Les Reed spoke about Ian Torrance’s intelligence, eye for a player and ability to plan for succession as he congratulated his old protégé on his new job – and Stoke City on hiring him.
Reed was head of football development at Southampton when he brought in Torrance to a recruitment department that was being rebuilt, or just built, about 15 years ago. Torrance and his colleagues were given licence to explore new ways to be agile in the market at a club which needed to find different ways to get ahead of rivals.
Now that Torrance is starting work as Stoke’s head of recruitment, Reed can look back at what he saw him do at close hand on the south coast. It is clear that he remains impressed, throwing out the signings Dusan Tadic and Graziano Pelle as examples of when and how Torrance’s forward thinking helped beat the crowd to key players.
“I first met Ian when I interview him for a job as an intern in about 2010 or 2011, having gone to Southampton myself as a consultant in 2009 and staying as director of football when the club had come out of administration,” Reed told Radio Stoke. “A lot of people had been made redundant, morale was pretty low and there was a 10-point deduction in League One.
“We had to try to rebuild the club under a new ownership to try to get to the Premier League within five years. I had to do an audit to try to make that happen and one of the things I quickly discovered is that there wasn’t a recruitment department. There were a few part-time scouts but nothing structured and it was one thing we had to build very quickly.
“We were fortunate that we had connections with some good universities and we advertised for graduates who needed to take a year out to work towards their masters. We were quite strict on the criteria and the theory was that we needed to get ahead of the game, get an edge and build something strong. Get some bright talent in the building and give them leeway to express themselves.
“Ian came in with two or three others who have all gone on to very big things. Ian’s buddy Tom Stockwell is now sporting director at Wycombe Wanderers, appointed last week having been in recruitment at Nottingham Forest, taken there by Ross Wilson, who was my director of recruitment at Southampton.
“One of the things we put to them was that we needed to find a way to recruit players cheaply with lots of potential and blend them with players we develop from the academy. We needed an analytics platform that would give us the right data, the right information to enable us to not only achieve that but achieve it before anyone else does.
“Ian was one of the leads on this project to develop a way we could do that and back then there was nothing like the platforms that are available now for analytics. Ian built a platform that was bespoke to us and then explore how we could get data from other leagues around Europe. The European was Ian’s baby and it meant we could structure our analysis in such a way we could be ahead of the game in spotting young talent.
“They got the tech guys in and it was built on the principle of Matthew Syed’s theory Black Box Thinking. People only think about a black box in terms of analysing why a plane crashed but actually its data is downloaded every day and used to get better at flying to avoid crashes and provide better safety measures. We wanted that principle for our scouts.
“It was a project they all get their teeth into and Ian led it and then managed it with Tom and it really meant we could interrogate data very quickly, almost live. By a Monday morning meeting we could use a weekend’s matches and have a league table of targets that Ian was responsible for updating. We could see a fifth-choice potential left-back had moved up to number three.
“It was brilliant for me as a sporting director, brilliant for our head of recruitment because we could make quick decisions and get scouts to games before other people. Classic examples, in our succession planning – and guys were tasked with producing these – we produced Adam Lallana from our academy and we knew he was going to be a class player, who was eventually signed by Liverpool. We needed to find a replacement and we had a list of four or five who were already in the system, already scouted and at the top of that list was Dusan Tadic. We were able to quickly move to sign Dusan Tadic before other people had recognised the potential and he also met the right profile for that position and would be an improvement how our first team played.
“Lallana had worked well with Rickie Lambert, who was also signed by Liverpool, but within days we were able to sign a meeting with Feyenoord and bring Graziano Pelle in, who scored 28 goals in his first season and attracted so much attention that he was then sold on to a club in China.
“It was Ian’s job to keep on top of that and make sure we were at the cutting edge and it doesn’t surprise me that all those guys have progressed to important roles. When Ian went to Como it didn’t surprise me one bit because his knowledge of European football is excellent.
“The other thing with Ian was that we didn’t just base him in the office, watching a screen all day, he had to go and find out what it took to be in the stadium and use that analytics for scouting. Ian was sent on many missions to scout domestically and in Europe and being a very intelligent guy he was able to assimilate all that and has progressed in his career accordingly.
“He’s also a great guy, personable, can lead people, manage people, is empathetic. I can’t say enough about the qualities he brings to this job. Congratulations to Ian and congratulations to Stoke as well.”
