The man in charge of the Italian owner’s recruitment unit explains why the club have the players and belief to make a success of their top-flight return

It was perhaps inevitable but certainly ironic that one of the first things that followed the arrival at Watford of the family known above all others for employing legions of scouts was the sacking of all the scouts. What use, after all, is a small-scale focus on the search for English-based bargains when you already have access to the world’s largest global scouting network?

“As soon as we first heard the rumours I just felt: ‘There’s going to be mega change here,’” says Brian Greenhalgh, the club’s chief scout until the Pozzo family, already owners of Udinese in Italy and Granada in Spain, took control in 2012. “When new owners come in they either buy into what’s going on or they adapt it to a degree, or they come in and change everything. It’s my mentality to check things out – as a chief scout you tend to delve a little bit – and as soon as I saw how they operated I could see there was going to be a totally new system. We had six scouts working at the club and everybody went. Everybody.”

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Greenhalgh’s first impressions were not wrong and there has been mega change. Though Watford retain a three-man local recruitment team, the man in charge of the scouting operation does not live in England or even speak English. As a player Andrea Carnevale spent two seasons at Udinese but more famously won a scudetto with Napoli alongside Diego Maradona, played for Italy in the 1990 World Cup, and soon afterwards was banned for a year after testing positive for amphetamines. Now he is in control of perhaps world football’s most highly regarded scouting unit, a world away from the low-cost, low-key team once overseen by Greenhalgh.

“We run an operation on a global scale, a well-oiled, highly professional team, using many former players,” Carnevale tells the Guardian in his first interview with an English newspaper. “We cover every significant competition around the world – regional championships at every level from under-17 to under-21, domestic leagues in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Colombia and also across Europe: Belgium, Sweden, Serbia, Croatia. In all there are perhaps 25 or 30 of us. We’re constantly looking for players. Our ambitions have no limit.”

Player recruitment is the most famous part of the Pozzo family’s increasingly complex international operation. Their greatest success remains Alexis Sánchez, signed for £1.5m from the Chilean club Cobreloa as a 17-year-old, loaned back to South American clubs for a couple of seasons until considered ready to make an impact in Europe, eventually sold to Barcelona for £30m and now at Arsenal. The same formula remains in active use: clubs who sent scouts to this year’s South American Under-17 Championship in Paraguay found they had turned up too late to snaffle its star and top scorer, the 16-year-old Ponte Preta forward Leandro.

Udinese had already secured his signature, although he will spend at least another season on loan in his native Brazil before boarding the plane to Europe, with Spain likely to be his first stop. “Our secret on the international transfer market is simple, or at least it sounds simple when you say it,” Carnevale says. “We have to get there before everybody else.”

If the classic Pozzo signing is young, obscure and wildly promising, Watford have trodden a different path this summer. The first eight arrivals were aged between 27 and 31, all but one of them full internationals and very much established. Only one, the right-back Allan Nyom, who had spent the past six seasons on loan from Udinese to Granada, was already under the Pozzo umbrella. “It is one thing selecting players for the Championship but choosing players for the Premier League is another thing entirely,” Carnevale says. “So we made some cautious choices. We signed players of some importance, who were already playing with big teams. It’s not easy to remain in the Premier League and that is our priority.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Andrea Carnevale, right, draws up shortlists of potential signings for Gino Pozzo. Photograph: Claudio Villa/Getty Images

The number of high-profile signings Watford have made since their promotion has led to mutterings in Udine that the family’s focus has moved away from Italy. Franco Soldati, Udinese’s executive president, reassured supporters. “Watford will be our engine room, to create a team that will take us to Europe. The very best young players, players of potentially world-beating quality, will go to England, where they will gain the experience that will eventually bear fruit in Friuli,” he said.

“The Pozzos’ heart remains here,” Carnevale says: “Udinese fans can chill out because this summer we’ve bought four new players, each one better than the last. It’s a great team. The Pozzos make sure all three teams get the same focus.”

I don’t think there could be a better owner in the world than Gino Pozzo

There are three key figures in the Pozzo family. Giampaolo, now 74, bought Udinese in 1986 using money from his family’s tool-making business, which was sold in 2008, allowing them to turn their attentions fully towards football. His wife, Giuliana, is the granddaughter and the cousin of former Udinese presidents and keeps such a close eye on football that, when Watford’s promotion to the Premier League was secured, she made the first congratulatory phone call, narrowly pipping Sir Elton John.

The key man, however; the one who fielded those phone calls, is their son Gino, whose arrival on Udinese’s payroll following his graduation in 1993 coincided with the adoption of the scouting-reliant model that has sustained their success ever since.

He has also led the family’s international expansion. The idea may have come about because Udinese found themselves with too many players for one club reasonably to use but Granada and Watford are more than just finishing schools. A presence in Spain allows the Pozzos to bring to Europe players who could not get a work permit in Italy, while success in England brings financial rewards beyond compare elsewhere.

Gino masterminded both acquisitions, first identifying Granada after moving to Spain with his Catalan wife. At the time the club were €12m in debt and struggling in the third division; two years later they ended a 35-year absence from the Primera Liga. Gino then moved to London, where he has again dragged what was a heavily indebted club to the top flight – and financial security.

“Our model is to look for a project that will be sustainable in the medium and long term,” he told the Friuli newspaper Il Gazzettino last month. “We pay close attention to expenditure, to making the clubs self-sufficient. We saw what happened to Parma, where the moment they stopped spending the wheels fell off. We try to install proper management and then we add value by developing young talents.”

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The aim, in short, is for league tables and balance sheets to offer encouraging reading. In Watford’s last accounts, for 2013-14, the club made a £0.3m loss, the fourth-best headline figures in a Championship where more clubs lost in excess of £20m (five) than turned a profit (three). Meanwhile, in 2012-13 only six Serie A clubs reported an operating profit and Udinese’s £32.3m was almost exactly four times larger than anyone else’s. All three Pozzo clubs will play in their country’s top flight this season, Udinese for the 20th year in succession.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Giampaolo Pozzo, right, also owns the Italian club Udinese and Granada in Spain. Photograph: Lancia/EPA

“I don’t think there could be a better owner in the world than Gino Pozzo,” Carnevale says. “He is very professional but he also really understands football. He has been around the game for so long that he has great expertise, even if he never played professionally. We have known each other for more than 30 years – we met when we were both young and I was playing – and he’s now a great, competent, intelligent president.”

Carnevale’s job is to draw up shortlists of potential signings but it is Gino who makes the decisions. “Udinese receive up to 300 reports a year,” says Carlo Piazzolla, the club’s former general manager. “Players are watched by the scouts and, after they sort out the chaff, profiles of the best players are sent to Gino Pozzo. In recent years he has made good decisions.”

We have acquired some important players; players who are good enough to play in the Champions League

His influence is not confined to transfers and balance sheets. He is at Watford’s training ground most days, from where he monitors the efforts of his family’s three squads. All of their players wear GPS devices in training and it was by analysing and comparing this data last year that Pozzo noticed the training sessions he was witnessing in Hertfordshire were significantly less intense than those taking place simultaneously in Friuli and Andalucía.

Watford’s then manager, Beppe Sannino, had gone within weeks. It was also Pozzo who decided Billy McKinlay, eight days after his appointment last October, was not after all the right man to manage the team, replacing him with Slavisa Jokanovic and insisting the focus on success over sentiment “cannot be compromised – whatever the circumstances”.

That single-minded approach has resulted in Watford stretching some transfer regulations to their logical limits. In their first season under the Pozzos they brought so many players in on international loans the Football League legislated to stop the practice, so Watford handed out permanent contracts instead.

At times players switch between Pozzo-controlled employers with alarmingly casual frequency. So when Watford decided to keep the Nigerian striker Odion Ighalo last October they first cancelled his loan, then Udinese released him from his contract and finally he returned to Watford on a free transfer, all within 24 hours – this summer Udinese’s president has suggested they may have him back again. The Ecuador right-back Juan Carlos Paredes and the Mexico midfielder Miguel Layún joined Granada on permanent deals and then signed different permanent contracts at Watford within days and without ever playing for the Spanish side.

The number of signings Watford, under new head coach Quique Flores, have made this summer has reminded some observers of the ultimately unsuccessful sprees recently undertaken at Queens Park Rangers, and they will start the season as the bookmakers’ favourites for relegation, but in Udine they insist that there is method in the apparent madness. “The Premier League is a really hard competition,” Carnevale says. “We have acquired some important players; players who are good enough to play in the Champions League. It won’t be easy and it will take some time before the players get to know each other but let’s hope the team click and they have a great season. Safety is our first goal but there is the potential to do even better.”