The Backroom Staff - Founder: Dinarte Jesus

The Backroom Staff - Founder: Dinarte Jesus

The developer building the scouting infrastructure of the future 

I think ‘scouting’ is just the formal name for the most human version of sports fandom - ask anyone who’s a fan of any sport, they’ll tell you who’s good and who’s not!

When I hear about Athleads and Dinarte’s vision to democratize scouting, it makes me really excited for the future of football. Just like anyone with a phone or a TikTok account can produce or contribute to ‘real’ journalism, I think platforms like Athleads can allow anyone with some free time and a discerning eye to be a scout.

In this interview, Athleads founder Dinarte Jesus shares his journey from Madeira to tech founder in Berlin. He’s been deeply immersed in the world of scouting, transfers and football business for years now and has some great insights on the future of player assessment and technology in football.

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

[ Can you tell me about your background before Athleads? ]

I'm from Madeira. I played youth football at Andorinha, the club where Cristiano Ronaldo started. He’d already left when I was there of course (he was already at Manchester United) but it was really cool to see how excited everyone was to follow him and his matches. It was a really special atmosphere to watch him grow!

At the end of my youth career, I had to choose between a senior career or university. A tough decision! My dream was always to play football. I thought, maybe not in the first division but maybe in the second or somewhere else in the world where I could get paid, play football, have a nice life and do what I love. But, looking at these things, it’s really hard and difficult to know who to reach, how to get trials and things like that.

Anyway, I decided to study computer science, I always loved technology and every around that and that’s (at university) where I got into startups and software. I created a (software development and design) agency with a friend where I got to know someone from Germany who was hiring us for work.

I eventually moved to Berlin to start working there. At the time I wasn’t so involved in football anymore and was working with a lot of startups. I joined Techstars and Silicon Allee, where I learned a lot more about starting a company.

Eventually I decided, it’s time to go back and build my own thing again! I knew how much work a company is and thought, maybe if you do something that you like and get actually excited by, it won’t feel like so much work. So I started to look into football.

My initial idea was to build a kind of ‘LinkedIn for players’ and help solve the problem of players looking for (playing) opportunities. I saw a few companies working on this that failed and I tried something a little different.

The idea is to build a platform where scouts can go and be proactive - instead of waiting for assignments, they can watch players and create reports and clubs can buy that information (their reports) as an initial step (in the recruitment process).

[ So the goal is to ‘empower’ freelance scouts, so they can be paid for reports they write by clubs looking at that player? ]

Eventually, yes. In the future, scouts can even sell the same report to different clubs. Mainly, if the content is out there, they can profit instead of just keeping their reports in their own catalog. To do this, we need money to scale and try to create a network effect. This is part of a growth plan.

Currently, what we're building is the basic infrastructure so that scouts can create reports, analyze players and clubs can see all the reports and schedules and everyone can see the progress and things like ‘what’s the next step?’.

[ Athleads is essentially a CRM for scouts and scouting departments - is that a correct generalization? ]

Exactly, at the moment it’s a CRM. Eventually we plan to move towards an ‘HR tool’ where you can send contracts and payments and things like that - and still, the scout ‘marketplace’.

[ Can you tell me a little about the beginning of Athleads - you started on your own? ]

I started working on it myself - with some help from friends here and there. Then I joined Silicon Allee, where there was a chance to bring someone in full time. That’s when Jens Hillmann joined as my co-founder. He has lots of experience, he was at Metrica Sports and worked as a performance analyst. He also has really good expertise in terms of making contacts at a club and getting the inside perspective.

I had started the (Silicon Allee) programme with an idea for a more social concept but pivoted with Jens after seeing how much money and complexity was needed to get the first customers for this.

We even went to the FIFA offices in Switzerland and presented out technology to FIFA’s head of technology and got some good feedback and that validation was definitely cool and I think proves we are on the right path. It will require a lot of work to get there but we’re on the right track.

[ Football is generally considered a ‘closed’ industry, is this your experience as well? ]

Yes, 100%. It takes a lot of time until you start coming up in people's minds. Slowly, things start to develop but it's a rough start. I think that’s why you don't see a lot of startups in football. It takes a long time, so the ones that last are the ones that really managed to stay alive and start getting that ‘organic adoption’.

[ Who are the customers - is it the club or an individual scout? ]

Both. There's freelance scouts already using it. We’re also working with scouting agencies who provide clubs with scouts/scouting services, which is pretty cool. We also have contracts with clubs who use our software to organize their information - especially clubs that don’t have a tool for this yet and want to migrate their data from excel or somewhere else.

[ Have you thought about agents as customers for your platforms? ]

Yeah, definitely, we do a bit of work with agents as well. Athleads’ tool is really agnostic whether you’re a club, a freelancer, an agent or even a football journalist. Anyone who wants to understand players and football can use it to organize their knowledge.

I think more and more, if you want to become an agent, you need to start really looking for players and organizing your thoughts because it’s become so competitive. When you go for a player, you need to go fully in, already knowing everything because otherwise someone else will get that player and your time will have been wasted.

[ Have you raised money for Athleads? ]

Yeah, we got an EU grant from Silicon Allee. At the moment we’re bootstrapping basically. We are finishing the tool and starting to get some paying customers. Fundraising from normal VCs is really hard because they often see it as a niche. So you often need to go to football enthusiasts but there you have to be careful too!

To find the right investors, it takes a lot of time, a lot of meetings and follow ups. That’s why we’re just focusing on building and getting customers who love to use our product. Once this is in place, it will be easier to look at the next step.

[ What is the ‘status quo’ in scouting and how does it vary from division to division? ]

Many first division clubs have a 3 or 4 person team and then the size can go down quickly as you go down. It’s a bit sad that we see a lot of clubs invest a lot into transfers and player salaries but they are not investing as much as they should into the tooling and the actual people finding the players.

The variation though, is wild, it can go from one person - maybe a sporting director - scouting and doing a little bit of everything with some connections or freelancers helping out to big teams at the biggest clubs.

In the past, clubs would have scouts based everywhere but now there’s a movement, or a transition, where they are not doing this as often. Rather they (big clubs) have a core team of maybe 6-10 people and do a lot more scouting via video. Then when the player is towards the last stage, they will go see them live in the stadium. I think that’s the big transition of the last 5-10 years on the scouting side.

There are also a lot more statistics. It’s tricky and some statistics are not widely accepted or trusted in the same way. It’s changing all the time. A simple example is, in the past, ‘completed passes’ was a useful metric. I mean completed passes, sounds good right? But if you keep passing backwards or sideways, it’s not as valuable. Now, ‘forward passes’ is a widely available stat.

So scouts still rely a lot on watching videos and games. If you think about it as a funnel, you’ll probably use statistics at the beginning to filter a bit. And then watch video at the next stage, and go to the stadiums for the final stage before taking a final decision.

[ Currently, and in the last few years, there’s been a lot of hype around clubs like Brighton or Brentford - clubs that are owned by people who made their money on sports betting - and using a version of a ‘moneyball’ approach to scouting and transfer. What are some trends or 'innovations' that are less publicized? ]

Yeah, I think Brexit has also changed that a bit. It's kind of conflicted with ‘moneyball’ because the player needs to be in a certain ‘category’ to play in the UK.

One of the trends we’re starting to see is that big clubs, like Real Madrid are not getting players anymore from e.g. Benfica or Porto but going directly to the ‘source’ e.g. Brazilian clubs. I think a big positive of this trend is that clubs are starting to see themselves as companies and that’s positive for the technology side because they want to professionalize the entire process to make things more predictable in terms of risk.

Of course there will always be unpredictable things, that’s why we love football - but with more data and a better understanding of players, you can make fewer errors and have a higher success rate.

[ Looking at the ‘top of the funnel’ for big clubs, how many players do these clubs have on their radar? How sophisticated is their ‘search function’? ]

So not a specific club but you can take, for example, the market for German clubs. They look in terms of which countries show success rates (at developing players). So you can’t say all players in the world are going to be potential players for a German club. There are lots of factors. For example, the style of play - if you look at the 2. Bundesliga, it’s a really physical league, so you have to be tough to survive there. Or, in Germany, the language is quite a big thing, speaking it definitely helps, but speaking e.g. a Nordic language makes it easier to adapt.

Once you start using these filters, you’re not talking about such a high amount of players. Maybe there’s 1,000 players that could be a fit. From there, you can take budget constraints, age, position, etc and the numbers (and potential signings) reduce quite quickly. And based on the club’s budget and risk tolerance, sometimes you’re only talking about a few players by the end.

[ Do you have any predictions on the future of scouting from a technical perspective? ]

I can start with what's not gonna happen! I think we’re not going to just delegate scouting decisions completely to a computer. There’s a human side that is difficult for technology to replace. For example, the dressing room environment is really important, probably more and more so even. We see how successful teams have a bonding effect that makes them really strong together and that’s why, personality-wise you will always need someone to have a part in this.

I saw Bernardo Silva playing for Benfica when I was still in Madeira and his talent was so obvious. Of course a kid can still get lost, the most important factor, or challenge, is the mental side - how they perform under pressure, ambition, motivation to go to the next level. That’s the part where a good scout makes a difference, because they can start seeing those signs early.

—^interviewer’s note: This reminds me of a great story in Michael Calvin’s book The Nowhere Men — “​​He (then-Manchester City technical director Mike Rigg) pushed his laptop across the desk, at an angle, and scrolled through a 56-page dossier he had compiled on Alexis Sanchez, when City considered signing him from Udinese (in 2011).” Rigg goes on to describe his ‘mission’ with City’s Italy scout Barry Hunter, “We went out and spent four or five days, on the back of two years’ worth of work, watching Alexis. We saw Udinese train, looked at his house, met family and friends. We went into town at one point, sat down and had a coffee, and we actually followed him walking around with a mate of his. We weren’t trying to be private investigators but it’s only a small place. We were noticing who he was with, what he was doing. At one point we went into a hotel and pretended to be fans. We asked for an autograph to see what the reaction was like.”

What I do see, of course, is technology playing a huge role in putting all the data together. For example, the technology for automatic match events tagging will give better statistics with way fewer errors, increasing trust in the stats. This will reinforce ‘data-driven’ decisions from clubs. At the moment clubs use statistics in two main ways. One is to narrow the search funnel, another is to validate decisions (e.g. do our expectations fit with the ‘eye-test’ and vice-versa). This will get stronger as the statistics get better and more reliable.

[ Has working on Athleads changed how you view football or your own ‘fandom’? ]

That's a good question. It’s changed a bit towards more ‘work’ which can be a bit of a pain. But honestly, I'm always excited to get up in the morning knowing that I'm gonna work on this!

Of course you become more analytical. You also see more behind all these ‘overnight success’ players. You know it’s not really overnight just because a big transfer happened. You realize that many, most even, people and clubs saw it - they just couldn’t afford it!

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