The scout using Football Manager to find players for Guinea-Bissau

Jack Charlton led the Republic of Ireland from international also-rans to the World Cup quarter-finals. When appointed manager of the national team in the late 1980s, he cast the net for players far and wide, searching through genealogies and tracking down anybody with Irish roots. It was a controversial approach, but it worked. Fast forward thirty-odd years and another Jack C is undertaking similar searches, but this time on behalf Guinea-Bissau. For a country with a population of just two million, the need to expand the pool of players is understandable. This is where Jack Coles plays a crucial role.

Coles, who worked as a recruitment analyst at Leicester for four years before taking over as head of data analysis at Coventry City, discovered that Guinea-Bissau were missing out on footballers while playing a computer game. “While playing Football Manager, I became aware of the facility to switch players from one country to a different nation,” he says. “Initially I looked into the links between Curaçao and the Netherlands and soon realised that there were plenty of players who had dual nationality.”

His interest was piqued and he wondered which country could benefit most from their diaspora. Coles identified Guinea-Bissau as the country with the widest difference between its own world ranking – which is currently 106 – and the countries that it could potentially draw players from, such as Portugal, Spain and France, who are all in the top 10.

He tracked down Guinea-Bissau’s technical director via LinkedIn and offered his services on a voluntary basis. Although the president of the federation was initially sceptical about why an Englishman working for a Championship club would want to help them for free, he gave the