Boss Paul Jewell says he’s happy with his current scouting set-up despite being a man shorter than he had planned last season.
Last November, the Town manager added ex-Bolton defender Mark Seagraves, a fellow former Liverpool youth player, and one-time Everton man Andy King as full-time scouts alongside chief scout Steve McCall and David Hamilton, a member of his Derby and Wigan staffs.
Within a month, King was offered the assistant manager’s job at Northampton. Late last season, former Luton and England man Mick Harford was set to replaced King but he was given the chance to replace one-time Town coach John Gorman as the MK Dons’ assistant boss before he had joined up with the Blues.
"People who are out of work keep on ringing me asking me to give them a job because every time I offer people a [scouting] job someone else gives them a [management] job,” Jewell joked.
"We’ve got three full-time scouts at the moment and we’ve got three or four part-time. It’s an area which you’re always trying to improve but at the moment we’re just going to stick with what we’ve got.”
He says he wasn’t too unhappy with the set-up he inherited from former boss Roy Keane: "There wasn’t too much wrong with it.
"I wanted to have more full-time scouts on the ground to get more games covered. Not just analysis of the opposition but also to have a wider variation.
"When people are doing things part-time they have other jobs and they can’t go to Scandinavia, they can’t go abroad or up to Scotland. When you’ve got three full-time scouts they go wherever we tell them to go.”
He says having more full-time scouts than the club has had in the past affords the freedom to follow tip-offs regarding prospective signings: "Either they’ll go or we’ll go. We went to Scandinavia a couple of times in the summer to watch games.
"It’s not just tip-offs, it’s just watching games. They might go away for four or five days just to take six or seven games in.
"They might come back and say that there was no one they fancied there, but it’s never a waste of time because you’ve got a knowledge [of football in that country]. It does take time to build that up.”