Somebody is linked with your club. You've never watched him play. Within about four minutes you've found a compilation video, watched it, and formed an opinion. Almost everybody does this now and it's one of the least reliable ways to assess a footballer that has ever been invented.
The problem isn't that the videos are dishonest. They're perfectly accurate — every clip really happened. The problem is what gets left out, and the shape of what remains.
The selection problem
A compilation is, by construction, a player's best moments across a period. If you take any professional footballer and select their forty best actions from a season, they will look extraordinary. That's true of a struggling striker at a relegated club. It's true of a decent player in a second division.
The video doesn't tell you the denominator. Forty brilliant actions out of two thousand is a completely different player to forty out of four hundred, and both look identical in a three-minute edit.
Worse, compilations tend to be made about players who are being talked about, which means the selection is already biased towards a positive conclusion before you press play.
What gets systematically excluded
Certain kinds of contribution are essentially uncompilable, and they happen to be the ones that determine whether a striker fits a team.
Off-ball movement that doesn't get rewarded. A striker making thirty runs a game that pull defenders around is doing valuable work, and none of it is footage. The camera follows the ball. If the pass doesn't come, the run doesn't exist.
Pressing. Occasionally you'll see a clip of a forward winning the ball high and scoring, because that has a goal at the end. What you won't see is the twenty-five presses that forced a rushed clearance, which is what the coach actually cares about.
Defensive work at set pieces. Nobody makes a video of a striker heading a corner clear from his own box. It's a real part of the job and it's completely invisible.
Positioning discipline. Whether a forward holds the last line properly, whether he drifts into the same space as his winger, whether he times his runs to stay onside — all of this is about where he is when nothing is happening, and nothing-happening is precisely what gets cut.
The things that get overweighted
Flip side. Some actions are extremely compilable and get much more prominence than their actual value warrants.
Skill moves are the obvious one. A stepover or a flick looks great in isolation and tells you almost nothing about whether a player is effective. Plenty of forwards with beautiful highlight reels have very ordinary end products, and the video format flatters exactly that profile.
Long-range goals too. They're rare, they're spectacular, and a striker with four in a season will have all four in his video, which creates an impression that he scores from distance regularly. He doesn't. Nobody does.
And the sheer volume of goals shown gives a false sense of frequency. Watching twenty goals in ninety seconds makes it feel like this is a player who scores constantly, when those twenty goals were spread across nine months and probably three hundred shots.
How to watch better, if you're going to watch
You can get a lot more out of video with a few adjustments.
Watch full matches, or at least full halves, and specifically watch the player rather than the ball. It's genuinely difficult and quite boring for the first twenty minutes, and then you start seeing things that no compilation would ever show you.
If you only have highlights, pay attention to the buildup rather than the finish. What was the player doing four seconds before he received the ball? Where did he start his run from? Who did he take with him?
Look for the goals he scores that aren't spectacular. A compilation full of screamers and no tap-ins is a warning sign — it suggests the player isn't consistently in the right areas. Great strikers have boring goals, lots of them.
And check the opposition. It's remarkable how often a compilation's best moments come against the weakest teams in the division, which is not surprising and is also not information you should ignore.
Why scouts still watch a lot of video
I should be clear that video analysis is central to professional scouting and works fine — because professionals use it completely differently.
They watch every touch of a player across multiple full matches, tagged and organised, including the matches where he was poor. They watch specific situations — every time he received in the box, every defensive transition — rather than a curated selection. And they combine it with data that tells them the denominator.
That's a different activity to watching a fan-made compilation set to music, even though both involve looking at footage of a footballer. One is sampling. The other is advertising.
Which is fine, as long as everybody knows which one they're looking at. The trouble is that the advertising is free and the sampling takes forty hours.