The five blocks every report needs
Identification: name, age, position and secondary positions, nationality, current club, league, contract status and representation. Without contract status a report cannot be actioned.
Profile summary: two or three sentences describing the player's function on the pitch, not adjectives. 'Screening midfielder who receives on the half-turn and breaks lines with a first pass' beats 'talented and composed'.
Technical and physical attributes: scored consistently so profiles can be compared. SCOUTVERSE scores pace, shooting, passing, dribbling, defending, physical and vision on a shared scale so one player can be read against another without re-reading prose.
Evidence: match footage, season output and situation-specific clips. A claim with no clip attached is an opinion.
Recommendation: sign, monitor, or discard — with the brief it was judged against.
Why briefs come before reports
A report written with no brief is unscoreable. The same left-back can be an excellent fit for a possession side that needs an inverted full-back and a poor fit for a direct side that needs recovery pace.
On SCOUTVERSE a club writes the brief first — system, budget, age window, contract situation — and every profile in the index is then scored against it continuously rather than at the moment someone remembers to look.
What changes with an AI-assisted workflow
The human judgement stays where it belongs: watching football and deciding. What automation removes is the search cost — reading hundreds of profiles to find the twenty worth watching.
The practical benefit is coverage. A traditional department watches the leagues it already has contacts in. An index that scores every published profile against your brief surfaces players from markets no one on your staff currently covers.
Common mistakes
Writing for the file rather than the decision-maker. If the recommendation is not in the first ten lines, it will not be read.
Mixing observation with inference without labelling which is which.
Omitting the negative case. A report that lists no risks is not trusted by anyone who has signed a player before.