For many young aspiring footballers around the world, especially those from smaller clubs and under-served regions, breaking into professional football has long been a pipe dream. Traditional scouting networks focus heavily on established youth academies and known talent pools, leaving thousands of skilled players unseen and their professional dreams unfulfilled. Now, a new wave of artificial intelligence-powered football apps is upending this system, opening unprecedented pathways for hidden talent to catch the eye of top clubs across Europe and South America.
The story of 18-year-old Brazilian Leonardo “Leo” Veiga perfectly illustrates this revolution. Stuck playing for a little-known local club in the southern Brazilian state of Santa Catarina, Veiga had all but abandoned his hope of going pro. Out of options, he decided to take a chance on Footbao, a AI-powered football talent scouting app developed by a Swiss startup. The app invites young players to upload phone-recorded videos of their match and training performances, which AI algorithms then analyze, score, and share with professional scouts and club officials. Footbao had partnered with Italian club Lecce to offer a multi-day training opportunity with the club’s youth side to the app’s highest-scoring players. Veiga earned a spot in the invite group, impressed on-site Lecce scouts with his skill, and today holds a contract with the youth academy of Serie B club Spezia. “AI opened a new door,” Veiga told AFP from his new base in Italy. “I thought, I’m going to download the app and give it a try. If nothing happens, it doesn’t matter because nothing else is working out for me. But what if something does happen?”
Veiga is far from the only young player whose career has been transformed by this technology. Footbao, founded just two years ago in 2023, has already been used by roughly 120,000 players worldwide, the vast majority of them based in Brazil — the world’s largest exporter of elite football talent. According to Footbao chief executive Nick Rappolt, the company’s data suggests between 14,000 and 15,000 currently active users have the raw ability to earn spots at professional clubs or youth academies. After launching in Brazil, the firm has expanded operations to Colombia and Argentina, with plans to enter additional South American markets in the coming year. For Rappolt, the core mission of AI-powered scouting is to democratize access to professional football: traditional scouting networks are limited by geography and network, meaning huge pools of talent fly entirely under the radar of top development programs. AI removes those barriers by giving any player with a phone a shot at being discovered.
Footbao is not the only company chasing this opportunity. German startup CUJU, another player in the AI scouting space, takes a slightly different approach: instead of relying on user-uploaded match and training footage, CUJU guides users through structured in-app drills designed to test core technical skills, then analyzes footage of those exercises. Launched in 2023, the app has already been downloaded more than 160,000 times. CUJU marketing director Sven Muller explained that even top professional clubs maintain huge databases that only include players who have already been scouted. There is a massive gap in reliable performance data for young talent in the earliest stages of their development, and AI fills that gap by turning simple phone-recorded clips into actionable, standardized performance data that scouts can trust.
The technology is already driving major progress for women’s football, a segment that has historically been far under-scouted compared to the men’s game. In Sao Paulo, 14-year-old Marcela Geremias de Lima worked through CUJU’s wall-kicking drill, designed to measure ball control and movement speed, and uploaded her footage to the app. After her high score earned her an invitation to a scouting tournament in front of top club representatives, she won a spot in the Under-15 side of Corinthians, one of the most successful women’s football clubs in South America, with six Copa Libertadores titles to its name. The exercises “help you improve” and mean “you can be seen from anywhere in the world,” de Lima said. With Brazil set to host the 2027 FIFA Women’s World Cup, industry leaders expect this AI-driven scouting to accelerate the growth of women’s football by unlocking a wave of new young female talent that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.
Top Brazilian clubs are already starting to partner with these AI platforms to expand their own recruitment pipelines. Santos, the legendary Brazilian club that launched the careers of icons Pele and Neymar, announced a partnership with Footbao in late 2024 to identify new young prospects. Santos president Marcelo Teixeira called the partnership a key way to “expand our search for athletes” beyond the club’s existing scouting network. Even for clubs that have not yet formalized partnerships, the technology is changing how youth development leaders think about recruitment. Joao Paulo Sampaio, head of youth development at Palmeiras — the club that produced current global sensation Endrick and other top young talents — notes that top prospects are traditionally recruited at extremely young ages, locking out players who develop later or come from less connected regions. AI acts as a equalizer that gives overlooked players a second shot. While Palmeiras does not currently work with AI scouting firms, Sampaio says the pre-selection work these companies do provides a valuable new tool for overstretched scouts, who often receive dozens of unvetted talent videos each week that they lack the capacity to review.