Football Wyscout Recruiting

From Discovery to Deal: Building Your Shortlist on Hudl Wyscout

20 Aug 2025

9 min Read

By Tom Robinson

Follow these five steps to streamline your scouting and recruitment workflow – all within the Hudl Wyscout platform.

The transfer window brings intense speculation around potential signings, thrusting scouting and recruitment to the forefront of football discourse.

But the work of a scout is a year-round endeavour, requiring constant monitoring and evaluation of targets from across the globe.

And while this process is made easier by access to footage of +600 competitions on Hudl Wyscout, the challenge for time-poor scouts isn't finding players — it's finding the right players efficiently.

Here, we take you through the steps needed to streamline your scouting and recruitment workflow, from first to discovery right through to final decision, all within the Hudl Wyscout platform.

STEP 1: SQUAD ANALYSIS

Before you can barrel headfirst into looking for your new star, a thorough analysis of the profile, strengths, and weaknesses of your current squad is essential.

It’s all well and good to be drawn to a shiny new striker, but if you’ve got a gaping hole in midfield or an ageing centre back on their last legs, then prioritising where you need to focus your scouting should be taken into account.

Hudl Wyscout’s Shadow Team feature allows you to create, organise and manage your squad in a centralised tool, allowing for an analysis of where targeted players might integrate into your preferred style and formation.

Once you’ve identified the position, the profile of the player to fill this role needs to be defined. This should be aligned with the team’s game model to ensure that the target’s qualities are suited to the style of play and coaching philosophy.

Our Working Example

For the purposes of this thought experiment, let’s say that we are looking to strengthen at right back. We want to target a young player under the age of 23 with room for improvement to future proof the position. To fit in with our style of play, we want a dynamic, attack-minded player who provides width, carries the ball well, and gets crosses into the box.

We choose to scout the Belgian Pro League due to the amount of minutes the league gives to young players, their reputation for good value rising talents with high potential, and the competitive level of the league. More on this later.

Key takeaway: Define your needs before you search. Every successful recruitment starts with knowing exactly what gap you're filling.

STEP 2: LONGLIST CREATION

Once you’ve defined what type of player you’re looking for, the scouting department’s job is to translate the club’s KPIs into footage, reports, shortlists, and insights. The starting point is the creation of a longlist of players who meet the outlined criteria.

While sifting through the data can seem like a time consuming process, Wyscout’s Advanced Search tool can speed up player identification with intuitive search and filtering functionalities. Biographical, technical, tactical, and physical data can quickly be narrowed down with flexible filters and players added to your initial longlist.

Wyscout Rankings also helps streamline longlist creation with a quick visualisation of the top performing players across a number of key metrics from any given competition. This can be used to quickly benchmark players against their peers and see who warrants further investigation.

Particularly useful for unearthing young prospects for a longlist is Wyscout’s Talent Center. Through customisable filters you can quickly discover young players who are already regulars for their first team, breakthrough talents, and debutants at both domestic and international level.

Putting it into Practice

So returning to our example of looking for a young right back in Belgium, let’s see how we can quickly get a longlist of potential talents.

Using Advanced Search, we can easily set the competition scope to the Belgian Pro League, use the pitch map to select the right back position we want to look for, and add filters to zone in on eligible players for the longlist.

We’ve set the age to under 23 and added a few metrics that are important to our game model. To get even more specific we can alter the lower and higher limits of the selected metrics, or reorder the list based on different attributes. In just a couple of clicks we have some solid candidates for the longlist.

A look at the breakthrough right back talents from the Belgian Pro League on Talent Center gives some extra context and throws up some more interesting names to consider.

Finally, using Wyscout Rankings Indexes - which sorts and rates players in a competition for each position based on their stats - we get an ordered list of the best performing full backs from the 2024/25 season. We select the right backs and add these to our longlist.

Key takeaway: Cast the net wide, but cast it smart to get a comprehensive longlist ready for deeper analysis.

STEP 3: DEEPER PLAYER ANALYSIS

Now you have a longlist, it’s time to undertake an exhaustive analysis of the potential targets. This is where combining data with more subjective insights from video is crucial to get a well rounded opinion of a player.

The critical questions:

Do they pass the eye test?
Do the numbers back up what you’re seeing?
Or do the stats point to something you’ve missed and need to go back and reassess in the footage?

As the most comprehensive football library in the world, Wyscout gives you quick access to a vast collection of adult and youth competitions, saving scouts time and money from travelling to far flung corners of the globe.

By studying the footage, scouts can gain insights into aspects of a player’s game that have no obvious proxies in basic data, such as body positioning, communication, and leadership. Findings can then be compared and contrasted with event data in Player Reports to quickly get the full picture of the players.

Analysis in Action

So, in our search for the next right back star out of Belgium, let’s assess a player from our longlist using Wyscout video. For the purposes of this example, we’ve gone with Club Brugge’s 20-year-old Kyriani Sabbe.

We can quickly select clips that we feel demonstrate his abilities and add them to a playlist for further analysis.

Using the Playlist and Draw function we can annotate the clips from the playlist. For example, here we see a great example of Sabbe’s ability to carry the ball forward with pace and pick out a perfect cross - two of the qualities we are looking for - leading to a goal for his teammate.

For added context, we can use the Player Lists tool to compare and contrast Sabbe with other players on the longlist or from your pre-existing squad. These can also be customised to show the metrics that are most important to you and your style.

And for more in-depth analysis with advanced data, Wyscout video seamlessly integrates with Hudl Statsbomb and Hudl Sportscode.

Pro tip: Create themed playlists for different attributes (e.g. attacking play, defensive actions, set pieces) to systematically evaluate each candidate.

STEP 4: REFINING THE SHORTLIST

Your analysis of the video and data will allow you to whittle down the longlist into a shortlist of potential - and preferably achievable - targets. These can be ordered into a list of preferences, taking into account availability, likely transfer fee, wage demands, and so on.

Having saved time with your streamlined search, you can now dig even deeper into the video and stats on the Wyscout platform - dedicating quality analysis for the players that matter.

At this stage, you may also choose to conduct some in-person scouting to see how they perform in the flesh, while background investigations into mental attributes and personality will also help you understand how they will transition to a new team or league.

Our Shortlist Results

For our example, we have narrowed our right back search down to six candidates. We have provided options that meet the criteria we have initially set out and that stood out in further video and data analysis.

Given the fluid nature of the transfer market, we have also decided to cover a range of ages and transfer values, ensuring there are back ups if we can’t secure our first choice. All that remains is to make a decision on who to approach.

Key takeaway: Quality analysis time should be inversely proportional to list length—the shorter your list, the deeper you should dig.

STEP 5: FINAL DECISIONS

Once your top target has been chosen, there is still the small matter of presenting your recommendation to key decision makers within the club.

Wyscout’s Playlist and Draw can be used to provide annotations to clips of the selected players, to help demonstrate and communicate why they are the right choice in a more engaging and accessible way.

This playlist can be instantly saved to the Hudl platform to quickly share with stakeholders in real-time. This integration with the Hudl Pro Suite removes the difficulty of coordinating team members' fragmented workflows across multiple platforms, allowing staff to collaborate seamlessly and come to better decisions faster.

Our First Choice Target

Following all of the steps above, our theoretical search for a new right back leads us to Genk’s Zakaria El Ouahdi.

At 23, he fits the age profile and brings experience but still has room for growth and ROI. His attacking output and versatility to play as a wing back fits our style of play, while his expected assists to assists ratio suggests he is putting in quality balls which haven’t been finished by teammates – backed up by the video analysis we have done.

Here we see a couple of clips - annotated on Playlist and Draw - showing his crossing ability off both feet, providing evidence of his talent and illustrating the rationale behind chasing his signature.

We can then send them across to Hudl for discussions to begin, ultimately with the aim of securing the deal of the desired player.

Pro tip: Decision makers buy into stories, not just stats. Use annotated video to craft a compelling narrative about why this player transforms your team.

Your complete scouting solution

So there you have it! Five simple steps to streamline your scouting and recruitment, all possible on the Hudl Wyscout platform. From initial squad analysis through to final recommendations, you now have a systematic approach that saves time while improving decision-making quality

Ready to transform your recruitment process? Find out more about how to use Hudl Wyscout for your scouting, recruitment, and talent evaluation workflows here.