The Technology Changing How Football Finds Its Next Stars

Matheus Cunha scored twice against Roma on Tuesday night and was then sent off before the final whistle, which was a very United way of ending a nine-game winless run. Somebody at the club once watched him play and decided he was worth buying; as a supporter of a team (unfortunately) that has spent months looking for answers, I have become oddly interested in how clubs make that call.

Scouting used to mean a man in a bobble hat behind a goal in the rain with a notebook. These days, it can mean GPS vests, software that watches match footage frame by frame and apps that let a teenager upload a video of himself from the back garden. Clubs are collecting so much information on young players that a notebook has little hope of keeping up.

Algorithms Are Reading The Scouting Reports Nobody Has Time For

Clubs have been filing scouting reports for decades, but many end up in databases that nobody has time to open. Sevilla FC has more than 200,000 scouting reports in its database, according to IBM. The club worked with IBM to build Scout Advisor, a generative AI tool that can search those reports using ordinary written prompts and return a list of matching players, along with summaries of what scouts have recorded about them.

In May 2024, the Football Association announced its work with Google Cloud on using generative AI to analyse historical scouting reports. Using Google’s Vertex AI platform, the project turns years of observations into shorter summaries, giving coaches and scouts a broader picture of a young player’s development. The project was still in its pilot phase when Google reported on it, but it showed how AI could help staff review years of scouting information more quickly.

GPS Vests Don’t Care How Good Your Highlights Look

Professional clubs use GPS tracking and other performance monitoring systems to collect information about players during training and matches. STATSports reported that five of the Premier League’s top six clubs used its Apex tracking devices during the 2018/19 season.

These systems can record sprint distance, top speed and workload. Leroy Sané reached 35.18 km/h that season, according to Sky Sports, just under 22 mph – a figure no highlights reel can fake.

Wearable tracking technology is now available outside professional football, too. The Dutch football association KNVB, for example, supported Footbar’s wearable tracker for amateur players, allowing them to measure things such as distance covered, sprinting speed and the number of balls played. A teenager in a small league can use this kind of technology to build a record of their physical performance over a season, although a tracker can only tell you a player reached 22 mph, it still has no idea whether he was chasing a through ball or the referee.

Computer Vision Watches The Players Everyone Else Overlooks

Computer vision is software that picks out players and the ball in a video, then tracks their positions throughout a match. That lets it measure what never appears in a goals and assists column, such as how well a midfielder closes down space or how often a forward makes a run that nobody passes to. SkillCorner, a Paris-based company, uses this technology to generate player-tracking data from ordinary broadcast footage.

In a 2026 validation project comparing its tracking outputs with the Premier League’s stadium-based tracking system, SkillCorner reported player identification accuracy ranging from around 90% to 98%, depending on camera position and footage conditions.

Because the data can come from television footage, a club can assess leagues it has nobody in the stands for. The camera won’t always show all 22 players at once, so the footage has its limitations, but it can still give recruitment teams information about players and their movement that would be difficult to collect from a distance. It’s a skill United’s back line has not exactly mastered lately.

A Phone Can Put A Player On A Club’s Radar

AiScout gives aspiring players another way to get noticed. They can download the app, film themselves completing football drills and upload the videos for assessment. Its software analyses areas such as technical, athletic, cognitive and psychometric ability, giving scouts information they can use when deciding whether to take a closer look.

Chelsea named AiScout its Official Academy Research Partner in October 2022, following two years of research and development work with the platform. The club agreed to a five-year partnership, with the app intended to become part of its academy recruitment and scouting process. It doesn’t guarantee a trial or a contract, but it gives clubs a way to assess players they might not otherwise have seen.

There’s a financial incentive to finding a player early, too. Brighton has built a recruitment approach around analytics and data, using it to monitor players across professional leagues and identify potential signings. The club’s sporting director has described how this helps Brighton find talent around the world and compete in a difficult transfer market.

Moisés Caicedo is an example of how valuable a young player can become: Brighton paid £4m for him in February 2021 before selling him to Chelsea for an initial £100m in August 2023, with the fee potentially rising to £115m, according to BBC Sport. His transfer illustrates the potential financial value of finding talented players before their market value climbs.

Can An Algorithm Spot The Next Messi?

Research by Leah Monsees from Malmö University examined how coaches, scouts and a sporting manager at a German Bundesliga academy used technology and data to identify and develop young players. The 2025 case study involved seven interviews with staff overseeing the academy’s U8–U14 age groups. It found that the technology used in those age groups was mainly limited to physical measurements and automated video evaluations. Staff recognised the potential of data-driven methods, including AI, but raised concerns about interpreting the information, finding time to analyse it and knowing how to use it effectively.

The study also found that staff were cautious about relying too heavily on numbers when assessing young players. Physical development varies, especially during adolescence, and a player’s statistics don’t necessarily reflect their potential. Whether a sixteen-year-old stays calm after a mistake, how he talks to teammates and whether he turns up for training the day after a bad game are all things a tracking system cannot fully assess.

Clubs still need to look at those qualities alongside the numbers, rather than assuming a promising set of statistics guarantees a successful signing.

The Software Can Find The Teenager, But A Scout Still Has To Watch Him Lose The Ball

Between report-reading software, GPS vests, video tracking and scouting apps, clubs can now follow a young player’s speed, positioning and development across leagues they might never have sent a scout to. A teenager playing somewhere that rarely attracts scouts now has a better chance of being noticed by a professional club than ever before.

What none of these tools can fully capture is what happens when a talented sixteen-year-old steps into a first-team environment, faces stronger opposition and has to respond when a game goes badly. Somebody will still have to stand by the touchline and watch what he does in the ten seconds after he gives the ball away.