Founder: Isaac Felizardo

Creating tools and communities for scouts, agents & coaches

Football is going through a ‘data revolution’, everything is measured and analyzed but most clubs are still lacking the infrastructure to reliably make use of this data. While some clubs are developing their own in-house solutions, others are turning to innovative tools like ScoutDecision to bridge the gap.

A former competitive surfer turned software engineer and entrepreneur, Isaac Felizardo is a co-founder at ScoutDecision.

ScoutDecision is an all-in-one tool for football clubs, agents, scouts and coaches looking to structure their data and make it more usable. Focusing on full customization and personalization, ScoutDecision has customers at professional clubs all over the world, helping to save the huge amount of time spent looking and sorting through data.

Isaac is living the dream with ScoutDecision! Hear about how he turned a school project with his best friends into a profitable, fully bootstrapped startup with customers all over the world by identifying - and solving - problems in how football clubs, agents, scouts, and coaches gather and organize data at all levels.

The interview has been condensed and lightly edited for grammar and clarity.

ScoutDecision founder Isaac Felizardo profile pic

[ Starting ScoutDecision ]

In university, I met some really cool guys in my program. We lived in the same residence, ate together and always worked together on group projects - we were ‘bros’!

Anyway, we had a project for a class on multi-criteria decision analysis and we wanted to do something with football. One of our group members had a distant connection to Luís Campos and we started a project for him. In short, it was a way to make decisions on football transfers by evaluating players across attributes on a scale (e.g. 1-5) and feeding this into a mathematical model.

At the end of the class, our professor told us, ‘you just found a way to make money!’ Well, you know people in academia often don’t really know what makes money or not - I think that was the case because it was a long fight to actually get the project running after that!

Officially, we founded ScoutDecision in November 2022 after we ended college but had already started it two years earlier. Initially, we were 5 but ultimately became 4. It’s a real pleasure working with them, we’ve added a more professional relationship on top of our friendship. I think our customers can see - and love us for - our authentic relationship.

The first years were a very fun - though at times painful - period of trial and error to learn and understand what scouts and sporting directors actually wanted.

[ What is the problem ScoutDecision is solving? ]

By now, we solve a lot of problems for a lot of people.

For scouts, we solve the problem of messy, disorganized and unretrievable information. Scouts have information in Excel sheets, PDFs, WhatsApp messages - even handwritten notes - you can imagine how cluttered a physical file, or a cloud drive gets with a lot of scouting reports. Some scouts are adding several reports per day - that’s hundreds and hundreds each season.

We’ve built a completely customizable database where scouts can choose the metrics they want to evaluate for each player/position. The results can then be easily filtered, sorted and compared - complete with data visualizations - automatically with just one click. This saves a scouting department hours and hours in their decision making process.

After working with a lot of scouts, we learned that many scouts are working for agents/agencies. So we included a CRM-type feature for agents where they can manage all club requests, player offerings and contracts all in one place.

Next, we started looking at how we could better collect and organize information for coaches and other staff inside clubs. Coaches can use ScoutDecision to plan practices, evaluate and monitor player wellbeing with everything from post-practice perceived exertion questionnaires to GPS analysis.

Our latest feature that we’re working on is connecting clubs and agents on our platform so they can connect more easily and make deals happen faster. We just had our first matchmaking event, it was super cool. We planned and executed it in just one week and had 75 meetings between clubs and agents. We met a lot of our customers and were able to create opportunities for people to connect. Inside Connect, we have over 60 clubs and 70 agencies registered already, so the potential is amazing.

One of ScoutDecision's features to help scouts and analysts stay organised

[ As founders without a background in the football industry, how did you discover these problems? ]

It was a very manual and time-consuming process! We started reaching out to people via email, calls, and LinkedIn. At the start, it was difficult because we didn’t have any contacts and our product wasn’t well known - and wasn’t that good yet either!

A lot of our learnings came organically - one discovery leading us to another, to another, etc. For example, talking with scouts, we learned that in the college system in the US, coaches have to always be scouting for the next season. So we spoke to coaches and started building stuff for them!

A lot of our features started as requests, this was great because we could make things that we knew people needed.

"At the start, it was difficult because we didn’t have any contacts and our product wasn’t well known - and wasn’t that good yet either!"

[ Football can be a pretty traditional industry - what kind of pushback have you received? ]

In business, in startups, it’s a life of rejection - you just have to learn to deal with it. In the beginning, it was frustrating and we’d get upset by rejections and criticism but I don’t take it personally, it doesn’t phase me anymore.

We were trying to work with a Portuguese club once that gave us really harsh feedback and told us things like we were trying to ‘reinvent football’! Well, they ended up being relegated. I think over time, we’ll prove lots of people wrong.

Former Portuguese champions Boavista F.C. are partnered with ScoutDecision
Former Portuguese champions Boavista F.C. are just one of the dozens of clubs partnered with ScoutDecision

[ What do your ‘ideal’ or usual customers look like? - what’s the ‘status quo’? ]

We see a lot of things, including a lot of people that even if they don’t have anything in place (to structure or organize their information), we know they are not ready for a solution like ours. It depends a lot on the country and the scouting culture there. In some countries, older analysts are still using pen and paper - that’s fine, it works too but - they’re usually not ready to transfer everything to a dedicated software.

On the other end of the spectrum, some people or clubs have already built very complex custom in house tools that contain lots of information accumulated over the years.

The middle ground - usually people we would approach as potential customers - are people who have a lot of information and are using some sort of simplified Excel, AirTable or Notion-like products. These are the people we can really help the most because they have a lot of information that can be much more useful if it’s structured in a better way.

[ Do you have a geographic focus? ]

At the start, we tried to focus on Portugal a lot, but we weren't taken seriously! So we had to go abroad and see what people thought of us. Turns out we had lots of interest in Brazil, clubs in Brazil were our early adopters. After that, and improving our product, we tried again in Portugal - and it’s now our biggest market. We’re worldwide now, with clubs using our product all over the world but Portugal and Brazil remain our biggest markets.

[ Are there any security risks for clubs to keep all their scouting info in one place? Couldn’t a scout just take everything with them when they switch clubs? ]

Yeah, the clubs do see a risk there and I totally understand but I also don’t think it’s actually that common of a problem. Every club is different, with a different culture, goals and staff. A good scout needs to be able to put each player in context and try to understand how they will fit in your team - they can’t just take a list from another scout at another club and use all the information in the same way.

[ But surely seeing how other teams rate players you’re interested in would still be helpful (or at least interesting) for clubs? ]

Yes, 100%. Still, you need to be operating in the same markets. For example, the type of players a big club in Portugal is looking to bring into their academy is a different list to a second division team in France. They aren’t really competing for the same players.

[ Have you noticed an increase in investment in this type of technology since you started? ]

Yes, especially in scouting a lot more clubs are considering it more as an investment instead of a cost. They realize it's cost effective to have good scouts and good scouting software and frameworks in their departments because they can use (in comparison to the players) ‘cheap’ labor to find players that can be sold for a much higher price. I think everyone but especially clubs and agents are aware of this potential and investing accordingly.

"I think everyone but especially clubs and agents are aware of this potential and investing accordingly"

[ How will the future of football be different if ScoutDecision is adopted on a mass scale? ]

Our vision is for a more open, democratic and connected football world. We want to be the tool of choice for anyone working with data in football, helping them make better decisions - from nutritionists to scouts and agents.

This is also the vision behind our free WhatsApp communities for scouts, coaches and agents and our matchmaking events. We want to help people find opportunities. We want everyone to have access to this because football can be very closed for ‘outsiders’.

[ What are the big goals for ScoutDecision in 2025? ]

We definitely want to develop the ‘Connect’ feature. We want to connect more people online and in person. We’re also expanding into other areas of club management, for example, we’re developing features for health and fitness - for people working in everything from fitness test data to nutrition to physiotherapy. This will help us get closer to our aim to manage all the sports operations at a club - so a sporting director can have a bird’s eye view of everything going on across all the departments.

[ What makes you personally most excited to keep working on ScoutDecision? ]

We’re doing the right things more and more often, we’re getting more excited customers and keep evolving our product. This year we made a lot of progress and this really drives me to get even better feedback and results next year.

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