can be watched before kick-off. For defenders, the assessment can start before the out-of-possession moment, then continue through positional play, scanning, decision-making, calmness, composure and distribution.

Southampton’s black box shows the limit of scoring character

Southampton’s recruitment system gives the clearest club example of how character sits beside data without becoming just another number. The club tracked around 20 players in each position and kept a shortlist of four or five primary targets. Some players had been “in our thinking for two, three, four years.”

Ross Wilson drew the boundary around character measurement. “I don’t think you can put a number on character,” he said. “We certainly put a big emphasis on finding out as much as we possibly can about that player, whether on the pitch or off the pitch, before he comes here. That’s a big role of our scouts.” The checks included personalities, attitudes in training and social habits, with multiple scouts seeing players before Southampton tried to sign them.

The black box also held injury history, match footage of how injuries happened, personal-life information, social-media presence and childhood experiences to build a picture of the person and whether he was likely to succeed. It had not been flawless. Recent big-money deals still left Southampton hoping for more.

Any serious character file needs that caveat. Better information reduces avoidable surprise; it does not make recruitment safe. A player can have good references, strong match behaviour and a clean background check, then still fail because of role fit, adaptation, injury, salary pressure or timing.

Due diligence widens the question

Character profiling becomes broader once a target is serious enough for due diligence. InsightX, a commercial intelligence provider, says its football clients examine character, personality, social-media activity, representation, corporate relationships and activism. Its checks can also include online posting, third-party rights, agent and family involvement, visa status, non-sport business interests, political views and local manual inquiries where needed.

The examples are not attitude problems in the dressing-room sense. InsightX says clients were alerted to a target’s involvement in heavily indebted business ventures, concerns about another player’s visa status amid questions about illegal immigration, and a case where a player’s father owned all of the player’s image rights. Those are transfer risks, but they affect different decisions: fee, contract structure, commercial rights, legal exposure, integration plan.

Character references can also be used at squad-culture level. Manchester United’s first INEOS-window signings — Joshua Zirkzee, Matthijs de Ligt, Leny Yoro, Manuel Ugarte and Noussair Mazraoui — had character references feeding into a desired cultural reset for the squad environment. In that case, character was not only a pass-fail check on the individual. It was part of a club decision about the group the player would enter.

The weak version turns evidence into gossip

The methodological warning comes from psychology. Research on assessing psychological characteristics in talented soccer players says personality traits and psychological skills have been treated as relevant predictors of football performance, but practice often runs ahead of validation. Clubs and academies often ask coaches to rate players on self-designed, unevaluated scouting sheets.

A review of 43 studies with 14,977 participants found self-regulation, resilience, commitment and discipline had the greatest impact on player development. A German project with 2,677 U12 players found psychological characteristics associated with current and future performance, but with small effect sizes. The authors state that those questionnaire results should not be the base for selecting or deselecting players in talent identification.

The recommendations point toward better football scouting language. Characteristics should be clearly defined, tied to observable behaviour, placed on standardised sheets with behavioural anchors, assessed with more than one item, and rated by at least two independent people. Traits and skills should not be treated the same: personality traits are relatively stable, while psychological skills can change by situation and context, so the timing and frequency of assessment should differ.

Applied to transfers, “poor attitude” is not a usable diagnosis. It has to become something observable: stopped pressing after losing the ball, avoided duels after contact, stopped communicating when not receiving, ignored pressing triggers, reacted badly to correction in training, or failed to adapt when used on the opposite side. The more specific the behaviour, the easier it is to test against role demand.

Vetting has a privacy line

Social-media and background checks also carry a legal and fairness risk. The UK Information Commissioner’s Office says pre-employment vetting is intrusive and should only be used where there is a legal obligation or a significant, particular risk. The guidance is employment-focused rather than football-specific, but the principles are relevant to clubs acting as recruiters: checks should be necessary, proportionate, targeted and transparent.

For social media, the ICO says recruiters should identify and document a specific risk, tell candidates if checks will be used, avoid irrelevant personal information, avoid making decisions from online material alone, and give the candidate an opportunity to comment on accuracy. It also advises separating the person who screens social-media material from the person making the recruitment decision, because public profiles can expose irrelevant or misleading information.

Football clubs have legitimate reasons to understand off-pitch risk before committing transfer fees and wages. The clean version of that work is narrow: define the risk, collect only what bears on it, keep context, and avoid turning lifestyle clues into a moral file.

What changes in the scouting room

A useful character profile starts with the situation, not the adjective. It records when the behaviour appeared, what the player’s role demanded, how the score and opposition shaped the action, who saw it, whether another scout or reference confirmed it, and whether the behaviour is a transfer risk or a coaching need.

That separates fit from virtue. One club may need a senior centre-back who talks constantly, organises rest defence and drags the line through bad spells. Another may accept a quieter defender if his scanning, duels and distribution fit the model. A player can be a good professional and still be the wrong cultural or tactical fit for a specific dressing room.

The final meeting before a fee is agreed should be able to point to evidence on both sides of the ledger: repeated football behaviour under role stress, and verified off-pitch risks that have been checked for relevance. If six or seven viewings still leave only “good character” or “questionable attitude”, the club has not removed the surprise-and-luck problem Monchi was trying to reduce.