How to use Wyscout for successful football analysis

As football analysis has risen to prominence in the past decade, platforms like Wyscout, InStat, StatsBomb and smarterscout have become commonplace for clubs, analysts, scouts, coaches and even players around the world. As part of our Introduction to Football Analysis course, we detail how to successfully use Wyscout to enhance your analytical mind and football analysis frame.

WORTH THE COST?

Before beginning this article, it’s important to note that Wyscout is an expensive platform, as a direct result of the client-base they serve. In addition to the outstanding video analysis tools that the service provides, professional clubs and their recruitment departments utilize Wyscout to create databases filled with player information in a matter of minutes. They have stats and video footage on leagues that you simply can’t get anywhere else. They easily allow you to create playlists specifically guided towards what you want to see. They even allow you to contact clubs and agents at the click of a button. This is wonderful, but it all contributes to that expensive cost we referenced. So if you’re not making bang for your buck in analysis, coaching, scouting, recruitment, agency work or whatever it is that you’re doing in football, Wyscout might not be the place for you.

For my own purposes, as I’ve grown frustrated with my inability to clip live in-match footage on streaming services, Wyscout has needed to become a platform that I rely on. If you want to enhance your analysis and bring a different perspective to what you see on the pitch, and you’re willing to pay the price, Wyscout could be an excellent option.

wyscout features

After logging in to your Wyscout account, you will see a little well-hidden icon of multiple squares sitting in a row. This is where you will find many of the tools that you are eligible to use within the package you purchase.

The ‘Dashboard’ is where you can see all of the clips and playlists that you’ve compilated and downloaded. As a coach, you could also use this tool to upload videos of your own, where you would then be able to use Wyscout’s tools for analysis.

The ‘Advanced Search’ function is the next valuable icon, which allows you to search for players under a specific statistical category of interest, whether that be a football statistic (e.g. key passes per 90) or basic demographic information (e.g. age or nationality). You can use the tool to search for players around the world who accomplish your desired characteristics, or within a specific league / geographic region. As an example of this, I can use the ‘Advanced Search’ function to study Canadian-born stars playing abroad, that could one day come back to Canada.

The ‘Rankings’ feature then nicely compiles players or teams at the top of a specific statistical category. While this information is also accessible on free platforms like WhoScored?, FBRef and FotMob, you can use this feature on Wyscout to study statistics beyond the top 5 European Leagues, which is a current limitation of FBRef in particular.

The other nice thing about both the ‘Rankings’ and ‘Advanced Search’ is that you can not only add players to a list to study later on, but go directly into a video analysis based on the information.

Say that I was doing an analysis of teams that were caught offside far too many times in 2021-22 and how they could change that moving forward. I could then sift through this information, identify the teams worth studying, and then examine video footage that could help to guide my work. As you can see from the image below, I could even play all 105 of Real Madrid’s offsides (if I wasn’t worried about my download limit on the site).

Next up is the ‘Shadow Team’ feature, which allows you to create a ‘Team’ of players, helping you keep an eye on potential prospects. This can also be helpful in building a dream squad as a transfer market progresses – that sort of backdrop that Edu has in the Arsenal documentary of players on his team.

Other than the video analysis tools, my favourite feature is the ‘Player Lists’ tool, where I can use the ‘Advanced Search’ function to amalgamate players together, and then compare data. Say that I was looking for a new striker for Chelsea, I could then position players together, and study their data and video footage all in one place.

Finally, the best feature of all that Wyscout has to offer would be their easy to use tools for video analysis. You can search for and find footage of virtually any player or team in men’s football, and then create custom playlists guided toward what you want to see. The feature is extraordinarily cool, as you can not only see video footage, but specific stats, player reports and, if you want, even direct DM a player’s agent. I’m not sure why I would want to do this yet, but I think it’s pretty cool nonetheless.

Rather than contacting agents and clubs, I use Wyscout for purposes of creating ‘custom video reports’ and scanning for what I want to see about a player. I can then select say Erling Haaland’s goals against Crystal Palace, and create a specific playlist that does not completely ruin my download limit in the blink of an eye.

This then allows me to guide my focus, and create specific analyses around the facets of a player’s game, and what they accomplish. I can then click on the ‘Analysis’ icon below the video to create my analysis.

The ‘Analysis’ tool allows you to export the extraction as a PNG file, for your purposes. Here’s my example…

You can also ‘Save’ the image, which allows the telestrations you created to then occur as a two-four second still-frame as you play the video in full. Once you add more videos to the same ‘Playlist’, you can then download several actions together as one succinct file.

Thanks to Wyscout, I can produce a nice and quick compilation like this that allows my audience to immediately understand the presented information.

Working for a professional club, with professional players, you can do the exact same to show them video clips of opponents, areas of success and areas of development, and key performance indicators in reference to their game model. Knowing how to do this in a succinct fashion, like Wyscout easily provides, will allow you to take your analysis to the next level, and catch the attention of whomever you endeavour to impress. I’m still waiting for your call, Kristian Jack.

So to end off this section, I challenge you to think about what you would use Wyscout for in your first (or next) video analysis. What do you want to study? How can you guide that endeavour to scan for what really matters to the problem at hand?

So that is the SparkNotes version of how to use Wyscout to success in your analysis. If you have any questions or want to know whether or not it’s worth the cost, email me at themastermindsite.com@gmail.com.

This article is part of our Introduction to Football Analysis – Online Course with Rhys Desmond. See what else is in store for the course and navigate to the next section below.

See the entire course curriculum and jump around by visiting:
Introduction to Football Analysis – Online Course with Rhys Desmond

Thanks for reading and see you soon!

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