A revolution is happening in youth couting and it changes 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 that you may never have heard of, but a platform that has probably become central to how the club that supports you recruits young players. It is already used by the majority of them in Europe's top five major competitions.
The sale is simple. The platform offers video clips with thousands of data points for every player. But this is not the Premier League. These are young people who play in amateur football in France, in academies in Africa and, very soon, throughout South America.
This is how the next superstar of football will be dug up. And they can be everywhere. Had a genius of Mali ever discovered? “One hundred percent, there was,” says Oliver Dürr Dehnhardt, the colleague of Balkin. “In fact, there were probably 10.”
He adds: “I do not claim that Eyeball has the solution to find all 10. They still have to play for a club that we treat. But the route to finding all 10 is now clearer. Everyone knows the potential of Africa, but nobody knew how to unlock it. Now it can just be spiral -shaped.”
Eyeball was just an idea five years ago. Just like the best of them, it came from the need to solve a problem. Balkin, born in France to Danish parents, was a one-off Monaco front view that noticed that he was trying to identify young French talent for clubs abroad.
“Everything started with 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 there. You trusted strongly on agents. Our problem was a lack of video in youth football.”
They knew it was logical to base themselves in the big cities, Paris and Marseille, but it was just a well -trained gamble that corresponds to seeing. A contact would call about a prospect in Brittany. Another one in Lyon. “Everywhere except where it was practical to be.”
He explains: “What we were doing was in principle trying to be lucky. I just choose a bit instinctively on a Saturday afternoon. I'm going to see it and hope that the left back you were looking for would be on the field.
“How often did you hear that it was lucky to be in the right place at the right time?” I was just watching a competition and he was right in front of me. ” But in 2025 no football club wants to build a strategy based on happiness. “
That was the situation. They put a pin in a card and tried to find players in France. And even when they did, their reports missed something. Clips did not only want to see written reports. “We have decided to film the games ourselves.”
This was amateur football. “Nothing was on TV, no rights, nothing. We just bought cameras, the players we liked cut.” But it worked. “The response percentage of clubs increased. The decision -making time became much shorter.” Eyeball was the answer.
The challenge for Balkin and co-founder Emil Kjeldsen in 2020 was to scale it. “The problem was that most clubs did not have a camera. And if they did, they used it for internal coaching purposes and analysis. We tried to remove that barrier,” he says.
“By offering clubs for free with a camera system and the analysis that goes with it, we could in exchange the team magazines and the information we need on their players to ultimately build an actual searchable database.”
Dehnhardt came from the other angle in the other corner who worked at Ajax for three years as their international explorer, responsible for Scandinavia and France, but also explore the potential markets in Africa and beyond. “My focus was on rising talent.”
Ajax has long been considered one of the best clubs in Europe when it comes to identifying that talent. “A very well -financed reconnaissance system, very good scouts,” Dehnhardt agrees. “But they worked on the same basis as any other club,” he adds.
“If an agent they trusted on Thursday would call to say that there was a good player in Prague, they would fly there at the weekend to view him and then say 'no'. If there were 10 agents, they would choose one and then see the others in the next nine weekends.
“With eyeball you look for 20 minutes and decide if you want to put them on the list. If the live validates the video, I would send the name to Amsterdam where 10 video scouts work. Within two days I would have 10 independent reports. You can make a decision.
“At Ajax we made Oogbol at the center of our strategy. I saw the potential myself, how things can change completely.
“Ten days instead of 10 weeks or more? Time is money in this space. Very few clubs in the world do not have the luxury of time a factor.
“Look at Mathys Tel, he has hardly turned 19 and is already on the second major transfer of his life. If Mathys count was born two years later, there would have been 45 games before his debut for Rennes. The decision would be made earlier.”
After he has recognized the chance, Dehnhardt now works for Oogbol, located in their Copenhagen office. “It is really the first major shift in youth exploration in the last 30 years, to be honest,” he holds full. “That's why I'm here now. It's a game change.”
Of course, football itself changes too. Globalization in combination with increased financial limitations actively encourages clubs to throw the net wider and younger. “Upcoming talent used to be defined as U23, but now it's U19,” explains Dehnhardt.
“More and more clubs don't really care where a player comes from as long as they are good enough. That is all the strategy of clubs at the level of the first team, but with the barrier for international scouting that is now lowering, clubs will switch more and more.”
Balkin agrees. “If everything shifts younger, how does the reconnaissance strategy fit to that? Data are focused on the first team football in the last decade, but players are now going at the age of 19. Maybe it will be fast. The clubs must know about it at the age of 14.”
Oogbal is the means they can do that.
Balkin talks through it and it is amazingly simple, football manager for real. “I can select my data points to make my shortlist. Let's look for a center-back, this year, European passport, national team player, so long. It really makes the life of the explorer much easier.”
Clicking in is a teenager from West -Africa and a scout in Noord -Europe looks at clips of a game that is played on another continent where no fans were present. “You are not just going to Senegal, isn't it? It kills geography.”
But it's not just the big clubs that benefit. Logistics in Africa has been simple because clubs have embraced there. “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 clubs in the championship are now on board, so that their use is adjusted for both costs and usability. “You don't have to buy everything, just subscribe to the countries that are relevant to your reconnaissance department, your strategy,” says Balkin.
Below Bolton Wanderers are in an interesting position in the food chain. They film their games from the age of 13 and prove video and team magazines. It helps to show talent to sell, but also offers players released the chance to be picked up elsewhere.
“You don't have to trust the agent what you have never heard about who you wrote on LinkedIn with a good video,” says Dehnhardt. “You can do your own due diligence. At the same time, you have direct contact with the club on the eye. No intermediaries.”
That said, the big desks are in mind. “It's logical,” says Balkin. “They are part of the ecosystem with their own analysts. They make data -driven decisions about players they want to represent, not only on the recommendation of someone else.”
“Certainly transfers are being done purely on eyeball,” Dehnhardt claims. Even movements that, at first sight, seem to be examples of traditional scouting, are in fact – before and then – fed by extensive research that is being done on the eyeball platform.
“As a general rule, when the club uses eyeball and the player is about eyeball, Eyeball played a role in the Due Diligence. It is likely that 70 to 80 percent of the reconnaissance reports on young players are actually made on video on the basis of eyeball. It is as simple as that.”
Valy Konate, the ivory coast player of Racing Club Abidjan who recently seemed to be at the Toulon tournament and then earned a large move to Monaco, still needed some background controls. “The sequel was on the eye, I have no doubt about that.”
Simply put, it is now an integral part of the scouting process. “We have now passed the turning point,” says Balkin. “If you don't use an eyeball, you're the exception. I think there are four in the Premier League that don't use it. Two in Ligue 1.” And it will only grow.
“We have 130 partner academies in Africa and we will reach 200 to 250 towards the end of the calendar year.” But the big project, a project that Balkin, shy, instead of boasting, allows the eyeball that has already invested nine digits, is to expand to South America.
“Nobody only wants a Brazilian strategy. They want a South American strategy. So we put a lot of money in mapping Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Uruguay and Ecuador. We have three full-time people on the site and we all go in. Asia is the next.”
Eyeball is getting bigger. As a result, the world becomes smaller.
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