“I liked him so much that I bought him immediately,” Ardiles said at the time, when asked how much Dumitrescu’s performances in that hot, bright summer in the United States had influenced his decision.

It felt as if that was what was happening all over the newly rich, nakedly ambitious Premier League. England had not qualified for the World Cup that year, and so — in the weeks after the tournament had finished — its clubs seemed determined to bring the World Cup to England instead. U.S.A. 1994 seemed to be treated as a sort of soccer equivalent to the home shopping network. Now, thanks to technology and a better understanding of scouting and analytics, it’s little more than a monthlong summer spectacle.

Most important, the world is much smaller than it once was. Nowhere is too exotic, too unfamiliar. Romania is not so far away. Clubs not only have much more sophisticated networks of contacts across the planet, they can now track possible targets remotely, thanks to digital platforms like Wyscout, InStat and Scout 7.

Teams and their scouts can watch nearly every game, in (almost) every league around the world, from the comfort of their own offices. Many of those computerized programs allow scouts to focus on the individual player they are interested in.

To ensure they know exactly what they are watching, leading teams have developed complex algorithms to quantify, essentially, how well a player needs to perform in Romania to be the equal of an average player in Italy. That dovetails with the work of expert analytics departments.

Crucially, they can tabulate data on any player for years. One scout estimates that his staff follows potential targets, on average, for seven years to have as complete a picture as possible of their abilities. No player at the World Cup this summer is unfamiliar. “We should know every athlete there,” one chief scout said.