# What should a professional scouting supplier have to prove?


**A supplier should prove that its proposed package answers important recruitment questions better than the club’s agreed baseline—and that the club can lawfully, reliably and affordably use the answers.** This scorecard gives the greatest weight to decision contribution, competition coverage and evidence accuracy. It treats permission, essential coverage, critical errors and implementation feasibility as gates that cannot be offset by an attractive aggregate score.

Use it for soccer scouting software, video libraries, event-data feeds, tracking-derived intelligence, recruitment analytics, regional scouting services and internal integration plans. Evaluate the **specific package and delivery plan**, not the supplier’s brand or its entire catalogue.

The recommended sequence is:

1. Define the buying decision and comparison baseline.
2. Obtain permission for the evaluation itself.
3. Agree non-negotiable gates and acceptance tests.
4. Run equivalent tasks using club-selected evidence.
5. Score ten weighted criteria.
6. Compare fully loaded costs and capabilities that would be lost.
7. Issue a conditional, evidence-linked recommendation.

**Methodology status:** The weights, scoring anchors, sample sizes and decision bands below are this desk’s proposed procurement method. They are not league requirements, published industry benchmarks or statistically validated predictors of recruitment success. No supplier has been scored through a live club trial for this document. Public product descriptions establish what suppliers advertise—not what an individual club receives or how well it performs.