Every club wants to make the best possible decisions when it comes to recruiting new players. One way to do so is to get to know everything about a potential target. The more information, the better. Another way to improve your decision-making is by managing to find better players worldwide. Increasing the number of transfer targets undoubtedly leads to better decision-making. How can digital scouting be useful here?
Live scouting
Traditionally, scouting is based on two main things: watching full matches and receiving tips from people in the club’s network. Both of these methods are still relevant today and will always remain useful.
At the same time, they share a few disadvantages. The most important one? It is nearly impossible to ‘cover’ the whole world with these two scouting methods. Watching full matches takes a lot of time and it is practically impossible to build a high-quality network in all areas of the world. As a result, some areas – depending on language, location, infrastructure, etc. – are covered way better than other areas.
Digital scouting
It makes a lot of sense to prioritise some regions, but to optimise your decision-making, it is highly recommended to cover the whole world. More options lead to more flexibility and to better transfer decisions. That is exactly where digital scouting can help.
In this article, we write about the pros and cons of live scouting, video scouting and data analysis. To summarise: live scouting is very reliable, but at the same time really time consuming. In contrast, data analysis is really fast, but less reliable. Video can be seen as somewhere in the middle between those two.
Find better players
Clubs usually have a long history with live scouting. Video scouting and data analysis seem to be less developed, although these tools are rapidly gaining ground. At 11tegen11 Scouting, we specialise in digital scouting, with data analysis and video scouting as its two main sources. Our sophisticated approach enables us to support clubs to improve the level of their scouting team.
In short, digital scouting support has two main advantages.
- Explore new areas. With data and video, we have full coverage of all professional leagues worldwide. This means we can easily use digital resources as a filter to find the best possible players for your club.
- Independent second opinion. Some players don’t hit the spotlights the first time you watch them, but can still be very useful for your team. With data, and with the Custom Video Report option in WyScout, we are able to find players the club might have overlooked in the regions they scout thoroughly themselves.
Investing in digital scouting is a very smart thing to do for any club at any level. Not only from a short-term perspective by strengthening the squad, but also long-term by improving the decision-making and reaping the subsequent financial benefits.
Get in touch
Finding players in unexplored areas can hand the club an immediate advantage of their direct competitors. At the same time, digital scouting support will improve the decision-making and immediately reduce the number of unsuccessful transfers.
Want to get to know us better and learn how 11tegen11 Scouting can support your club? We’d be happy to talk you through it in a 30 minutes video call.
