For the last eight years, Wyscout has become a growing force and transformed the football recruitment and scouting industry. The cutting-edge video and networking platform provides objective information about the performance of players in 80 countries and across 150 championships. 

With some of the largest clubs in the world levering the data provided by Wyscout to help with their recruitment strategies, it is no surprise to see a correlation between the statistics collected in player profiles and their respective market value. 

Matteo Campodonico, Wyscout chief executive, commented in a recent interview with Sky Sports that the initial idea was "to create something useful for coaches to train players and scout players, so it was really surprising for us discovering that what we did was for everyone in the world. Today, we are the biggest football community after FIFA."

The explosive growth of Wyscout and its adoption within the football industry can be compared with the growing significance of combining internal and external data sources. Football scouts review the data they have collected in-house, cross reference this with the information from Wyscout and other external sources, in order to gather a complete picture when attempting to predict the likely success of signing particular players. The unstructured data collected by Wyscout in video format is enriched by their team of analysts and objective values can be assigned and indexed. Consequently, footballing clubs and institutions are able to combine what they already know about players, subsequently, filling in the gaps using the Wyscout analysis. 

With this data potentially being the difference between a club deciding to invest in one player over another, it becomes easy to appreciate the importance of having access to complete datasets. In an industry where a teenager (Anthony Martial) can be purchased for a fee potentially rising to £57.6m, it also emphasises how costly it could become investing without using all of the data available. 

Therefore, for those looking to make up ground on their peers in fantasy team selections, perhaps try the 14 day free trial of the Wyscout platform and see if you have what it makes to find the next Riyad Mahrez.

https://wyscout.com/