Over the last couple of years, we have developed a five-step scouting process that we use in every assignment. The first four steps regularly take us one or two weeks to go through. The process cycle of the fifth step depends on the club. What we do is the same every time – follow those five steps. How we do it depends on the needs of the club.
Scouting process
Throughout the years, we’ve structured our scouting process for every assignment step-by-step. This has resulted in a cycle which goes through five steps.
- The club provides us with detailed search criteria: what exactly are they looking for?
- We carry out data analysis using advanced player profiles, build-up from self-developed metrics.
- By using extensive video scouting, we narrow down the best options even further.
- We deliver a shortlist to the club, which contains player names and both textual and visual explanations.
- The club evaluates those players and provides us with feedback to improve our next assignment.
Let’s explain those steps in more detail. Use one of the bullets above to scroll to one of those five steps immediately.
Search criteria
The first step is an extensive description of the exact needs of the club. This contains three main components.
- Demographic: age, region, language, nationality.
- Tactical: position, role, playing style.
- Financial: transfer fee, salary.
The better we know what the club wants is looking for in a players, the higher the quality of our shortlist with recommended players. You’ll read more about this shortlist below, in the fourth step in our scouting process.
Data analysis
Based on the search criteria listed above, we start the data analysis. Our worldwide coverage of data enables us to identify potential transfer targets in every corner of the world. In all data analysis, we always use football as a starting point, which appears in the player profiles we use. Those profiles show strengths and weaknesses of players for the main skills they should possess on their position, in their role, within the playing style of their team and adjusted for the level of opposition.
We hardly ever use a single number to rate a player’s qualities. In our opinion, scouting is all about finding a good fit between a player and a club. A player can be a super fit at one club, while never playing to his skills at another. This depends on many different factors. Instead of using a single rating, we manually analyse several hundreds of players. We do so by taking an in-depth look into their strengths and weaknesses from a data point of view.
Here, you can read more about our data analysis process.
Video scouting
From the data analysis, we extract a list of most interesting players, based on the criteria the club provided us with. We evaluate those players with different video scouts by using the Custom Video Report option in WyScout. Every player – who makes it all the way towards the shortlist of best suggestions – has me been evaluated by three independent video scouts. Summed up, they watched clips from over ten different matches.
We believe it is really important to provide objective tactical frameworks to evaluate a player. Therefore, we write every scouting report down in clear football language to decrease the chance of miscommunication. We only use action language, based on the reference communication: decision, execution, as well as time-space characteristics like position, moment, direction and speed.
Here, you can read more about our video analysis process.
Delivery
Once we have finished our data and video analysis, we compile a shortlist with the best suggestions for the club. We are very flexible in the way we report the suggested players. Soms clubs prefer a brief summary of the players’ strengths and weaknesses, while other clubs like to receive detailed descriptions and visualisations, both with data and video.
A crucial element of the way we deliver our player suggestions, is that we always add text. We want to have the possibility to explain why we suggest a player, both from a data and a video point of view. Written text is the most common way of digital communication, so it leaves the least room for misunderstanding. It also helps to understand and interpret possible charts and tables better.
Feedback
After every assignment, we communicate with the club about the shortlist that we delivered. The objective of this final step is to receive feedback, which we use to improve our next assignment. Which players were rated highly by the club? Which players weren’t, and for what reason?
For us, this is a crucial and often underrated step, because in our experience, feedback from the club is essential to improve the quality of our scouting and to optimise our process to the needs of the club.
At every club we’ve cooperated with so far, we’ve experienced that the quality of our suggestions improved over time. This could be either by finding players we might have eliminated before or by crossing out players that the club doesn’t appreciate. There can be several reasons for that, such as style, budget and preferred region.
Get in touch
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. We’ll explain in more detail how we work and would like to learn more about your club, current methods, and areas in need of support.
