The Ultimate CRM Buyers Guide for Football Clubs
Reading time:
12 mins
Nathan Curnock wears many hats. By day, he’s a project resource lead helping professionals find the right career paths. By night (and most weekends), he’s a first-team scout for Leamington FC, diving deep into opposition analysis and player identification.
His work shows what modern scouting looks like away from the spotlight: structure, discipline, and creativity within tight timeframes. Between video analysis, custom templates, and matchday routines, Nathan turns limited resources into sharp, actionable insights for his team.
In this interview, he shares:
Preparation and structure are everything. I use my own templates that align with what the team manager wants to see. It keeps me focused on the key details and ensures consistency in every report. Balancing scouting alongside a full-time job can be challenging, but as most of my work is video analysis, I can break my workflow into four manageable blocks: 1. Pre-match prep and analyse first half of the match, 2. Analyse the second half of game, 3. Write up my analysis, and finally 4. Create all the diagrams and add in screenshots. Working in bursts helps me stay sharp and prevents burnout.
Start by watching the team you are working for first. Understand how they play, their strengths and weaknesses and most importantly, ask and understand what that manager expects from you. Every manager values different details, so it’s important to tailor your style, format and level of detail accordingly. By aligning your opposition analysis with the team’s needs, your reports instantly become more relevant and actionable.
Pre-match for opposition reports I review that team’s previous results, team shapes and line-ups. I then ensure that I have my analysis templates ready. For opposition analysis, I rely on pen and paper for notes, as it allows me to draw team tactics visually. When carrying out player identification reports, I switch to my iPad and use the app Notion to record observations. As most of my work is video-based, I can pause and rewatch moments to capture specific details, though I’ll often use shorthand when watching live. After the match, I compile everything into a structured report, revisiting key timestamps to refine my insights and add clarity.
What I appreciated most about this exchange with Nathan is how it brings scouting down to earth. No fluff, no pretense. Just tight process, clear priorities, and consistency over chaos. It’s easy to overlook the weight of preparation and internal alignment in any analysis-driven role, but Nathan makes the case for both without ever needing to say so outright.
What stood out is how he approaches scouting with the same logic that makes RevOps work: design once, use often, improve in iterations. His use of templates isn’t just about formatting reports. It’s a way to hardwire clarity into his process. He doesn’t guess what the manager wants but he asks, builds around it, and makes sure every report speaks their language. That’s CRM thinking in a different outfit. The same way a smart lifecycle campaign depends on well-tagged data, Nathan’s opposition analysis depends on knowing which cues actually matter and building structure around them.
Even his video scouting workflow mirrors a modular approach to marketing automation. Four blocks. Each with a clear input and output. One feeds the next. That’s how you scale something without losing quality, whether it’s scouting reports or outbound nurture sequences. And it’s a subtle reminder that no matter the domain, good systems don’t start with tools. They start with questions. What matters most to the person on the receiving end? What signals are we actually tracking? Where are we wasting time?
If you’ve ever built a CRM from scratch, you’ll know the thrill of seeing structure take hold. You wire things up once, and the whole system starts to move. But without ongoing care, even the cleanest setup falls apart. Nathan gets that too. He talks about staying sharp by breaking things into bursts, pacing himself to avoid burnout. That’s not just a productivity hack. It’s stewardship. You plant a good system, but you also have to tend it.
In both football and commercial ops, the best results usually grow from ordinary discipline. Less heroics, more rhythm. Nathan’s work is a quiet example of that.
