Scout7 acquisition will boost service to football talent spotters
FOOTBALL scouting software company Scout7 has bought rival Open Source Factory for around £785,000.
Birmingham Science Park-based Scout7 can already boast of having 90% of English Premier League clubs and more than 50% of clubs in the top leagues of France, Germany, Netherlands and Spain on its client list. It argues that this latest acquisition has created professional football’s leading global supplier for scouting and recruitment intelligence.
Established in 2001, Scout7 employs 30 people, with two thirds based at its Birmingham Science Park office. The annual turnover of the company post-acquisition will approach £3m.
It provides web-based recruitment, squad and scouting management solutions for its 175 professional football industry clients. For the past three years, the company has been the exclusive sales agent for Open Source Factory’s Xeatre.tv, which films and stores the video footage from every match played across 60 professional football leagues worldwide.
Scout7’s acquisition of Open Source Factory provides the advantage of product ownership and intellectual property rights.
Former Aston Villa deputy chief executive Mark Ansell, who is chairman of Scout7, said: “Over the past three years, Xeatre.tv has evolved into the preferred video-based scouting solution for elite professional football clubs. In an increasingly competitive marketplace, this strategic acquisition enables us to further develop a joint product offering to maintain our position as the leading supplier of scouting and recruitment intelligence to the professional football industry.
“We can now embark on a highly exciting new era of further growth and expansion.”
Lee Jamison, founder and managing director of Scout7, said: “The extended range of data we can now provide our client base with, on demand, at the touch of a button, is exactly what is required by elite football clubs striving to find the cutting edge to enhance performance.”
Launched in 2009, Xeatre.tv is a video scouting, management and analysis solution, capturing football footage from all over the world, for subscribers to watch live via an internet video stream, or from an archive of match recordings.
