Dario Osorio’s move to Crystal Palace this summer came with a £24m option to buy attached, a fee that would make him the most expensive sale in Danish Superliga history if it is triggered. Yet nobody at Midtjylland pretends they pulled off a heist when they signed him. The Chilean winger, who has 25 caps and has already made two appearances for Palace, was on the radar of AC Milan, RB Leipzig, Salzburg and a number of other English and German clubs before he left Santiago for Denmark at the age of 19.
“When we signed Dario Osorio, it was not because no-one knew about him,” Kristian Kjaer, technical director at Midtjylland, says. “That hidden gem kind of thing almost does not exist any more in football. Sometimes it does, but it’s rare.”
Midtjylland’s structure explains why. The club, where Brentford owner Matthew Benham was a majority stakeholder between 2014 and 2023, runs what Kjaer describes as two parallel pathways. One is traditional: subjective scouting, classic video work, live watching, a network of trusted contacts inside the club and among its partners. The other is data scouting. Osorio was flagged through that combination long before a bid was made.
That infrastructure is now far more widespread. Sam Turner, head of operations at the scouting and development platform Eyeball, says the current period is “one of the most transformational in talent ID and recruitment”. Eyeball was founded five years ago to focus predominantly on players aged 13 to 21. It is used by more than 60% of clubs in Europe’s top five leagues and a majority of Premier League sides, giving them access to more than 400,000 young players across 42 global markets stretching from Europe to Africa and Latin America.
The detail available is striking. Eyeball takes north of 2,000 data points every match, typically from leading amateur clubs and elite academies who film and upload their fixtures. The database allows analysts to call up every progressive pass a player has made, see who covered the most distance, or simply search for the next Ashley Cole. Brighton’s Malick Yalcouye was tracked on the system since his time at Ivorian side ASEC Mimosas before joining from IFK Goteborg two years ago, going on to loan spells at Sturm Graz and Swansea and breaking into the first team this season. Bazoumana Toure, now at Newcastle, was followed the same way. Elsewhere, Josue Caicedo left Ecuador’s LDU Quito for Barcelona, Mustapha Nyassi moved from Gambia’s Real de Banjul to Copenhagen and Nour Ashraf joined Leipzig from Egypt’s ENPPI.
“The availability of data and footage has prompted a change in methodology,” Turner says, pointing to gains in time and cost as well as decision-making. He is careful to add that the human element survives: the aim, he argues, is to supplement scouts and recruitment teams with tools and information rather than replace them.
Kjaer frames data as one input among several. It is, he says, “extremely important because it gives you an objective tool you can lean towards”, but it cannot stand alone. “We cannot just turn on the computer and it tell us who to sign and then we go sign them,” he says. Clubs also need to understand a player’s cultural and family background to judge whether he fits. Midtjylland’s willingness to sign young creates its own pressure: their sample sizes are necessarily small, and if they wait for the numbers to become convincing, Brighton, Liverpool, Brentford and others will take the player first. “The pace in decision-making is also a hidden gem,” Kjaer adds.
Looking for the next frontier, both men point to Uzbekistan, which played its first World Cup this summer with 22-year-old Manchester City defender Abdukodir Khusanov among the squad. Turner highlights Azerbaijan, which he says is pioneering a national talent network, and calls Japan a “guiding star” in youth development for a system that carries players from grassroots through school and college football into the professional game, producing thinkers such as Kaoru Mitoma and his thesis on dribbling techniques. For European clubs, identifying young Japanese prospects remains complicated.
Latin America stays a hotbed. Former Midtjylland chairman Rasmus Ankersen, who has since worked for Brentford and Southampton, wrote in his book The Gold Mine Effect that a club such as Cruzeiro will reject 4,000 players under the age of 15 for every one it takes in. Brazilian clubs are protective of their assets, but Turner notes they accept players will eventually leave and are focused on letting them go at an age that still benefits the selling club. Much of the region, he says, remains untapped, with recording games the key to visibility for players who would otherwise go unseen.
Africa is the market most often described as saturated, and Thomas Randolph disputes it. Randolph, founder of Delphlyx, works with Premier League clubs and ownership groups, as well as others across Europe, the United States and Mexico, to provide information on the best and most relevant 14 to 21-year-olds in West Africa, using data, live scouting and private tournaments. He says the platform carries more than 19,000 African players who could be watched from London before a phone call secures a trial or a transfer. With a projected average age of just over 18, he describes the region as a “young, growing, developing space” and a “sporting mecca”, though NFL and NBA investment is beginning in some countries. He points to regions left relatively undiscovered because of conflict or logistics, with scouts gravitating to the biggest cities. Zadok Yohanna, the 19-year-old winger who recently made his Brighton debut after a year in Sweden with AIK, came from Ikon Allah, a tiny and relatively unknown academy in northern Nigeria. Southern Senegal, home to Sadio Mane and to Lamine Camara, whom Chelsea tried to sign, has only one team.
Randolph also singles out Benin, where he says federation grants have been invested well in football infrastructure and pitches. The country has produced Romaine Gandonou, a 15-year-old who has already scored for the senior national side and played at the Under-20 World Cup, drawing interest from Paris Saint-Germain, Barcelona and others. Eastern Mali, Togo, Guinea-Bissau and Burkina Faso are among the other areas he flags.
Some Premier League clubs are now buying directly from the continent. Senegalese defender Mor Talla Ndiaye, 18, has already been on the bench for Liverpool after arriving from Amitie, the club owned by former Newcastle and Chelsea striker Demba Ba. He was spotted at last year’s Under-17 World Cup, where Burkina Faso midfielder Mohamed Zongo also impressed; Zongo will join the BlueCo project, which owns Chelsea and Strasbourg, when he turns 18 in two years’ time. Randolph calls the Under-17 World Cup “a big one” for African players, and scouts have also attended recent Under-17 Africa Cup of Nations qualifying, with Delphlyx helping organise trials for Senegalese and Gambian players at Premier League clubs. The pool is narrowed by the requirement for a Governing Body Endorsement to obtain a work permit, or else one of a club’s four Elite Significant Contribution spots, which in practice depends on how many youth or senior internationals a player has. That is one reason young players first move to countries with looser regulations, and why Randolph believes Scottish clubs, where the same criteria do not apply, should look at the African market the way Scandinavian clubs do.
Nordsjaelland offer the clearest example of that route. The Right to Dream academy, founded in Ghana in 1999 by former Manchester United scout Tom Vernon, bought the Danish club seven years ago to give its biggest prospects a pathway; Mohammed Kudus, Simon Adingra and Kamaldeen Sulemana are among those who came through. Yalcouye and Toure made their first European moves to Swedish clubs IFK Goteborg and Hammarby respectively, while Midtjylland have a partner club in Nigeria, FC Ebedei, where Coventry’s Frank Onyeka and Paul Onuachu, now at Trabzonspor, both played. Guinea-Bissau forward Franculino left this summer for Trabzonspor, and Ivory Coast defender Ousmane Diomande is now at Nottingham Forest via Sporting. Kjaer likens Midtjylland to “Silicon Valley for tech companies” in the volume of talent it has produced, arguing the club’s pitch to young players is a secure environment devoted to development.
Undiscovered talent still exists much closer to home. Jamel Sandjak, president of the Ligue de Paris Ile-de-France, which covers more than 1,000 clubs and 270,000 players, says scouts from all over the world come to the region, where amateur sides face professional academies and regularly beat them. Last season, amateur club ES Nanterre won Championnat National Group B ahead of Champions League sides Lens and Lille. Forward Exauce Luyindula was the division’s top scorer for AAS Sarcelles, where Riyad Mahrez played until he was 18, and has since joined Ligue 2 Guingamp. AFC Creil beat Lens at under-15 level, Olympique Rovenain’s under-19s beat Nice and CS Bretigny’s under-17s edged Paris Saint-Germain. Mahrez himself was 19 when he joined a professional club for the first time, with Le Havre. As Turner puts it, clubs long assumed the best players were in the best academies, when in truth many were picked at 12 or 13, and the best players at 12 are not always the best at 18.