Why we built our own scout metrics instead of using StatsBomb

The first version of FootClaw used StatsBomb's open-data set for tactical metrics. By month 3, we'd hit the limits.

The licensing problem

Wyscout costs €5,000-15,000/year per seat. StatsBomb's API is enterprise-tier. Opta licenses are six figures. None of these scale to a €9/month consumer product. Even at 10,000 paying users (€1.08M ARR), licensing eats half the revenue.

The freshness problem

Pro metric providers update their data overnight. Our scrapers update every 60 seconds for live matches. For metrics like Hot Hand or in-match Pulse Map, a 1-day data lag is fatal.

The differentiation problem

If we use the same data as everyone else, we'd compete on UX alone. SofaScore has 10 years of UX iteration on us — we'd lose. By owning the metric pipeline, we ship metrics nobody else has, which becomes the moat.