Project for ConUHacks VII
My inspiration for this project stems from the deep-rooted love that I have for football/soccer. A young kid going to play football in his local ground with the ball at his feet to amaze the world. Football truly is an art in motion if players are given freedom to express themselves. Like this kid, there are million of young artists out there who find their place on the football field and in general, the world through their artistry. Players rise through the ranks overcoming a huge level of competition by playing their natural style of football. This however, is short lived as they later become victims of the inadequate system of player profiling.
Top clubs recruit these youngsters based on their potential and said performances. All the top clubs have a demanding and set-style of play implemented by the manager or the sporting hierarchy. The problem arises when a player completely foreign to the playing-style of a team is forced to forget his roots, the football culture that made him who he is, and try to adapt to a new-style of play. Despite us living in the modern era and having a lot of technological resources to carry out comprehensive analysis of a player and his playing style, miss-profiling is very common and often results in the player loosing confidence in himself and falling out of love with the beautiful game.
Scout Mania tries to counter this problem by introducing a new way of analysis in the scouting realm. Scout Mania maintains a database of young talents all around the world. Scouts from around the world are asked to register a player on the database by grading on certain attributes. Many of the attributes are general and seen in everyday football but I have introduced some new attributes of my own that will make the analysis of a player even more concise. Attributes like Movement between the lines, scanning, space identification give a greater idea of what is the play style of the said player. Scouts are highly encouraged to write their own views about the player and his play-style in the general section.
I made a short non-functional prototype using Wix. Scouts can register their talents by entering their personal details, grading their attributes as well as elaborate on the preferred play-style of the player in their own words. It is a non-functional prototype made in the last moment. https://asadrubinara.wixsite.com/scout-mania
There were various challenges and some are still lingering begging to be solved. The first challenge obviously is that a player rating rely heavily on the perception of the scout, hence bringing in a sense of subjectivity. Although scouts are supposed to be unbiased but as humans none of us are perfectly 100% objective. A solution to this would be to dive deeper into the field on analytical data to back up the new stats that I introduced. Stats such as expected goals, expected assists, post shot expected goals, etc. give an even more broader view of a player performance and dive more into objectivity.
Scout Mania is far from perfect and currently is just a seed which needs to be further cultivated. First thing would be to develop the website into a complete and functional one. Creating a databse to store all the player informations and making the website more interactive and at the same time striving for more innovation with further advanced statistics and their use to analyse player performances.
Currently, the scouting network in football is very privatised. Football clubs hire scouts from different regions to scout footballers in that particular region. Scouts are not hired full time and work on contractual basis. A preliminary business plan could be to have a club register its account with the website for a monthly fee through which they get access to our scouting database containing thousands of players scouted from different regions by different scouts. When a club decides to buy a player from our database, setting a percentage commission to be paid to Scout Mania for providing all the necessary details and resources about the player and then paying a percentage of that commission to the scout who scouted the player.