An East Midlands entrepreneur has created a nationwide scouting and analytics firm based on 30 years experience in the business.
Darren Robinson, 47, has worked under Billy Davies at Nottingham Forest and Kevin Nolan at Notts County - his last job was head of performance at Birmingham City.
Now, the former Loughborough University graduate, has turned his attention to creating winning football teams - by using the latest technology and analysis systems alongside traditional scouting, for his new business iScout, which he launched in 2017.
With his background in personal profiling, Darren describes his East Midlands-based business as "the football intelligence service" - and it's a service that is not only appealing to clubs but is also catching the attention of TV shows. Darren has made several appearances on Sky Sports and even turned down the opportunity to pitch to the Dragons on Dragons Den.
With football scouts observing players on the ground and data analytics that take into account a club’s playing style, ethos and budget, he said the service has the structure to help match the right player to the right club.
He said: “Analytics isn’t about gathering data, it’s about interpreting data and making it useful and that’s where our approach differs.
"We’re not just an analytics service. We live and breathe football in the same way our clients do, and we’re bringing scouting and analytics together as a team, rather than as separate players.
"Our scouts and analysts work together to build up a profile of each footballer on our database and it’s fascinating to see how closely aligned the results are to our objective measures.
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"We look at players holistically, from a technical, tactical, physical and social perspective, to build up a complete picture of their performance and potential, in a way that’s bespoke to the club that’s interested in them, taking into account things like the club’s style of play.”
Starting with a scouting service only, Darren, who now lives in Derby with his family, said his business idea was honed and grown with the help of Nottingham Trent University’s start-up support programme, The Big House Accelerator.
He said of the programme: "I learned the process of running a business. I consolidated my business plan, broadened my vision in the sector and as a result flipped my business model on its head."
Darren focused on upscaling – taking iScout from a scouting service that uses analytics to an AI software service platform that also utilises data funnelling, natural language processing and machine learning. The business has also received SEIS eligibility (the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme).
Since then, the firm won £209k funding from Innovate 海角视频 - one of only 17 businesses chosen for investment from 2,400 hopeful companies - secured angel investment and won a Mainframe Award for Best Digital/Creative Start-Up in 2019.
He said of the business concept: “It makes sense to outsource scouting - clubs are operating at huge inefficiencies. Sending one scout to one match against potentially 40 scouts at one match working for various clubs… Using our service means operating costs are 91 percent lower than a club having an employee scouting for them.
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This is the changing face of football scouting - the industry is slow in terms of digital tech. Clubs are very traditional but it is slowly changing."