Theme
Scouting & recruitment
Finding, comparing and tracking players — usually across incompatible notes and half-remembered opinions.
How this runs today
Scout reports arrive as free text in email or a shared document, in whatever structure each scout prefers, which makes comparison across a shortlist impossible without someone reading everything again. Trial evaluations are recorded on paper on the day and typed up later, losing detail. Prospects tracked over several seasons live in a spreadsheet whose history nobody trusts. The same player gets assessed twice by different scouts who never learn of each other's report.
Who owns this
- Head of recruitment
- Chief scout
- Regional scout
- Recruitment analyst
- Academy recruitment lead
Systems already in play
- Scouting and recruitment databases
- Video analysis platforms
- Third-party data providers
- Spreadsheets and shared documents
Rules that constrain it
- Approach and tapping-up rules
- Youth recruitment and travel-distance regulations
- Agent and intermediary regulations
- Data protection for minors
The framing grid
Crossing this theme against each product framing is what generates distinct ideas rather than one idea described several ways.
| Framing | The question it asks | Product pattern |
|---|---|---|
| Analyse data | What is the data telling us that nobody has time to look for? | A reporting layer with a natural-language query surface over a unified data model. |
| Research | What do we need to know that lives outside our systems? | A research agent that reads the sources, cites them, and produces a briefing an operator can act on. |
| Automate a workflow | Which manual handoff can disappear entirely? | A rules-driven workflow that assigns, escalates and closes the loop without anyone chasing it. |
| Voice or chat interface | Who is asking, and is anyone available to answer? | A voice or chat agent that answers, captures structured detail and schedules a human follow-up. |
| Manage compliance | What obligation is about to lapse? | An obligation register with expiry monitoring, ownership, escalation and audit-ready evidence. |
| Monitor | What is the current state, and what should trigger an alert? | A live status view plus a rules engine that pushes alerts to the people who can act on them. |
| Find the bottleneck | Where does this process actually stall? | A process map derived from timestamps in existing systems, with cycle-time distributions and stall-point alerts. |
Ideas (5)
Pitchside prospect lookup chat for scouts
A chat line scouts text from the ground to check whether a prospect has already been assessed, get the verdict on file, and flag that they are now watching too.
Player approach and agent-contact clearance tracker
A workflow that routes a scout's request to approach a player, guardian or agent through formal sign-off, logging who approved contact and when, in place of a phone call or group chat message nobody records.
Scout report intake and duplicate-assessment router
A workflow that matches new scout reports against existing prospect records, routes them for triage and chases overdue watch list assignments so no player gets assessed twice or forgotten.
Voice capture for trial day player evaluations
A voice tool that lets evaluators dictate structured ratings on each trial player station by station, removing the paper card and the evening typing-up that loses detail.
Youth trial invitation and safeguarding paperwork tracker
A workflow tool that turns a youth trial invitation into a tracked case, chasing parental consent, travel-distance checks and DBS-checked staffing before the trial date arrives.