Scouting your next Opponent

Scouting your next opponent in youth soccer can be challenging as you just can’t watch games on TV.  Scouting in league play is a little easier than tournament play as you typically have history, common opponents and league standings to help you out.  When you are scouting teams for tournaments it becomes more difficult.  Coaches are generally left with two sources of information; word of mouth and the internet.

The amount of youth soccer data on the internet is mind-blowing. Turning that information into useful intelligence on your next opponent can be tough though.  The two most common websites I use to scout opponents are https://youthsoccerrankings.us and https://home.gotsoccer.com. The got soccer rankings have limited value as they generally only include participation in got soccer sponsored events.  Youth Soccer Rankings includes league results, gotsoccer results, Total Global Sports, and other events.  

Typically, I go to Youth Soccer Rankings to some digital scouting of our next opponents.  The process is not exact, but can give you a pretty good idea of what sort of team you are going to be playing.  The analysis is usually two fold, a look at their rankings and then an evaluation of the teams that they have actually played to find some common opponents.  

The Youth Soccer Rankings page looks like this.

Here is what the basic got soccer page looks like.

Some common opponent evaluations look like this.

This ability to see common opponents is likely one of the most valuable aspects of scouting your next opponent.

Scouting information is not perfect

Remember, these online results are not perfect as they don’t take into account the use of guest players.  So teams may have artificially high rankings or artificially low rankings.  High rankings occur when teams borrow players and advance in tournaments farther than they should have with their organic roster.  Low rankings come from teams that play it straight up, but end up in tournaments playing against stacked teams.

Please check out our post on out of town tournaments here.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases