Video scouting was sold as a saving and became a subscription

Recruitment departments swapped travel budgets for platform fees, and the new cost turned out to be permanent.

The pitch to boards was irresistible around a decade ago. Stop flying four scouts to Scandinavia. Buy a licence, watch every league in the world from a desk, redirect the savings. Plenty of clubs did exactly that, and the travel budget shrank, and the platform invoice arrived every year afterwards whether anybody used it or not.

A video platform is a good product. Full match access, tagged events, filters that let an analyst build a shortlist in a morning rather than a month. For a mid-sized club it genuinely widened the searchable market. But the economics of software are not the economics of a plane ticket. Travel is variable cost: cut a trip, save the money. A licence is fixed, escalates at renewal, and is priced against the customer's revenue rather than its usage.

Then everyone bought the same one. When two hundred clubs run the same filters against the same tagged database, the obvious targets are obvious to all of them simultaneously, and the price of the player rises to meet the collective discovery. The edge that justified the purchase was competed away within a few seasons, and what remains is the invoice.

The clubs that kept a live scouting network are, quietly, the ones still finding people. Not because a scout in a stand sees something a camera cannot, though sometimes he does. Because he sees the things that never enter a database at all: the coaching setup, the family, whether the boy handles a bad half hour, whether the agent is honest. None of that is taggable and all of it predicts whether a signing works.

The honest budget line is both, and boards resist that because it looks like paying twice for the same function. It is not the same function. One narrows a field of ten thousand to fifty. The other tells you which of the fifty will survive a relocation.

If a recruitment department cannot name a signing that came from the platform and nowhere else, the renewal should be a real conversation rather than an automatic one.

Software vendors understand club procurement better than clubs understand software pricing. That gap is where the money goes.