Wyscout initially launched in 2004 in Italy as a Football Match Analysis and Advertising provider, amongst other minor services the company offered. It was not until 2008 when they launched their first user interface to offer access to their footballer database containing basic stats such as weight and height of players. Since then, the platform has experience rapid growth and popularity in the world of football and particular in the scouting field.
By 2012, Wyscout had captured videos and statistics of over 200,000 players around the world and was now actively being used by 300 professional clubs and 15 national sides, as reported by The Guardian newspaper right before the opening of the 2012/13 season's winter transfer window. Wyscout had established themselves in the forefront of worldwide scouting, ending with the most traditional methods historically used where scouts went to view players across the world with a notepad. With a platform like Wyscout, all the information and video footage they needed to know about their next multimillion signing or future youth academy star was as far as the click of a button.
However, as CEO of Wyscout Matteo Camponodico points out, the platform is not intended to replace scouts, as their roles continue to be crucial in shaping the future of clubs. Wyscout simply makes their job better by offering videos of players for them to review before or after they view them live. With the expanding range of functionalities the company continues to add, clubs can now list their transfer-listed players, examine footage of player trials, contact agents to discuss potential offers, view contract duration of players they are interested in signing and much more.
By 2016, SkySports reported that Wyscout had hire a team of 200 analyst collecting data for 1,300 matches a week and the platform had achieved a total of 32,000 professional users. With such a rapidly growing usage and user base, the demands for the data also continue to grow. Clubs asked Wyscout to go deeper into specific areas, to not only track major leagues worldwide but collect statistics in lower divisions too to sport future talent. Today, the company offers data for even semi-professional level players. The growing amount of data collected by Wyscout also increasingly requires smarter analytics to be applied to it. For example, to help digest and compare the wide variety of data offered, Wyscout develops indexing models to allow clubs to compare two team across completely different leagues using similar ratios.
Today, Wyscout is the main platform during transfer windows worldwide. The large majority of transfers in the world of football initiate and often get closed through Wyscout. But the use of the platform has also expanded to track player performance and even journalists are now using it to write articles about particular players. Even players are now making use of Wyscout to track their stats and those of their next opposition.
Matteo Camponodico's plans don't end here. He has an ambitious vision to continue the incredible growth of the platform and we are guaranteed to continue to hear a lot more about this great platform.