Atlanta United’s Jonathan Spector details scouting process

Most of the players signed by Atlanta United have started by meeting Jonathan Spector, the team’s head of international recruitment and development.

Spector’s experience as a professional player in England with Manchester United, Charlton Athletic, West Ham and Birmingham, and in MLS with Orlando, qualify him as a good judge of the types of players who should work well for Atlanta United, and he has the knowledge to tell them what they should expect.

His results are mixed.

Individually, players have been brought in and sold for tens of millions of dollars. That part of what Spector has done has been successful.

As a team, Atlanta United has struggled. It can be argued that a small part of that responsibility can be assigned to Spector. He’s scouting the ingredients even though someone else is mixing them together.

In the first part an exclusive interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Spector detailed the club’s efforts to sign central defenders Enea Mihaj and Juan Berrocal to improve a porous defense, to add more leaders and the ability to scout for injuries, which are an important factor in the poor play of the defense.

Part 2, coming Wednesday, will focus on the team’s results this season, why Emmanuel Latte Lath and Miguel Almirón have struggled, and if he feels pressure because of the team’s lack of success.

Questions and answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.

Q: Focusing on the two centerbacks, Mihaj and Berrocal, what is it that stood out to you on film or the data that started this rolling?

A: I think first it starts with what we want to address within the team. I think we felt, and we saw, that we were conceding goals in ways that were a little bit soft, a little bit too easy. We wanted to address that with some of these signings and I think you see with Mihaj certainly — Berrasco’s a little bit further behind, he joined later, didn’t get kind of that amount of training that Mihaj has had — I think you see it in particular with Mihaj, just the desire to defend and not concede goals.

That, for me, is one of those things that is innate, in particular in central defenders having played that position myself, and something that he really has is just a pride in his defending and not wanting to concede.

And then you see his leadership, his ability to progress the ball as well in possession. These were all things that we felt were going to help the team and benefit the group as a whole and help address some of those kinds of concerns that we have.

Q: Desire is an emotional thing. Was it when you saw it on film or talking to him that you saw the desire to defend?

A: I think you can see it on film for sure, and in watching him live.

We go and watch the players live before signing them. I think that’s a really important piece of our process as well.

You can just see he doesn’t want to concede goals. No defender does. But there’s some that just take it to a different kind of level. I feel, and certainly in speaking to him as well, that’s one of the things that’s important for us and our process is getting a chance to just sit down with the player, connect with them. They have questions for us as much as we have questions for them. They need to understand what the move from, in his case, from European football to soccer over here is going to be like and so we try and help. That adaptation piece starts really early, even in the kind of scouting and recruitment phase. That’s something that you just got a sense from him that was really important to him, that pride in defending and not conceding, and wanting to help the team and wanting to be a leader within a team.

Q: For Berrocal and Mihaj, is it data that stands out, or is it something visual that starts the process? How you decide who is targeted?

A: It’s a little bit of both. Taking a step back, we first look at what the needs of the team are going to be, and there’s a data piece to that, and certainly, then the watching, the visual piece, the eye test, if you will.

And then once we identify those needs, we’ve got scouts, we’ve got data scientists and analysts and we kind of come together with a list of players, some from the data side, some from the scouting side.

Players are coming from agents all the time, and so we have just one big database. And what we do is we put all those players into that database, and then we go back and forth and kind of cross-check, cross-reference both the scouting and the data side. So any player that comes into our ecosystem, we’re looking at both the data and the scouting, the visual aspect of it.

Q: Before (team president) Garth (Lagerwey), with (former president) Darren (Eales) and (former technical director) Carlos (Bocanegra), it was definitely about a style of play. Now, with Garth and (former manager) Gonzalo (Pineda) and (manager) Ronny (Deila), how much of the manager’s wants and preferred style of play factor into the players that get targeted?

A: Yeah, I think there’s always that balance. So you’re picking players that are for the club and for the manager. And when you have that alignment in terms of how the manager wants to play, how the club wants to play when you have that kind of shared vision.

Now, there’s different ways of going about it, different nuances within a profile of a player that are really important to essentially achieve that style of play. That’s where I think the communication and the work between the departments becomes really important and something that we’ve worked hard to try and find that right balance between those things.

Q: One of the issues that Gonzalo had brought up when he was here and Ronny has kind of brought up is a lack of leadership within the team. How do you scout for leadership?

A: It’s a good question. That’s one of those things where you see a little bit on the field, some leadership, you can see some communication, but it’s not something you really know unless you’re digging into the clubs and where these players have been performing, teammates, other coaches. That’s where you really get that information.

That’s something that we’ve looked at and tried to evaluate and get as much information as we can on each one of these signings. It’s not just what they’re doing on the field, it’s what they do off the field. That’s a really important piece for us.

Mihaj, in that sense, is someone who we deemed as an individual who can come in and kind of be another leader for us within the group. With that said, I don’t know how many teams nowadays have that (former Manchester United player) Roy Keane-type profile. So I think a lot of times it’s done by committee.

I think the more guys that we can get that have some of those leadership qualities and can really raise the expectations and the level of the group, I think the better we’re going to be.

Q: Ronny has also talked about that he thinks too many of the guys have the same profile, or kind of in the same stage of their lives, which I think he means that there’s just not a lot of off the field stuff going on, because they are married, have kids, I’m assuming. It’s just too many of the same profile. There’s not enough dynamic, I guess on the team.

A: I think it’s interesting. I think we’ve got some really good young players coming through. There’s always cycles of young players coming through in the academy system. We had Caleb Wiley, who we ended up selling, George Bello, George Campbell, Efrain (Morales) and Noah (Cobb) more recently. There were some really good opportunities for us and good opportunities for those players as well, where it made sense for all parties involved.

We also now have some other young players coming through that we’re excited about. I don’t want too many names out there to put pressure on these guys, but we’re excited about some of the youth that is coming through.

It’s always finding that balance between the youth and experience that you have within the team and, Doug, as you know, like within MLS rosters, it’s hard to, sometimes, move guys if you feel like you maybe need to move on from them, but that’s something that we continue to work hard on as well.

I think we have a good core group of players now, especially through the spine of the team. And if we can supplement that with some of the youth we have coming through and maybe bring in some players in as well, then I think we’ll be in a really good place.

Q: How do you scout for injuries because it seems like this team, for the past several years, has just dealt with a glut of injuries.

A: It’s challenging, right? We can look back historically at player’s injuries and see how durable they’ve been. And that is a part of our process. And for the most part, a lot of these guys have been pretty durable before coming here.

Changing to a new league, changing to different climates, playing in heat, playing on turf here at (Mercedes-Benz Stadium), playing at altitude, all these things, you don’t know how players are going to respond to all that. That’s the difficult part.

It’s really challenging to say this player is going to come here and they’re going to be injury free for two, three years, right? There’s no real way of knowing, but we’ve got a good performance staff, and we have faith in the job that they’re doing.