Soccer Life: Lisandro Isei - From Football Manager to Al-Ahli SFC
By Brian Maurer
Football Manager (FM) has been captivating people for years. It’s a game that allows one to run a soccer club; recruit, scout, and roster build. For many, it was just a game. For Lisandro Isei it sparked a lifelong dream. “The difference between me playing that game and other people gaming and not making a career out of it is that I became obsessed…my mom used to come to my room at 4 or 5 AM and tell me to go to bed like ‘knock it off you got school in the morning’” said Isei. “Of course, I’ve had to work very hard to learn and grow my competence and knowledge once I believed it was possible to make a career out of that and get lucky. Just the obsession in itself was not enough because many people had and have it, just look at the amount of FM content creators whose work I enjoy very much.”
At the time, the game was called Championship Manager, and Isei would constantly work on his roster. “I had notes of my teams or the targets that I wanted to sign…their names obviously, their ages, but which club did they move to, how did they do there…I wanted to know everything about them,” explained Isei. “When I was doing exams, when I didn’t know an answer I would write either a player's name, or I would write my lineup, or I would write my projection for my team for the next season.” In school, out of school, roster building was always on his mind.
After the fire of roster building was sparked, Isei started developing methods for finding and organizing players into lists. This separated his approach to playing a video game from other kids. He used the game to help his notetaking and analyzing. When looking for a left-back, he doesn’t just form a list of left-backs. He forms a list of multiple types of left-backs. Left elbow backs (one that stays between the center-back and the left-back), left-backs that go vertical, and ones that invert into the midfield. He will also then track left-wing backs, left-midfielders, and left-wingers “because one day one of them can be converted into a left-back,” explained Isei.
This helps Isei form a complete picture of the potentially available players that could play in his team’s left-back role regardless of the coach’s game model and the club’s roster build. This way he is always prepared. “I will say most of the time it’s a bit paranoid, just wanting to be prepared, and I would say 90% of the time you’re doing way too much work than needed, but for me, it’s the only way,” said Isei. Always being prepared, and always learning.
While building lists of players for FM he would also use the Dutch football magazine website Voetbal International to help learn as much as he could. “Religiously I would type in [Voetbal International] every five minutes to try and see what’s the news, is there a new article out that I can learn from,” said Isei.
What Isei really enjoyed about FM was taking a small club starting in say the National League in England and working on building them up to League Two or League One and then eventually the Premier League. “That’s also where I found out that I’m a builder, I like building things from the ground up,” said Isei. This game was the first step for him as he started down the path of becoming a soccer scout and helping build soccer rosters for real.
As Isei got older he switched from playing a video game to regularly watching games on video and live, sometimes traveling tens of hours by bus to catch a weekend slate of games, making sure to get the information on players he needed, updating his lists, and going again. It was “doing the work before getting the job,” said Isei. He was scouting well before he was hired as a scout, sending out emails to coaches asking if he could spend a couple of days watching their clubs train. “I got a lot of no’s” Isei recalls.
One thing that helped keep Isei pushing toward being a professional in the sport was listening to motivational speakers and thought leaders. One specific quote from Dr. Eric Thomas stood out “‘If you want to succeed as bad as you want to breathe then you will be successful,’ I’ve heard that so many times, and I was like you know what let me give that a try.” Another important lesson Isei learned was getting projects started. “You don’t have to be perfect, just start,” stated Isei.
His first professional role in soccer was at FC Dordrecht. There he learned many life lessons that have helped him to this day. Isei started as an assistant coach for Dordrecht’s U14s where he worked under the U14 Head Coach Ronald Plaisier. “[Plaisier was] full of life…obviously he likes quality football and quality training, but he understood the assignment…it was about helping players fall in love with the game and stay in love with the game,” said Isei.
Dordrecht’s Sporting Director at the time was Peter Drijver, who showed Isei “How to be good with everyone…always coming from a place of understanding the other person…he would talk to one of the parents of the U14s the same as he would talk to the Head Coach of the First Team or a first-team player.” Isei mentioned he was kind to everyone, but kindness should not be mistaken for weakness. Drijver could do the job while treating everyone with respect and care.
Drijver was also the one who pushed Isei to do more than be a U14 Assistant Coach. He pulled Isei into his office once and told him he was mad at him, not because of something Isei did wrong but because he didn’t tell Drijver that he could do so much more. “‘I want you to think about what more you can do,’” Isei recalls Drijver telling him. This led Isei to help Dordrecht with more tasks like video analysis, coaching at older age groups, and scouting. Isei was encouraged to add several new skills to his toolbelt.
This encouragement introduced him to Dordrecht’s Head Coach at the time Gerard de Nooijer. De Nooijer would ask Isei questions about tactics and formation before facing opponents or before starting a new season. This helped him realize that he belonged at a professional level.
He then spent time at Willem II where they were a midtable team in the Netherlands and at times would also be fighting relegation. While at Willem II they reached a Cup Final and qualified for European competition. Newcastle United’s Alexander Isak was a part of that team.
During his time there he worked with Javier Rabanal who was Willem II’s U19 Head Coach and was also in charge of Methodology. Rabanal went on to be an assistant at PSV and is now the Head Coach for Independiente del Valle in Ecuador. “He taught me how to look at football, how to prepare for things in advance even better, how to demand things at an absurdly high level but also from yourself,” said Isei of the lessons Rabanal taught him at Willem II.
Isei mentioned that it was at Willem II that he knew he needed to go all in on the Sporting Director and scouting track. While working with Rabanal, Isei made a few mistakes while preparing the team for training, and afterward, Isei told him that he was taking accountability and that level of mistake could not happen again. “I will fire myself, you won’t have to say anything,” Isei told Rabanal at the time. From that moment Isei realized that he was not supposed to be a coach which led him to focus all his efforts on scouting.
Some clubs like Brighton Hove and Albion have adopted a newer method for scouting players. They will assign different scouts to each position, assigning scouts as positional specialists. Isei prefers a more traditional approach to scouting, meaning he prefers watching all positions on the field. This allows him to report on aspects of everything that he is seeing.
This increases creativity in his work. “I really need the creativity to do my job the best possible way and express myself the best when it comes to a player or even a coach…it would be too rigid for me, I need more freedom to watch different positions because then I see more. If we compare it to music I can listen to one genre over and over again, like classical music, which I like, but the classical music becomes more beautiful when I can also listen to rap and hip-hop, and 80s and 90s,” said Isei on Brighton’s approach. “But Brighton’s approach seems to work very well, different things work for different people and clubs” Isei added.
Being “the best I can be,” is Isei’s method for measuring the success of his scouting. This desire is one of the crucial forces that energizes Isei’s obsession. Part of being the best in scouting is being highly predictive and repeatable, they need to be able to make predictions far more often than random chance. “I would say I have seen some departments where I would rather take the flip of the coin,” said Isei. This is the downside to scouting if it’s done poorly. “Personally, I would always want to be and work to be around 70% at least,” said Isei, describing how accurate he wants his analysis and conclusions on players to be.
“The ones that do this the best overall are the German clubs, the German clubs by far, they do transfers in January not expecting the guys to perform right away but to get adjusted and then to play and perform well in July, August. Or they do business in January and then expect the player to come in July,” said Isei. “They are well prepared, they are meticulous, it makes sense on 80, 85% of the transfers.”
German clubs like Borussia Dortmund have a special position called the Squad Planner. This role is specifically designed to have someone responsible for solely organizing the structure of the team’s roster. Further preparing them for future transfer windows.
After conclusions are made from scouting and analysis, quick decisive action is needed. “Once you’re done scouting and analyzing a player, you have a full picture of him, you have to as they say in Argentina ‘put your balls on the table’ and go for it,” stated Isei. “You have to be fast, especially when you’re working in MLS, you don’t have the time to wait.” This is where experience as a scout and scouting team is paramount because a scout can increase their efficiency at identifying the right talent when they are more familiar with all players available. Which requires thousands of hours of analysis.
Sometimes, Isei can have a conclusion on a player after 15 minutes of game time. That doesn’t mean he only watches 15 minutes, but in that time he can analyze what a player is doing, what traits he has, and what other roles that player can do with those traits he is seeing. He then continues to watch to help make a final determination on that player.
Isei was the last scout to assess Malanda after the other scouts had seen and written their reports on him. Isei was confident after 15 minutes of watching Charlotte FC’s Adilson Malanda playing defensive midfielder because of the work of his colleagues and because he had already watched thousands of hours of other similar profile center-backs.
“After the first 15 minutes, I said to Thomas [Schaling; Director of Scouting], who was also excited about the player, ‘Let’s go to Zoran [Krneta; General Manager] right now, let’s sign this guy’” said Isei on his initial reaction to seeing Malanda play. “Zoran Krneta did an amazing job of convincing Malanda and getting the deal done with Rodez.”
“I was also excited about Jan Sobocinski, and my projection of him was higher than what he was able to show at Charlotte. All of this to say, that scouts will be wrong and it’s good to reflect on why. The projections I got wrong are the best teachers for me.” Isei added.
Talented prospects like Malanda make it easier to conclude. Other situations can take a bit more time. “I need at least 90 minutes to have a picture, and another 90 minutes of clips from different games and the data to have high-level confidence and conviction,” says Isei. But it always remains a collective effort from everyone involved with scouting and recruitment.
Isei’s role at Charlotte was to identify the right talent. After that, Charlotte’s Front Office led by General Manager Zoran Krneta would have to get the deal done. “Scouting is easy, recruiting is hard, and then getting that player to hit like you imagined is down to a lot of factors,” said Isei.
Getting the deal done is not enough, the player has to enjoy their time with their new city, and club and gel with their teammates and the coach. Putting all the steps together you can see how tricky it is to get recruitment right. “There’s always risk and that’s why it's also good to make sure you do a good job on the front end to have let’s say your top three but you know they’re always available or available as much as possible, and that helps continuing and putting those guys into your top three,” said Isei. “If your top three consists of players that maybe you know financially it's not going to work out, one is injury prone, and unsure if the last one wants to come. That means that you’ve done, in my opinion, a bad job.”
Recruitment also requires some luck. “For every Malanda, you get a Privett,” said Isei. Malanda was a prospect who came to Charlotte because the club identified him early enough to get a deal done. If they hadn’t assessed him when they did or reached out to sign him that summer, that window would have closed on Charlotte by winter. In Andrew Privett’s case, the expectation was not that he would be an immediate impact starter. He was a Third Round SuperDraft pick. It’s not generally where year-one starters come from. But the team found a little bit of luck and looks to have landed themselves a long-term starter from the last round in the draft. “Credit to the coaching staffs of both Crown Legacy, and Charlotte FC at the time, but not lastly the player himself. Amazing mentality of adjusting to the new position and doing so well game in, game out.”
His enjoyment of roster building from the ground up is the reason he was intrigued by coming to Charlotte FC. “When I got hired there were no players, there were no coaches, there wasn’t anything, there were no offices, not even a light switch, it was Charlotte MLS, there was no badge.” A team that had to be built from nothing. Charlotte FC was Isei’s real-life Football Manager game.
While at Charlotte FC, Isei was tasked with helping Head Scout Thomas Schaling build the scouting department from the ground up. General Manager Zoran Krneta allowed Schaling the freedom to build the scouting department the way he wanted. “He [Schaling] had an idea what excellent looked like…and also his own opinions of what he would improve…or what he would do differently,” said Isei on Schaling’s experience from working at PSV and what he brought to Charlotte. Isei said Schaling outlined the structure of what was needed, and Isei was tasked often with helping color that structure in. “As long as it fits the structure it was good,” said Isei.
For Isei, coloring in the structure often meant adding the human side to the scouting department and recruiting others to join the team. “You bring them in as the scout, obviously also as the person, over time they kind of became my mentors,” said Isei on hiring and working with the others in the scouting department; Vincent van Raam, Davor Brasanac, Ryan Johnson, Ben Green, Charles Williams, and Daniel Wicker.
“They start asking you questions…and that’s when you know if you know your stuff,” Isei said on how the learning process went for this group of scouts. They started by asking questions and showing they were learning, and eager to learn more, and also highlighted to Isei and Schaling that they were capable of teaching and bringing their ideas to the department.
Every member of the Charlotte FC scouting team brought different characteristics and skills to the department. Isei highlighted van Raam’s ability to organize, which was similar to Schaling's. Brasanac’s ability to zoom in and look at the specific details and actions of a player was a special trait. Johnson brought a player’s perspective with his experience of being a player and spending time as a teammate in the locker room. Johnson’s playing career also made him familiar with MLS and the local region for recruiting.
Isei highlighted Green’s ability to know what MLS good looks like, also his knowledge of the college level, and his ability to empathize at the human level. Williams and Wicker both bring an analytical perspective to the department using data analysis to help provide another angle to the recruiting process.
This recruiting and teaching process in the department led van Raam to take over as Head of Scouting for Charlotte FC since Schaling left to return to PSV. Green also found a new role as the Head Scout at DC United. “The question is how long can you hold on to these people,” said Isei, as he believes that the scouting department at Charlotte might be even stronger now compared to when they started, due to the development of the team in place.
Isei recently accepted a new role with Saudi Arabian club Al-Ahli SFC working with Lee Congerton who has built himself an extensive resume during his time at Atalanta and playing a key role at several other major clubs including Liverpool, Celtic, Leicester City, and Chelsea. Isei said there is a difference between his time at Charlotte and at Al-Ahli. The resources here are very different, and subsequently the pool of players we look at. “At Charlotte, I could push for a player where I thought he would do well but we’ll need to give him maybe six months. Here it’s about he needs to be effective right away because we have to win, we are a traditional top club” stated Isei.
The main reason Isei took the new job was the opportunity to learn from Congerton. “I’ve never met someone in the football industry that’s this impressive,” said Isei. He described reaching this level and being around someone who has achieved this level of excellence as being the “end boss” of a video game. Isei found a new level and is pushing forward with it. “Once you know what excellence is and what it looks like, you cannot turn it down a notch.”
Congerton also taught Isei the importance of turning the game off. “Every week there’s a certain moment you have to take off, you have to do something else,” he said. “There’s also learning and progress in taking a step back.”
The excellence and pressure have risen for Isei as he is now more responsible in the final decision-making process of which players Al-Ahli will sign. He’s not only a scout charged with collecting information. That is a good problem to have. More pressure increases the opportunity for one to demonstrate the ability of their craft, whether they are a player, coach, scout, or sporting director. “Ultimately, I want to be as ready and prepared as I can be and confident in doing a great job when accepting the role of Director of Football or Sporting Director, one day. All these lessons and learnings go into that.”
For Isei, this is where the obsession and paranoia to be his best can truly flourish, still having late nights and early mornings preparing his player lists. “Last night I set my alarm at 2 AM because I wanted to watch a game that was being played in a different timezone,” said Isei at the time. Al-Ahli demands what he has required of himself since he was a boy taking notes and making lists for Championship Manager. Always maintaining that same desire he had when he was young, building rosters, and learning relentlessly.
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