Grassroots football UK is where the game grew up. Why ScoutsCapital has British roots, how the UK compares with Spain, and why we are building for both.
We're launching ScoutsCapital in Madrid, but the UK has never been an afterthought for us. Grassroots football in the UK is where the game grew up, it's where part of our family lives, and it has always been one of our first markets alongside Spain. This post explains why the UK still matters so much to us, how it compares with Spain, and what we're doing about it.
If you've been following this series, you'll know we've just explained why we started in Spain and Madrid. That decision was about where to begin. This one is about where we come from, and where we're heading next.
We're part British, and we have family living in the UK, so it has always felt like home. Some of our earliest memories of football are tied to it, and that feeling never really left us, even after we based ourselves in Madrid.
When we set up ScoutsCapital, my brother was living in the UK for six months, so a lot of those first decisions were made with one foot in each country. The UK is also the home of football. It's where the rules were written and where the club game first took shape, so setting ScoutsCapital up there felt natural. From the very start, we knew the UK would be one of the first places we wanted to build for.
On the pitch, the basics are the same. Players turn up every weekend, referees file an official match report, and goals, assists and cards are recorded in much the same way. That matters to us, because ScoutsCapital builds every personalised profile from official match data rather than opinions.
Off the pitch, there are real differences. The first is personal: we feel a strong connection to the UK, and its way of doing business and working together feels familiar to us. The second is about how clubs think about technology. In our experience, UK clubs tend to have more room to invest in new tools, and they're used to trying them. Spanish clubs have responded really well to ScoutsCapital, but football here is proud of its roots, and some clubs prefer to stick with what they know before trying something new. Neither approach is wrong. It just means each country needs a slightly different conversation.
The structure is different too. Spain organises its grassroots game through 19 regional federations. The UK is far more fragmented, with around 50 county-level football associations in England alone, and a huge concentration of grassroots players spread across them. For a platform built on official match data, that's both a challenge and a big opportunity.
And the culture runs deep. Grassroots football UK style means Sunday league on a frosty pitch, county cup runs that a whole village turns up for, and five-a-side after work on a Tuesday night. For millions of people it isn't a hobby on the side, it's part of the week. That's exactly the kind of football we built ScoutsCapital for.
We asked ourselves a simple question: why keep our technology for one federation? A grassroots player in Kent deserves a record of their season just as much as a player in Vallecas. So while we're launching in Spain, we've also started reaching out to football associations and leagues in the UK. We can't say much yet, but the early conversations have been really positive.
That doesn't mean doing everything at once. We've learned the hard way that trying to do too much too early slows you down, and we wrote about that in how we got here. The plan is to start with a couple of first leagues, help them get comfortable with ScoutsCapital, and let a pilot grow from there. Spain and the UK side by side is the goal, one careful step at a time.
If you've ever searched for football trials UK 2026/27, or how to get scouted in the UK, you'll know how much depends on one good day in front of the right person. We think a whole season should count for more than that. On ScoutsCapital, your goals, assists and appearances build up on your profile automatically from official match data, so your football keeps a record even when nobody important was watching.
People sometimes describe us as a football scouting app or a football scouting platform. Today we're focused on players, coaches, teams and clubs first, giving them a personalised profile with personal stats that are unbiased. Over time, that same data can make club recruitment tools fairer, and it can help connect grassroots players with the wider football scouting networks in Europe. We want to get the foundations right first.
For now, Madrid is where you can use ScoutsCapital every weekend, and the UK is where our next conversations are happening. When there's something concrete to share about the UK, you'll read about it here first. We'd rather tell you when something is signed and real than make promises we can't keep yet.
Next in the series, we'll talk about why we rebuilt the app more than once, and what our users taught us along the way. If you play, coach or run a club in Madrid, Claim Your Spot. If you're in the UK, keep an eye on this blog.