For this report, professional player intelligence means external information and services purchased to identify, assess and recruit players: licensed match video, event data, tracking-derived intelligence, recruitment models, regional scouting and recruitment-data integration.
The initial customer scope is MLS and NWSL first-team recruitment operations. It excludes player salaries, transfer fees, agent commissions, internal scouting payroll, medical assessment, betting-data distribution and consumer player-exposure services. Academy or reserve-team use belongs in the model only where an identified first-team purchasing agreement includes it; it is not automatically another customer.
The expenditure measure is the buyer’s external cash spend, not the sum of every supplier’s revenue along a data-resale chain. If an analytics platform purchases an upstream feed and resells a bundled service, counting both invoices as club expenditure would overstate the market.
This is a procurement-market report, not a valuation of US football or the global sports-analytics industry.