Scout52 vs Microsoft Forms and Power BI for scouting

Microsoft Forms for the report, Power BI for the dashboard, Excel in between. It is a common set-up in football recruitment, especially at clubs that already run on Microsoft 365. Here is a fair comparison with Scout52, tool by tool.

Why clubs use Forms and Power BI

It makes sense. Microsoft Forms usually comes with the club’s Microsoft 365 account, a form takes ten minutes to build, and Power BI can produce dashboards that look as good as anything in football. For a department moving reports off paper and out of email, it is a quick start, and nobody should feel bad for using it.

The catch is that both are general-purpose tools. Forms is built for surveys: lots of people answering the same questions once. Power BI is built for business reporting on data that someone has already prepared. Scouting is neither.

Microsoft Forms as a scouting report

Used for a football scouting report, the typical form runs into the same problems week after week:

• No real draft. A report is built up over 90 minutes, but in most club set-ups the form has to be completed in one go, or pieced together afterwards from memory.
• Corrections become duplicates. Depending on how the form is set up, a scout often cannot change an answer once it is submitted, so fixing a mistake means submitting again and leaving two rows behind.
• Names in free text. Club and player names are typed by hand, because a choice list of hundreds of clubs is unworkable. The same club arrives spelt three ways.
• No player record. Every response is a standalone row. Reports on the same player never join up unless someone matches them by hand.
• Form changes break the export. Add a question or change a rating scale mid-season and the columns shift underneath everything built on them.

Power BI as a scouting dashboard

A Power BI football scouting dashboard can look superb. The limits are about what feeds it and who can see it:

• It is only as fresh as the last refresh. When the data behind it is a cleaned Excel export, the dashboard is as current as the last time someone cleaned and refreshed it.
• It cannot fix the data. It shows what is in the spreadsheet. Misspelt clubs and duplicate reports still have to be sorted out by hand first.
• Viewers usually need licences. In most set-ups, each person viewing a shared dashboard needs a paid licence, so scouts often never see their own numbers.
• It needs a specialist. Someone has to build the data model and keep it working when the form changes. If that person leaves, the dashboard waits.

Side by side

Editing submitted reports is on the Scout and Scout Pro plans. On the Free plan, submitted grassroots reports cannot be edited.

Where Power BI still has a place

If your club’s analysts use Power BI for other things, there is no reason to stop. It is a strong tool for data that lives elsewhere in the club. The point here is narrower: scouting reports should not need a form, a weekly clean and a refresh before anyone can use them.

Scout52 is not trying to be a general analytics tool. Data and analytics tools are good at telling you where to look. Scout52 is where the scouting actually gets done: the reports from the touchline, the fixtures, the depth charts and one record per player, with analysis that is current because the reports are.

The bigger picture

Forms and Power BI are two ends of a three-step set-up, with Excel in the middle. We cover the whole thing, including what changes for scouts, the head of recruitment and whoever does the cleaning, in From Microsoft Forms and Excel to one scouting system. If your department is mainly on spreadsheets, see Scout52 vs a scouting spreadsheet.

To try it, start on the free plan, or take Scout or Scout Pro for a 7-day free trial with no card needed. For several scouts on one system, with shared reports, department dashboards and onboarding, email info@scout52.com about a club set-up.