When it comes to getting value of out of investing in the youth academy there have been fewer to have done it better than Chelsea over the past few years.
Over the last decade the conveyor belt of talent that has emerged from Cobham has either been able to directly impact the first team, as well as heavily aiding the balance sheet through the sale of home-grown players that count as pure profit from an accounting perspective.
The sale of graduates has enabled Chelsea’s transfer strategy under the ownership of Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital to be able to fly under the threshold of profit and sustainability regulations, and it is a model that the club aims to keep working for years to come.
A look at the data over the last decade tells its own story. According to Transfermarkt, if Chelsea’s academy set up was analysed by itself as a club, it has drawn in some €479m (£397m) in transfer fees, more than the whole operations of Arsenal, Leeds United, and Newcastle United.
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The challenge is to keep unearthing gems, and Chelsea are hoping that adopting new scouting technology, allied with their strong reputation for developing talent, will enable them to tap into a market that has been a huge success for them for first-team players down the years; Africa.
Founded five years ago, Prague-based Eyeball.Club have recently secured investment to the tune of €5m (£4.14m), led by Vendep Capital, with the aim to expand their business into the United States and Latin America.
The company operates in 27 countries, is already being utilised by over 100 top football clubs worldwide, including ‘the majority’ of Premier League and Ligue 1 clubs, as well as over 50% of both the German Bundesliga and Italy’s Serie A.
Chelsea, Burnley, Wolves, Ajax, Benfica, FC Midtjylland and the likes of Bayer Leverkusen and Borussia Dortmund are all using the technology to unearth future talent.
But what do they feel sets themselves apart from their competitors in the industry? Well, for one, it is the ability to reach grassroots in any region through an initial financial outlay.
“The only three big clubs in Europe that are not yet customers are Real Madrid, Bayern Munich and Tottenham*,"* Eyeball.Club CFO and founder David Hicks told Football.London.
“We decided five years ago to step into the space to create a video scouting platform for youth football because it didn't exist.
“You might be aware of companies like Wyscout that are ubiquitous in the industry and in senior team scouting. There are others.
“There's all sorts of data sources, so people are used to video scouting using data, and none of that was available in youth football because no one has figured out how to do it and how to commercialise it.
“We thought we had a good idea. So what we do is we go country by country. We started in France. We create a profile of the country. We go and partner with the best performing amateur youth clubs in the country. In countries like France, that's easy because the leagues are structured nationally above 18 and regional below 18, and there's promotion, relegation and professional academies playing the same leagues as the amateur teams.
“So we have about 90 partner clubs in France. We signed a ten-year exclusive deal with them and we provide them with the camera. So we give them our camera, but we give it to them to use and to look after. They film their games, and they upload them to our platform. We do analysis on the game and we provide it back to them for coaching purposes and analysis.
“Most of these clubs don't have any money. They really do run on a shoestring or by local, well-meaning parents or community organisations. So they don't have the budget for this, and we've gone in and we've made the investment and partnered with them and provided all that to them at no cost. We can do that because we then use that content to populate the platform. We commercialise it by selling an annual subscription to professional clubs who want to scout in France.
“The purpose is that obviously we want to promote players and we want to position players in the way of opportunity. So the way our database is structured, it's around individual players. You get the team sheets associated with all the match videos. If a player is new to us, we create a brand new profile and the coach typically shares those details with us after consent from the player and Guardian if they're under 18.
“So we know the date of birth, the nationality, the height, the weight, left foot, right foot position, all that sort of basic but vital information. That player then starts his life on Eyeball and every game where he's filmed and appears on the team sheet, it appears under his profile on the platform.
“Over the seasons now you can go and you see a whole playing history of players that are reliable. So now if a club is interested in a 16-year-old player or someone who's turning 16, there are often 45, 50-plus games of that player, which is understood in scouting recruitment, because I'm sure you know that many mistakes have been made when the data source is too small.
“So should you see a player's highlight clips or you see performance over two games and you think he's great, Eyeball says, ‘look at ten, 20, 50 games of that player so you can see how he performs against a good opposition performance, against weak opposition, how he performs in different positions, how he's progressed over the years physically’.
One of the areas where Hicks believes there is the potential to really make a difference is in Africa, a continent that has produced countless world-class stars but one where it has been hard for clubs to get a handle on the level of the talent pool before it hits mainland Europe via player pathways in the likes of France.
In providing camera equipment to local clubs that may have struggled to finance such things on their own, or have had a way to put their young players in the shop window on a large, structured scale, it offers huge potential. It also does for the clubs if they are unable to unearth future superstars earlier.
“We tell our clients that Europe's biggest market for African players is actually in France,” said Hicks.
“Almost every club we talk to we find that it's really a hot topic, the issue of scouting in Africa.
“Doing it the old fashioned way is nigh on impossible. I mean, it's horror stories of flying down there and, you know, players being mis-aged.
“Video scouting and data scouting is the only way to effectively cover the continent. The reason clubs are interested in Africa, obviously, is that they think they can get future stars very cheaply, which is very true. But also they tend to value the physicality of these players. So, you know, your archetypal West African Ghanaian or Senegalese players that are in the Didier Drogba, the Sadio Mane mould, they feel that they will do well in the European leagues rather than maybe a tiki-taka type Spanish player.
“There is tremendous interest, and basically what we do is this the same we do in France and in England and Scandinavia we did in all these games. We partner with the academies down there. We have 127 of the best academies in West Africa. So I think we're in 12 countries now in Africa. But the core proposition is Ghana, Senegal, Ivory Coast and Nigeria, and we're also in Mali, Burkina Faso, you know, sort of radiating out from that hub in West Africa.
“We provide them with the camera technology at our expense, and we just do the same thing. So now, for example, we sell access to Africa. We bundle Africa with Europe, we sell a country. You can now scout Africa and it was €2,300 per month. You have to sign up for a 12 month contract. That's less than one trip when you think about airfare, hotel and taxi.
“For that, you can scout some 15,000 players, several hundred games every week, fresh every week. You have so much video. You have the events broken down and you have data, accurate data on the players. Plus, in Africa, we provide another service where we sort of offer to get involved in the recruitment process if required.
“A lot of West Africa is French speaking. We have French speakers in the team, so sometimes it's as simple as that. But also because we're real partners with these academies and speak to the owners and the coaches on a weekly basis, and they tell us who their best players are and they tell us which players are getting interest from which clubs and which one is just signed with which agent.
“So we are in a really privileged position because we have a deal to the ground, if you like.
“There's not a club in Europe that cannot afford to have a strategy to scout and recruit from Africa, and up until 18 months ago, that was impossible. Absolutely impossible. It has been a game changer.
“There's very few clubs we speak to that are not interested. Africa, they were all interested. They just didn't know where to start.”
The tranche of funding secured recently allows for Eyeball.Club to further its ambitions into the US and Latin America, with Hicks stating that the company would like to increase the number of NCAA schools in the US that are signed up to the programme to aid their recruitment for their scholarships each year, a lucrative business in American sport.
He also expects to see the client list of clubs grow as more and more look to try and find ways to navigate with more certainty around the market when looking at finding and developing talent.
For Chelsea, identifying players such as Didier Drogba or Mikel Jon-Obi earlier in their journey could open the door to even more opportunities maximise the potential of the club’s academy, for both the benefit of the first-team as well as the balance sheet.
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