Football scouting · Under study

ApexScout

Spot the curve that takes off, before it is obvious.

Scouts and academies following UEFA youth competitions.

Talk to us

Phase 0 — source feasibility A study, no code

UEFA Youth League · U17 and U19 Euros

Open, free, official — the source we would use

FBref Aggregated statistics

Cloudflare challenge — robots.txt itself unreachable

StatsBomb Open Data

Licence: commercial exploitation forbidden

Transfermarkt Community database

European database right

The technical answer is yes. Football, not basketball — the reverse of the original brief, because FIBA does not publish what UEFA publishes.

What remains is the one question no code settles: would anybody pay.

A sixteen-year-old is not a smaller twenty-year-old: what matters is the gradient, season after season, at comparable ages. That gradient is legible in official match sheets, and almost nobody reads it.

ApexScout is a study, not yet a product. The technical feasibility is settled — UEFA Youth League and U17/U19 European Championship data are reachable, free, and without circumventing anything. The open question is not technical: it is whether a scout would pay for this.

What ApexScout does

The parts that matter in the field

Official sources only

Governing bodies and UEFA, never an aggregator. The European database right protects the compilation itself: copying Transfermarkt into a competing database is precisely what it exists to prevent.

No metric the data cannot carry

No tactical archetypes, no wingspan, no progressive carries without event data. The original brief asked for all three; none survives contact with the source.

Age is computed, never stored

A stored age is wrong within a year, and the entire product is about age curves. Only the date of birth is kept.

Minors, so GDPR first

Profiling under-eighteens in Europe falls under Article 8, and the CNIL is not passive. The position is settled before the first row is stored, not after.

A study that knows what would decide it

Three conversations with scouts, and one question: would you pay for this? It is the cheapest possible test of the only assumption left, and it needs no further line of code.