A few months ago, Oliver Sonne was a model who rubbed shoulders with celebrities like A$AP Rocky and walked runways at fashion shows. But then Sonne began ranking on a scouting app called Tonsser for his soccer skills. In February he signed a contract with FC Copenhagen.
When Sonne, 17, was playing soccer on muddy pitches with his friends in Denmark growing up, a pro contract from a team in the Danish Superliga seemed like a pipe dream. He was too small to play professionally, too risky a bet, scouts would say.
Sonne was instead discovered for his looks at a Christmas party hosted by his aunt, Helena Christensen. (Christensen is a model herself, and a former Victoria’s Secret Angel.) He made the decision to put his professional soccer aspirations on hold to pursue modeling.
Fast-forward a few years with the advent of the cloud and data, and the teen began tracking his play on the pitch through Tonsser. The scouting app connects youth soccer players to their peers, potential coaches, and scouts.
Through quantifiable data on the app, Sonne ranked as one of Denmark’s top emerging soccer players. He was sent on trial with Olympique de Marseille, the professional Ligue 1 French soccer team, and FC Copenhagen of the Superliga. Both teams expressed high interest, and FC Copenhagen handed him a contract in February. He made his senior debut for the team a few weeks later.
Sonne is a success story in what Tonsser co-founder and CEO Peter Holm hopes becomes a new industry norm: leveraging data to discover hidden talent. The emergence of scouting, video and player-tracking technologies and apps are igniting a broader trend of talent discovery across sports, and helping to usher in a new generation of soccer athletes. These are players who know how to use data to accelerate their careers, and who in the past might have gone undiscovered.
“We can make sure that we empower people to accelerate their dreams through transparency and information,” Holm said. “Tonsser is their performance gateway to opportunities.”
Tonsser, one of a few scouting apps starting to gain traction among youth leagues, is sort-of like LinkedIn for aspiring soccer players. The app enables athletes to create digital profiles of their performance on the pitch where they can showcase their skills, connect with their peers, vote and receive votes on their performance from coaches and teammates, and, increasingly, get invited to exclusive pro-team trials.
“It’s almost as though football was as the professional industry was before LinkedIn,” said Holm. “People were unmapped. Those not on top were difficult to find and explore. We want to make football transparent, to empower people.”
Now that Tonsser has amassed 600,000 users around Europe, it’s beginning to set its sights on the next phase of development. The company is expanding from a simple player network to a scouting ecosystem working directly with pro teams in Europe, such as the Premier League’s Southampton FC. The goal is to connect pro clubs via exclusive trials with top-ranked local talent, unearthed through a ranking system powered by Tonsser’s proprietary algorithm.
Tonsser hosted its first trial of that system in France at the end of April with Parisian club Red Star FC. Of the 8,700 players from the French region, Tonsser narrowed the pool to 86 based purely on data. It invited those players to Red Star FC over the course of three days. The club called back 30 percent for a second trial, and of the 27 who returned, it offered nine player contracts.
“Before the trials, we were skeptical about the fact that Tonsser could find players only with their data, without observing them the old-fashioned way,” said Sébastien Robert, Red Star’s technical director. “But … the quality of the players was better than our own detections.”
The second Tonsser-based trials took place in May when Bavarian club FC Ingolstadt 04 hosted an exclusive event, comprised of players chosen strictly from data, to scout German youth players.
With four years until the start of the next World Cup in Qatar, Tonsser hopes to expand its list of pro-team clients from the 25 it works with today, and to help more clubs potentially discover the next Henrik Dalsgaard. The late-blooming Danish player who made his World Cup debut with the Denmark national team this year, at age 28.
History is made
Henrik Dalsgaard becomes our first ever contracted player to feature at a #WorldCup https://t.co/2ilRpyVSYz
— Brentford FC (@BrentfordFC) June 16, 2018
“We’re becoming this more ecosystem-driven hub and community with coaches and clubs,” said Holm. “That’s where we believe we can empower the community.”
Whereas Tonsser is the biggest youth performance and scouting app in Europe, Scout Me is making similar strides in India. Scout Me, a free app developed by a teenager in Delhi, was recently adopted by the All India Football Federation to identify talent in rural regions that could have otherwise been overlooked.
The app’s founder, Kush Pandey, came up with the idea after noticing a gap in the market when his Delhi-based team went to play a team in a small rural village. His team, Bhaichung Bhutia Football School, thought that game would be an easy win—capital boys v. small town boys, a team with resources v. one without much at all. They were wrong, and lost.
“That’s where I realized that these people don’t have the same opportunities,” Pandey said. “Previously scouts could really only reach metros, but with ScoutMe they’re now reaching into the smallest villages.”
Both Tonsser and Scout Me don’t claim to offer a replacement for traditional human scouters. There’s still something to be said for using traditional methods to discover talent, and both Holm and Pandey view their platforms as complementary to the broader scouting ecosystem.
That said, they both also view data as a tool that will give clubs greater access to candidates and more information about each player so they can make better recruiting and coaching decisions. Perhaps their tools with help to unearth the stars of the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar.
“There have been too many lost talents out there, we don’t know how many because the stories have not been written—they’ve just fallen out of the system somehow,” said Holm. “You see many [teams] covering three to four countries with one scout. How are they able to get enough information to make a decision from? We want to map out the talent ecosystem with data.”