Argentines now create Gloria to scout for footballing talent

Two Argentine entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley have created Gloria, a social network for young football players designed to standardize the talent scouting process.

Gloria allows anyone, regardless of their abilities, to create a profile where they can post personal data (such as date of birth, height and foot size) and soccer skills such as what position they play, which foot is their stronger one as well as upload videos to show off their talent.

However, Gloria is the not the first of her kind. In 2018, Damian Acri and Abel Soriano, another two entrepreneurs passionate about the sport, created CV Players the first social media for footballers. It made them realise that of the 1,500 football leagues in Argentine only 10 per cent of them participated fully in the players market.

Now again, thanks to Gloria, football clubs and scouts can use the profiles to streamline their search for players by selecting for positions, skills and geographic location, among other things, along with watching the videos to find players they want to contact, reports Efe news.

"We're standardizing how talent is selected online. We tell the players what kind of content they need for scouts to determine if they are interested in them or not," said Victoire Cogevina, who co-founded Gloria along with Matias Castello.

Gloria signed its first agreement with the Argentine Super League, the 24 clubs of which will be the first to scout new talent using the platform.

"There are 211 football federations around the world and our goal is to be present in every market," said Cogevina.

She added that they will not accept individual clubs as customers - only leagues or federations - to avoid contributing to the economic inequality that already exists among teams.

The order in which the players are listed on Gloria will depend on how complete their profiles are as well as the number of views and likes they have received and eventually characteristics extracted from the videos themselves, along with the specific search terms entered by the scouts.

Scouts can also hone their searches using words like "free kicks" or "headers," and players will be able to send videos in response to challenges proposed by the platform, such as demonstrating the ability to "do a penalty kick blindfolded."

The basic app will be free for soccer players, with an additional cost of up to $3 if they want to make their profiles stand out on the platform and better attract the attention of scouts.

The beta version of Gloria will be presented in Buenos Aires on December 2 to the representatives of Argentine football clubs such as River Plate, Boca Juniors, Racing Club, Independiente and San Lorenzo.

( With inputs from IANS )