How do you find a superstar athlete before they're a star? What if they're playing on a dusty field in a remote village, thousands of miles away? In global sports like soccer and cricket, there's no single "draft." Instead, clubs rely on a massive, hidden network of scouts, data scientists, and even video game databases to find the next big thing.

Welcome to "Global Drafting." In this episode, we're unpacking the playbook of the world's best talent identifiers. You'll learn how soccer scouts use the Football Manager video game as a real-world tool and how data analysts for the Indian Premier League find diamonds in the rough. We'll explore the high-stakes blend of old-school "eye test" intuition and hard "Moneyball" analytics. What lessons can we learn from these cross-sport systems about how to spot true potential? How do you separate raw talent from hype?

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