The January transfer window has underlined the importance of finding football’s next big thing earlier, and AI scouting platform Eyeball.Club is built for that, says founder Benjamin Balkin.
Manchester United’s £30m signing of Danish left-back Patrick Dorgu, 20, wasn’t just one of the biggest deals of the January transfer window. It also distilled one of football’s prevailing trends: cost-conscious clubs are increasingly seeking younger talent with more sell-on value.
AI-powered video scouting platform Eyeball.Club exists for this. The only product of its type designed for analysing youth football, it provides clubs in the Premier League and across Europe with pro-level analysis for under-18 players from the suburbs of Paris to Senegal.
“Football is getting younger and that’s the whole reason why we are relevant, why we exist, and why clubs want to speak to us on both sides,” co-founder Benjamin Balkin tells City AM.
“Players that are 28, 29, 30, 31 years old, they are not finding clubs. No one wants to invest in a 32-year-old who has to earn over £100,000 a week because they’re a depreciating asset. Everyone is looking at younger.
“United just signed Dorgu from Lecce, who got him as an academy player when he was released from Nordsjaelland. This is exactly the model we believe in. They’re going to make £30m out of the transfer. It’s insane.
“If you want to exist in those transfers, you have to start younger. You cannot know about Dorgu when he has made his debut for Lecce because then he’s a £10m player, and then the next season he is £30m. So that’s the whole narrative with Eyeball.”
Former Monaco academy player Balkin, 26, spotted a gap in the market when he began scouting youth players, which still relied on word of mouth because it hadn’t been digitised like the professional game by platforms like Wyscout.
The Dane founded Eyeball in 2020 with friend Emil Kjeldsen and capital from a private investor. Five years and two more funding rounds later – some from Denmark’s richest man, Anders Holch Povlsen – it has 80 staff and counts 100 top clubs including Chelsea, Brentford, Borussia Dortmund, Bayer Leverkusen and Ajax among its clients.
Eyeball.Club offers AI-powered scouting for clubs to find youth players
How Eyeball will help find ‘next Phil Foden’
While “buying” teams pay a subscription fee, those on the selling side – academy sides in 30 countries – receive cameras and video analysis tools for free in exchange for uploading player ID data that allows for accurate tagging of 235,000 prospects on Eyeball.
That process helped Lille spot centre-back Isaac Cossier when he was playing for Parisian semi-pro outfit JA Drancy. The first ever transfer facilitated by Eyeball, back in the January transfer window of 2022, last week the 18-year-old was named on the bench in the Champions League.
The need for English clubs to cast the net ever wider has only been heightened by post-Brexit changes to immigration requirements for overseas footballers, which have made it easier to sign talent from outside Europe than in the EU.
Eyeball.Club founders Emil Kjeldsen and Benjamin Balkin
That is among the reasons why Balkin’s top priority is to expand Eyeball’s network in South America. He also wants to deepen its reach across the UK. Beyond that, the company hopes to roll out Chat GPT-style features to make it easier for teams to find their next big thing.
“In the next two years you will be able to open up a scouting platform like Eyeball and chat with it to describe with words what you’re looking for,” he says.
“So when Man City eventually sell Phil Foden to Real Madrid, the only thing on their mind will be ‘We need a new Phil Foden’ – and you will be able to ask a platform like ours.
“The system will recognise that Phil Foden is associated with take-ons, shots from outside the box, a lot of successful passes forward, is left footed, and it will tell you: These are 10 players that could match your needs. This is going to happen. And I don’t think we’re too far away.”