There is a revolution happening in youth scouting and it is changing football. “Today, on the platform, there are 250,000 players,” Benjamin Balkin tells Sky Sports. “Last year, there was 130,000. Next year, there will be half a million.”
Balkin is the co-founder of Eyeball, a platform you might not have heard of but one that has most likely become central to how the club you support recruits young players. It is already being used by the majority of them in Europe’s top five major leagues.
The sell is simple. The platform provides video clips with thousands of data points for each player. But this is not the Premier League. These are youngsters playing in amateur football in France, in academies in Africa and, very soon, all across South America.
This is how football’s next superstar will be unearthed. And they could be anywhere. Was there once a genius from Mali never discovered? “One hundred per cent, there was,” says Oliver Dürr Dehnhardt, Balkin’s colleague. “In fact, there were probably 10.”
He adds: “I am not claiming Eyeball has the solution to find all 10. They still need to play for a club we cover. But the route to finding all 10 is clearer now. Everybody knows the potential of Africa but nobody knew how to unlock it. Now you can, it will just spiral.”
Five years ago, Eyeball was just an idea. Like the best of them, it stemmed from the need to solve a problem. Balkin, born in France to Danish parents, was a one-time Monaco prospect who found himself trying to identify young French talent for clubs abroad.
“Everything started from personal experience. We had a network of clubs interested in finding 14- to 16-year-olds in France. That was our niche. But it was a jungle out there. You were heavily relying on agents. Our problem was a lack of video in youth football.”
They knew it made sense to base themselves in the big cities, Paris and Marseille, but it was just an educated guess which matches to watch. A contact would call about a prospect in Brittany. Another in Lyon. “Everywhere except where it was practical to be.”
He explains: “What we were doing was trying to be lucky basically. Just picking a game a bit instinctively on a Saturday afternoon. Going to watch it and hoping that the left-back you were looking for, for that English club that was in need, was going to be on the pitch.
“How many times have you heard that it was the luck of being in the right place at the right time? ‘I was just out watching a game and there he was right in front of me.’ But, in 2025, no football club in their right mind wants to build a strategy based around luck.”
That was the situation. They were sticking a pin in a map, trying to find players in France. And even when they did, their reports were missing something. Clubs wanted to see clips not mere written reports. “We decided to start filming the games ourselves.”
This was amateur football. “Nothing was on TV, no rights, nothing. We just bought cameras, clipped up the players we liked.” But it worked. “The response rate from clubs increased. The decision-making time got way shorter.” Eyeball was the answer.
The challenge for Balkin and co-founder Emil Kjeldsen back in 2020 was to scale it. “The problem was that most clubs did not have a camera. And if they did, they were just using it for internal coaching purposes and analysis. We tried to remove that barrier,” he says.
“By providing clubs with a camera system free of charge and the analysis that comes with it, in exchange we were able to get the team sheets and the information that we required on their players in order to build an actual searchable database in the end.”
Eyeball’s search function allows scouts to find detailed player profiles at the click of a button
Dehnhardt came at the situation from the other angle having worked at Ajax for three years as their international scout, responsible for Scandinavia and France but also exploring potential markets in Africa and beyond. “My focus was on emerging talent.”
Ajax have long been regarded as one of the best clubs in Europe when it comes to identifying that talent. “A very well-funded scouting system, very good scouts,” agrees Dehnhardt. “But they were working on the same basis like any other club,” he adds.
“If an agent they trust called on Thursday to say there was a good player in Prague, they would fly there on the weekend to watch him and then say ‘no’. If there were 10 agents calling then they would pick one and then go see the others on the next nine weekends.
“With Eyeball, you watch 20 minutes and decide whether to put them on the list. If the live validates the video, I would send the name to Amsterdam where 10 video scouts are working. Within two days, I would have 10 independent reports. You can make a decision.
“At Ajax, we made Eyeball central to our strategy. I saw for myself the potential, how it can completely change things.
“Ten days instead of 10 weeks or longer? Time is money in this space. Very few clubs in the world have the luxury of time not being a factor. Bayern Munich and Paris Saint-Germain can move at the last second and just pay. Everyone else needs to be earlier.
“Look at Mathys Tel, he has barely turned 19 and is already on the second big transfer of his life. If Mathys Tel had been born two years later, then there would have been 45 games of him before his debut for Rennes. The decision would be made even earlier.”
Having recognised the opportunity, Dehnhardt is now working for Eyeball, based in their Copenhagen office. “It is really the first big shift in youth scouting in the past 30 years, to be honest,” he insists. “That is why I am here now. It is a game changer.”
Mathys Tel has had more than one big move but in future he would be found even earlier
Of course, football itself is changing too. Globalisation coupled with increased financial restrictions actively encourages clubs to cast the net wider – and younger. “Emerging talent used to be defined as U23 but now it is U19,” explains Dehnhardt.
“More and more clubs do not really care where a player comes from as long as they are good enough. That is already the strategy of clubs at first-team level but with the barrier to international scouting now lowering, clubs will have to transition more and more.”
Balkin agrees. “If everything shifts younger, how does the scouting strategy adapt to that? Data has been focused on first-team football for the past decade but players are moving at 19 now. Maybe it will be 17 soon. The clubs need to know about them at 14.”
Eyeball is the means by which they can do that.
Balkin talks through it and it is stunningly simple, Football Manager for real. “I can select my data points to make my shortlist. Let’s search for a centre-back, this year, European passport, national team player, this tall. It really makes the scout’s life much easier.”
Within clicks, a teenager from west Africa can be found and a scout in northern Europe is watching clips from a game being played on another continent where there were no fans present. “You are not just going to go to Senegal, are you? It kills the geography.”
Eyeball scouting’s game page showing a match captured on one of their cameras
But it is not just the big clubs that benefit. The logistics in Africa have been straightforward because clubs there have embraced it. “Those academies, their entire business model is to sell players. They treat it with so much care. They are fantastic to work with.”
In England, most of the clubs in the Championship are now on board, tailoring their use of it for both cost and practicality. “You do not need to buy everything, just subscribe to the countries relevant to your scouting department, your strategy,” says Balkin.
Below that, Bolton Wanderers are in an interesting position in the food chain. They film their games from the age of 13 up, proving video and team sheets. It helps showcase talent to sell but also provides released players with a chance of being picked up elsewhere.
“You do not have to trust some agent you have never heard about who wrote to you on LinkedIn with a good video,” says Dehnhardt. “You can do your own due diligence. At the same time, on Eyeball, you have the direct contact to the club. No intermediaries.”
Having said that, the big agencies are on Eyeball. “It makes sense,” says Balkin. “They are a part of the ecosystem with analysts of their own. They make data-driven decisions on players they want to represent, not just on a recommendation from someone else.”
Eyeball’s platform allows scouts to watch games and players from around the world
“There are definitely transfers being made purely on Eyeball,” claims Dehnhardt. Even moves that, on the face of it, appear to be examples of traditional scouting, are in fact fuelled – before and after – by extensive research that is done on the Eyeball platform.
“As a general rule, if the club is using Eyeball and the player is on Eyeball, Eyeball played a role in the due diligence. It is likely that 70 to 80 per cent of the scouting reports made on young players are actually made on video based on Eyeball. It is as simple as that.”
Valy Konate, the Ivory Coast player from Racing Club Abidjan who recently shone at the Toulon Tournament and subsequently earned a big move to Monaco, still required some background checks. “The follow-up was on Eyeball, I have no doubt about that.”
Valy Konate joined Monaco from Racing Club Abidjan and Eyeball played its part
Put simply, it is now integral to the scouting process. “We have passed the tipping point now,” says Balkin. “If you are not using Eyeball, you are the exception. I think there are four in the Premier League not using it. Two in Ligue 1.” And it is only going to grow.
“We have 130 partner academies in Africa and we will reach 200 to 250 by the end of the calendar year.” But the big project, one that Balkin, bashfully rather than boastfully, admits Eyeball have already invested nine figures in, is to expand into South America.
“No one wants just a Brazilian strategy. They want a South American strategy. So we are putting a lot of money into mapping Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Uruguay and Ecuador. We have three full-time people on the ground there and we are going all in. Asia is next.”
Eyeball is getting bigger. As a result, the world is getting smaller.
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