It was the biggest match of Andre Odeku’s career. A week earlier, the 18-year-old striker was playing seventh in the English football pyramid. Now he was lining up for Burnley’s under-23 team in a trial match, with a view to signing for the then-Premier League club’s academy.
“Their scouts invited me for a week of training,” Odeku explains. “I had never really been on this kind of terrain before: the grass was so beautiful and so flat; the ball was moving so gently and so intensely; there were Premier League players training right next to us. They liked what they saw, so they wanted to see me up close at a game.
In footballing terms, Odeku had been plucked from relative obscurity: he was discovered while putting up Erling Haaland-like numbers for the North London semi-professional team’s development squad , Haringey Borough; he would score 25 goals in 18 games from the wing and win the league golden boot in the 2021-22 season.
But Odeku hadn’t been spotted in the traditional way. A few weeks before, in the mud of his local east London park, he had plugged in his phone, pressed record and started doing as many push-ups as he could in 30 seconds. As his parents and dog walkers passed by, he sprinted 10 yards, broke into standing jumps and completed a series of explosive twisting side jumps.
AiSCOUT, a platform that allows football players to take virtual tryouts, has watched it all. Players complete athletic and technical drills on the app, then are evaluated via an AI scoring system built by data scientists and the game’s leading scouts. It’s these talent scouts who decide which few prodigies will achieve their childhood dream of becoming a professional footballer and which will not lead a football career at all.
AiSCOUT founder Darren Peries began developing the app after his 16-year-old son was released by Spurs. “The scouts elsewhere had nothing on him in terms of information, match sequences or training measures,” explains Richard Felton-Thomas, the platform’s COO and director of sports sciences. “While there is a lot of data collection in senior professional football, there is not the same infrastructure in youth football, even at the elite level.”
After seven months of live testing and the analysis of millions of data points, AiSCOUT machine learning is now capable of measuring players’ biomechanics, technique and athletic prowess down to the smallest detail; comments are automated and sent through the app within the hour. After players complete basic athletic drills, the best performers are asked to show off their skills with the ball: Odeku’s virtual trial at Burnley included an agility dribble and a seven-cone weave in the park; his blazing speed and ball control earned the teenager an invitation to the club’s Barnfield training center in Lancashire.
In a game that often mercilessly rejects young footballers, AiSCOUT offers a second chance to both players and scouts. Odeku was released from Arsenal at the age of 11, then from Brentford at 13; its small size has been cited as a factor. “Academies have a ‘win now’ mentality, so smaller players who have not yet reached maturity are often dismissed,” says Felton-Thomas. “Once that happens, they’re out of sight, even if they’ve had a growth spurt. Now players can be back in the system via AiSCOUT, with clubs able to track their progress.
