Former Crystal Palace striker James Scowcroft is delighted to be now be part of their scouting team.

Scowcroft returned to Palace last year on invite from football chief Dougie Freedman.

He told the club's website: “Of course, I used to play with Dougie. And over the years I've bumped in to him and always had great conversations about football.

“It was probably about a year ago that Dougie invited me on board and I jumped at the chance. It has been really, really good. Dougie is building an excellent team behind the scenes.

“A Sporting Director's role is to build behind the scenes and build for the future and I think the club, going forward, looks really, really good. We've got an excellent Chairman in Steve Parish who is hands on and pushes the club as much as he possibly can.

“I've worked for two other Premier League clubs but they didn't have the infrastructure we've got at Crystal Palace."

He added: “I do a lot of stuff abroad – I'm mainly in France. I spend probably two weekends in a month going all over France. But I've also spent time in Italy watching the England Under-21s and visited Poland to watch the Under-19 tournament."