Searching for players

Search is how every report starts. It works in two steps, and knowing what it does and does not do saves you a lot of guessing.

Pick a country, then search a name

First choose the player's country. Then type the name and either click Search or press Enter — the matching players appear in a dropdown, and you pick the one you want from there.

The country step is doing real work: it narrows the database to one country's records before a single letter is typed, which is why the results are fast and why a common Scandinavian surname does not return half of Europe. It also means you have to know where the player plays — if you pick the wrong country, you will find nothing even though the record exists.

Every country in the database is searchable, including ones outside your bundles. You will find the player and be able to generate the report — it simply renders blurred until you add that bundle. Nothing is charged and nothing is wasted. See Bundles & country coverage.

The "Try searching in:" suggestions under the search box point you at countries available to you, which is a quick way to see where your coverage actually reaches.

Partial names and misspellings

Search is fuzzy, so you do not need the name exactly as the federation records it. Partial names work, and so do near-miss spellings — useful when you have a name from a conversation, a team sheet photo, or an agent's email rather than from an official squad list.

Accents and special characters (ø, æ, å, ó, š) are handled. Type the name however you have it.

Picking the right player from the results

The dropdown of results lists names only. For an unusual name that is all you need — but for a common one, two or three results may look identical, and there is no club or birth year shown to tell them apart.

When that happens, pick the most likely one and check the Player Snapshot at the top of the report: country, last club, total matches and years of data. If it is the wrong player, run the search again and pick another. Reports are unlimited within your bundles, so a wrong guess costs nothing but a few seconds.

What search does not do yet

No club search. You cannot type a club name and browse its squad — search is by player name only.
No filters. There is no filtering by position, birth year, or level. VeriScout answers questions about players you already have a name for; it is not a discovery engine that surfaces unknown names.

In practice that means the workflow is: get names from your usual sources — agents, showcases, film, your network — then use VeriScout to find out whether each one is real and whether the level fits your program.

If a player does not appear

See Why can't I find a player? — it walks the five usual causes, starting with the country selection.