Sven Mislintat's departure to Arsenal is Borussia Dortmund's biggest test since escaping insolvency in 2005... 'Diamond Eye' is irreplaceable

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It is the dawning of a new era. An era in which headlines are written and seven figure sums are paid not just for players, but for scouts. Arsenal made waves this week by securing the services of Borussia Dortmund's scouting sensation Sven Mislintat. 

The Bundesliga is used to its best players leaving for the lights and cash of the Premier League, but million-pound scouts are something new. 'They'll be poaching our team bus drivers soon,' grumbled one Bild columnist.

Mislintat's switch to Arsenal has prompted the sort of fuss that one rarely sees from backroom-staff appointments. But then Mislintat is no ordinary scout. He is one of the most influential figures in the last decade of German football.

Super scout Sven Mislintat has joined Arsenal after 11 years of service at Borussia Dortmund

Mislintat's departure is a massive blow to Dortmund - with his arrival coinciding with their rise

He is the irreplaceable super scout who laid the foundations for Jurgen Klopp's success there

His story is one of the rise and fall of Borussia Dortmund in recent years. He is the irreplaceable super scout who laid the foundations for Jurgen Klopp's success before falling out with Thomas Tuchel and electing to leave the club he helped rebuild.

Since Mislintat began working at Dortmund back in 2006, the club has gone from being a financial basket case to one of the most successful clubs in Europe. Part of that was down to the financial savvy of Hans-Joachim Watzke, part of it down to the managerial genius of Jurgen Klopp.

Mislintat's scouting work was what allowed both elements to work in harmony. With an astonishing ability to identify brilliant young talent, he was able to provide the coach with quality, and the board with palatable prices. 

Shinji Kagawa, Ousmane Dembele, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and Robert Lewandowski are the most famous names among those who Mislintat picked out for Dortmund. Aside from their on-field services to Dortmund, two of those players also brought in millions for the club when they were eventually sold on.

The 45-year-old has been nicknamed 'Super Eye' and 'Diamond Eye' among his colleagues, and 'pearl diver' by the media. So how does he go about finding his jewels? 

Mislintat helped to bring players such as Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang to Dortmund

Shinji Kagawa is another player to have shone at Dortmund thanks to Mislintat's scouting

In the immediate post-Moneyball era, Mislintat was one of the first to bring data-based scouting methods into the Bundesliga. He helped set up a scouting system which took its cue from an enormous database, with thousands of individual statistics on thousands of different players the world over. At the time, it was revolutionary. 

'We were pioneers: not in the sense that we were inventing things, but rather in the sense that we were installing things,' Mislintat is quoted in Sascha and Frank Fligge's book on Dortmund's revival.

If it began with the machine, though, it would always end with the 'Super Eye', or rather super eyes. Targets identified through the database would then be closely monitored at visits to the games by a team of Mislintat's scouts. 

'One scout would look only at body language, another would focus on pace, another on shooting technique,' said Mislintat. No player, though, could be considered without having been meticulously studied in the flesh. Working just metres down a corridor from sporting director Michael Zorc, Mislintat was indispensable, and ever more influential at Dortmund. 

'Sven was my closest colleague for 10 years,' said Zorc this week. 'We developed a very close relationship of trust. He has done brilliant work at BVB.'

Sporting director Michael Zorc hailed Mislintat as his 'closest colleague for 10 years'

Trust, though, has been in short supply at Dortmund in the last 12 months. The calamitous breakdown in relations between the board and former coach Thomas Tuchel has thrown the club into the biggest period of instability in a decade, and Mislintat is at the heart of it.

The scout fell out with Tuchel before anybody else did, enduring a public spat with the then coach over the failed attempt to sign Oliver Torres. Tuchel would, somewhat melodramatically, ban Mislintat from the training ground, in what proved to be the beginning of the end of his tenure. 

Tuchel is known for being difficult to handle, but some also saw Mislintat at the heart of the problem. 'He's not as easy to deal with as his laid-back appearance suggests,' wrote German newspaper the FAZ of the three-day-stubbled Super Eye.

Whoever was to blame, the board sided with Mislintat, promoting him immediately from chief scout to 'head of football'. Tuchel was fired in the summer, but the squabble had piqued the interest of other clubs, and a whole host of vultures began circling in the hope of poaching the super scout. The summer saw Fortuna Dusseldorf, Bayern Munich and others all attempt to lure Mislintat away from Dortmund, but the club stood firm. 

However, Mislintat's time at the club soured when former manager Thomas Tuchel took charge

'Sven is staying at BVB,' said chief executive Watzke. 'Full stop. End of.' It turned out to be more of a comma. For though Dortmund had tried to keep him onside, the squabble with Tuchel had obviously unsettled Mislintat, and when Arsenal came calling, he jumped at the opportunity.

'I was born here, I grew up here. I had offers in the past, but I never thought about leaving the club before,' Mislintat told Kicker this week. 'The ban from the training ground which the previous coach initiated, the fact that I was told to stay away from the inner circle: from players, staff members, friends who I had worked with for a long time - all that influenced the way I thought.' 

Even months after Tuchel's sacking, the fallout from his turbulent tenure goes on, and Arsenal are the beneficiaries. Mislintat's departure is perhaps the biggest test that Dortmund have suffered since they escaped insolvency in 2005.

After all, you can replace a Robert Lewandowski or a Mats Hummels so long as you have a super scout at your disposal. It is much harder to replace the Diamond Eye himself.

Dortmund will find it incredibly hard to replace 'Diamond Eye' Mislintat going forward