Reading a VeriScout report

A VeriScout report runs top to bottom from verdict to evidence: the headline judgment first, then the level fit, then the career record that produced it, then the alumni it was measured against. This article walks the whole page in order.

The thirty-second version

1. Look at the big centre number — that is the player's fit with your program.
2. Glance at the colours of the four circles around it. Green is clean, yellow and orange mean look closer, red means there is a real problem.
3. Read the word under each number ("Usually starts", "Slight climb") — it tells you what the score means without you having to remember any scale.
4. If it still looks interesting, scroll into the Development Path and the comparable alumni.

Player snapshot

The card at the top gives you the identity check: full name, the position you asked us to assess them for, country, last club, total matches on record, and years of data. Total matches and years of data are your first read on how much evidence the rest of the report is built on — 126 matches over 6 seasons is a deep profile; 15 matches over 1 season is not.

Separately, a Confidence badge sits in the top-right of the Level Fit card further down. It is a different measurement: how much comparable-alumni evidence backs the level fit prediction for a player like this one. It says nothing about the reliability of the match record itself, which is always drawn from official sources. See Confidence explained.

The five circles

Match Score (centre)

Can this player succeed at my program?

The only personalised number in the report: the likelihood of success at your school specifically, calculated from comparable international players who made the same jump into a program like yours. The same player will score differently for an NCAA D1 program and an NAIA program — that is the design, not an inconsistency.

Current Form

Are they playing right now?

How involved they have been in their club's most recent fixtures. Starting regularly keeps this high; missed matches pull it down. The arrow (▲ ▼ —) shows whether they are trending up or down inside that window — a flat arrow means no meaningful change.

Trajectory

Which direction are they heading?

Whether they are climbing their country's league ladder or sliding down it over recent seasons, and whether they kept their role while doing it. Verdicts run Steep climb · Climbing · Slight climb · Flat · Slight decline · Steep decline.

Form and Trajectory answer different questions, and the gap between them is where coaches misread players. A just-promoted substitute has good Trajectory and poor Form. A long-serving starter at a low level has the reverse. Read them together.

Consistency

How evenly do they play?

Do they play week in, week out, year after year — without holes in the record? It accounts for how steady their involvement has been across seasons, whether there are runs of missed matches, and whether their role survived club changes and step-ups. Verdicts run Very consistent · Consistent · Fairly consistent · Slightly inconsistent · Inconsistent · Very inconsistent.

Reliability

When they are available, are they a starter?

Pure volume: how often they start, and how often they are in the squad at all. Verdicts run Always starts · Usually starts · Often starts · Sometimes starts · Rarely starts · Barely plays.

Consistency and Reliability sound similar but are not. Reliability is how much they play; Consistency is how evenly. A permanent squad substitute who is never injured can be very consistent and not very reliable — both labels are true, and Reliability carries the judgment.

How to read the colours

All five circles use the same scale, and it is a judgment scale rather than a category scale: deep red at the bottom running through orange and yellow to green at the top.

One thing to calibrate on: the scale is not a school grade, and healthy profiles cluster high. Green arrives around 80. Yellow in the 60s is already saying "there is something here worth asking about", and orange below that is a real concern. An 87 is a good score, not a B grade.

When a circle is grey or missing

This is deliberate, not a bug. VeriScout would rather show you nothing than invent a number:

• Consistency grey, "not yet scoreable" — too few seasons on record to judge steadiness honestly.
• Form grey, "No recent matches" — the player has not appeared for their club recently. Rather than a near-zero score that makes an injured career starter look broken, we show nothing.
• Trajectory missing entirely — they have only ever played at one level, so there is no direction to measure. The remaining circles spread out to fill the row.

A young player with one season will often show only two or three circles. That is an honest signal in itself.

Level Fit

Open "See your level fit and fit across all associations and tiers" and the report expands into two views.

The first is Level Fit within your own association — a row of five tiers from E up to A, each labelled ("Excellent level fit", "Strong level fit") with your program's tier marked and its exact percentage shown. It answers: within my division, where does this player comfortably fit, and am I at the top of their range or the middle of it?

A player who reads "Excellent" at Tier E through B but "Strong" at Tier A is telling you something specific: they are a safe bet almost everywhere in your division, and a stretch — not a mistake, a stretch — at the very top of it.

Tier Match Overview

The 5×5 grid is the same question asked across the whole landscape: every tier (A–E) against every association (NCAA D1, D2, D3, NAIA, NJCAA). Your program's association is marked YOU, and the outlined cell is the tier the profile was originally calibrated against.

Each cell reads on this scale:

• Excellent fit — 90+
• Strong fit — 80–90
• Solid fit — 70–80
• Borderline fit — 60–70
• Below expected — 50–60
• Poor fit — under 50

Two ways coaches use this grid. One: sanity-check your own number against its neighbours — if the whole row is in the nineties and your cell is in the eighties, you are simply the hardest environment on the board for this player. Two: know your competition. A player who fits excellently almost everywhere will have plenty of programs calling.

Development Path

The season-by-season table: season, club, level (U17, U19, Senior), tier, the competition's official name, and appearances, starts, goals and assists.

The tier letter is the column that does the heavy lifting. It places each competition on that country's ladder, so you can judge "3. Division – Oprykningsspil" without knowing anything about Danish football. Watching the tier letter move down the table — A at youth level, then D, then C in senior football — is how you see a career progressing in real terms rather than in club names.

Note that a single season can occupy two rows when the league splits into a group stage and a promotion or qualification round. That is one season, not two.

The written analysis blocks

Four short written sections sit around the development curve, each answering a different question in plain language:

• Usage & Role Stability — how their coaches have actually used them, season by season, and whether trust has grown.
• Competitive Exposure Level — what standard they have genuinely been tested at, and when they stepped up.
• Development Trajectory — the shape of the career: progression, setbacks, and how they responded.
• Stability & Continuity — clubs, gaps, and whether playing time survived transitions.

These are narrative summaries of the same verified record the scores come from. They are the fastest thing on the page to forward to a head coach who will not read a table.

Development Curve

The chart plots the career across seasons, with the level and tier played at printed under each year. Points are coloured positive, neutral, negative or no data, so a career reads at a glance as a climb, a plateau, or a slide. It is the visual version of the Trajectory circle.

Comparable players

This is the evidence behind the Match Score, and for most coaches it is the most persuasive part of the report.

Three headline cards show the closest comparable alumni — international players with similar pathways who already made the move — each with a similarity percentage, the school they went to, their association, and their freshman-year appearances, starts, goals and assists. Expand additional alumni for the full list, which adds an Award column: all-conference selections, freshman-of-the-year honours, top-100 awards.

Read it as a distribution, not a promise. If most of the comparable group started immediately as freshmen and several picked up all-conference honours, that is a strong signal about the level. If most of them appeared in a handful of matches, that is a signal too — and it is the one the Match Score is quietly reflecting.

[CONFIRM: how is the expanded alumni list ordered/grouped? The Match percentages are not in descending order, and a coach will notice. Worth one sentence here.]

Recent match history

The individual fixtures behind Current Form: date, opponent, competition, tier, minutes, goals and assists — with each appearance marked ("Started · Full match"). Short minutes with no "Started" marker means they came off the bench.

This is where you check the story the circles told. Six consecutive full matches at the end of a season is a player in the team. Two cameos in six is a player on the way out of it.

What the report does not claim

VeriScout measures the verified record: where a player played, at what level, and how much. It does not diagnose why they missed matches — a gap is shown as a gap, never labelled an injury. And it is not a replacement for watching them play. It tells you who is worth your film time.