Tony Mowbray stopped short of a powerpoint presentation to explain the club’s new-look recruitment department, but the Rovers boss spoke in great detail, and with enthusiasm, of the lengths the club is going to in a bid to source top talent across the globe.

Mowbray travelled to Europe in midweek to take advantage of his players being afforded two days off to watch prospective targets. He will jet off again on Sunday, with assistant Mark Venus, as they step up their plans for next season.

Players will be identified through countless hours of studying video footage on state-of-the-art software, before being passed on to Mowbray who will then dispatch one of his recruitment team, or himself, to watch the player live.

That remains a key part of the process, while as ever, everything comes down to finance and whether Rovers can meet the transfer fees, and wages, of identified targets.

“This is how I’ve worked my recruitment department at clubs at this level, and at Celtic. I’ve tried to build recruitment departments,” Mowbray explained.

“You need bodies. But you can’t go from very little to bringing in lots of people.

“You have to build it bit-by-bit. From practically nothing, we’ve got the reports the way we want them, the video analysts who can cover a lot more games than one guy going to a game on a Tuesday night and a Saturday and you get two reports a week.

“Now we can get 25 reports a week from five guys doing five reports each. We’re covering more areas, and are trying to get to a position where we don’t have to use our video analysis guys to go and watch games in Europe, we actually have people watching games and giving us feedback.

“Their feedback, and via the video, can marry up positive vibes and if everyone thinks they’re a player then a member of staff will go and watch them.”

Rovers have four people studying matches from across the continent, chosen based upon the expected transfer fees and salary levels players from those countries would command.

Mowbray hopes the work behind the scenes will come to fruition with the signings Rovers make this summer, admitting that a successful recruitment department can more than fund itself with the players it identifies.

“Rather than starting off by employing 10 people to cover Europe, we have got some young guys who sit in a recruitment office at the back of our building and they watch games, live games, recorded games, games from the weekend, games played in countries we’re studying from leagues we think we can afford players from,” Mowbray continued.

“We identify the leagues where we think the salary levels, and what you would pay for footballers, are achievable, and the four young lads sit and they watch maybe three or four games and they report on the best players.

“We know about individual players because agents will say ‘so-and-so is available, he’s scored 25 goals in the French second division and he’ll cost £1million’ and then we’ll watch all of his games and make reports.

“We have report templates, what he’s good at, what his weaknesses are, every player has a grading system that we work off so we compare against all of the leagues. You will cross-section as who one person thinks is a good player, another might disagree, so we cross-section.

“Then when we have filtered out the players we like, those same lads on a weekend go and watch those players live and analyse them. If everything is positive, their viewing off the video, their live viewing is positive, I’ve told them to be brave and put their neck on the line.

“If you think he’s going to make our team better, you have to tell me. I’m the manager and you have to say ‘gaffer, he’s going to improve us, he’s better than X in our team’. Then here we are now, I’m trying to support our recruitment department by sending my assistant manager, head of recruitment, and myself, we’re watching these footballers on their recommendations and these footballers, I’ve seen a couple, Mark has gone out, we’re both going out on Sunday, and we’ll see.

“It’s like a filtering system to spit out the ones we can afford, from the countries we can afford, we feel their personalities will fit in to the British games, lots of different things.”

With more overseas trips, more people employed, there is undoubtedly a greater cost attached to the increased recruitment department. 

Though Mowbray says questions over cost won't be argued should it lead to high quality additions.

He added: “Hopefully it will become bigger, but it costs money. You have to pay people. You have to pay mileage to people to go in their cars to watch games in this country.

“If you’re getting people on aeroplanes, putting them in hotels, watching games and then coming back, they have to write reports, and there’s an expenditure to recruitment departments that can grow pretty quickly.

“Not just one guy can cover the whole of Europe. If you’re going to cover France, Germany, Portugal, Belgium, Scandinavia, wherever you’re going to put them there’s an expenditure. 

“The success is to find good players and then no-one questions the expense. When you’re not buying good players and the team is getting beat every week, and you spend a lot of money then there will be question marks.”