Jordan (KES 05-12)
Chief Scout at Phoenix Rising FC

My name is Jordan. I attended KES through a Bursary Award between 2005-2012. I’m currently Chief Scout at Phoenix Rising FC, a football club based in Arizona, in the United States. Football has always been my passion and every lunchtime at KES, you would find me out playing on the Astro. I can never forget Saints’ back-to-back promotions to the Premier League in 2011 and 2012 during my A Levels and quite a few additional sleepless nights around each examination period!

KES always encouraged pupils to be ambitious and follow their dreams. That has certainly been the case for me - 20 years on from joining as a confident kid but in unfamiliar surroundings, football is my full-time role. My dad used to tell me, ‘build it and they will come.’ My mum would say, ‘you can be anything you want to be.’ KES gave me the lifelong skills to turn well-meaning parental advice into something tangible. I love my role because I am empowered to work autonomously on something I am passionate about, while knowing I am surrounded by knowledgeable and caring professionals – just like at KES.

At Phoenix Rising, we’ve taken a unique approach to scouting for a USL team, taking players from the top divisions of Mexico and Colombia, and the lower divisions of France and Germany in the last year alone. Live-scouting private academies in Senegal was something I’d never expected to do, either, no matter how many hours of Football Manager I snuck in between lessons and in the concourse all those years ago!

My scouting experience draws on my wider knowledge and engagement around football. In 2020, I published a book in two languages (Red Wine & Arepas: How Football is Becoming Venezuela’s Religion), which I’m proud to say sits in the KES library, and in 2022 I was commissioned to direct a documentary on Caracas Futbol Club for COPA90. In the last year I have also become a guest lecturer at UCFB Manchester on their BA (Hons) International Football Business degree. I lead sessions to first year students on the topic of Technical Directorship and to second year students on International Culture & Relations.

I can trace so much of all this back to KES: the Spanish exchange that gave me the belief that I could move abroad and speak another language and the many hours spent in the library, developing my love for writing. Above all, KES empowered me to teach myself and become a lifelong learner. Exam results are important – and I achieved good ones – but what really means something is knowing how to learn. That never stops for me – every year I’m embracing new opportunities and learning within football.

All of this is why I was happy to be asked to become an Ambassador for the Boundless Futures Giving Campaign. I came to KES in 2005 from a single-parent household in which our income was less than the annual school fees. Things weren’t always straightforward, but KES was instrumental in my growth and I hope that by giving something back I can help to create more opportunities for future young people.   

Thank you to all those who have already supported bursaries at KES, and I’d urge anyone to get behind our campaign if you are able to. Together, we are aiming to increase Bursary offers to 1 in 10 pupils by 2030. By supporting bursaries, you will be having a lifelong and life-changing impact on young people, just as I have experienced.