Developing the next generation of players with a new Scouting Power App – Scottish Football Association

The Scottish Football Association (SFA) was looking to improve the way they manage scouting. They needed a more flexible solution that would improve how they collate and analyse scouting reports. They selected Bridgeall to provide a Microsoft Power App to replace their existing scouting solution.

We developed a new Power App that captures reports on players and the ability to analyse these to assess the next generation of Scottish Footballers. The new application streamlines the assessment and player ratings to easily identify players that are ready to move up to the first team.

The first area that the SFA wanted to focus on was the scouting process as this currently makes use of a piece of software called Sports Office. This software has lots of functionality but is currently only used within the SFA for recording information around scouting.

In addition to reviewing and proposing a new solution for the scouting functionality a wider data review is currently being carried out by Bridgeall to investigate, at a high level, what other options there are for consolidation of systems and better use of data within the organisation.

The SFA were using a system called Sports Office which had some limitations. It wasn’t allowing them to capture all of the data they needed to effectively assess a player and lacked the flexibility to tailor this for different stages of the process.

The SFA wanted to move towards a process where they could have an objective way of monitoring players and their performance on the pitch.

To do that they wanted to move to a solution that captured, or had the ability to capture, more detail about the player, their current stage in the process and provide rich reporting to understand the ongoing scouting work.

Bridgeall worked with the SFA to deliver a new scouting application. Our approach was to create a custom Power Apps solution to deliver the required functionality with integration of Power BI to provide additional reporting of scouting activity.

Templates

The new solution will allow the SFA to define the templates that are required to be completed given the stage in the process.

This will allow different templates to be allocated to stages in the defined six-stage process to allow different fields and information to be captured about the player at each stage of the process.

Players

The new solution will allow the SFA to manage players through the process and record relevant information about them at each stage.

It will take the player through the initial scouting stage all the way through to the final stages where they will be integrated into the Scotland national squad. It allows scouts to apply the sophisticated grading model the SFA applies to every player from the Under 14s all the way to the National Men’s A Squad.

It will also allow them to link to the player’s relevant ID in Wyscout, a platform which provides more in-depth player analytics.

The solution will have the ability to be extended in future to store data on the player provided by Hudl SportCode tagging and allow this to be viewable, searchable and reportable in the solution.

Scouts

The new solution will enable scouts to easily identify which players they are responsible for as the owning scout, as well as those within their assigned patch that require input.

Scouts will be able to search for and view detailed information on any player within the system.

The platform will clearly display where each player is in the scouting process and identify the current owning scout.

Scouts can submit reports using the appropriate templates based on the player’s current stage in the process. These reports will also include a chance to link

All functionality will be accessible via mobile and tablet devices, allowing scouts to complete reports and access player data on the go.

Reporting

The new solution will allow users to run reports showing what games were covered by the scouting department split by age group. This will also be able to be filtered by individual scouts through advanced filtering capabilities.

There is also a data dashboard screen which highlights the activity of scouts.

Results

The Scouting app was successfully rolled out across the SFA network of scouts and is in use today.  It has brought a range of efficiencies and decision making across how the SFA manage scouting for players.