Legendary Reading manager, and former chief scout, Brian McDermott believes that the current scouting network is improving as times goes on. 

The 2012 Championship-winning manager was chief scout at the club from 2000 until 2009, unearthing gems such as Kevin Doyle and Shane Long.

Also a previous scout for giants Arsenal, the 61-year-old regularly shadows and supports up-and-coming scouts.

Speaking in the new series of the 1871 podcast, McDermott was quizzed on the current set-up after current manager Paul Ince admitted that there was still plenrty of work to be done in the scouting department.

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"They’re doing it, slowly. Brian is in charge of scouting. He’s brought somebody in from Sheffield United and they’ve got another guy I was with the other day," he started. "It’s better than what it was. Paul was talking about making sure we have scouts at games. You’ve got your video analyst guys and you need your data, but you also need people on the ground. One of the reasons you need people on the ground is because there’s lots of scouts on the ground and scouts talk. I used to listen, because scouts like to talk about players. The best advice for a scout is to make sure you’re listening and find who the best ones are, because you don’t know who they all are.

"Sometimes just being amongst it and to be there, even if there isn’t a player playing on that particular day, you might find out from someone who the best player is somewhere else. It’s little things like that that can make a big difference. Scouts needs to have contacts. If you’ve been around the game a long time and you’ve got a lot of contacts, that holds a lot of sway. It’s not just about going to a game and putting a report in, it’s about finding players. Every time I went to a game, I wanted to find a player."

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