We've only scratched the surface of what big data can potentially do for scouting. However, on the flip-side, I feel like certain areas of human activity are less suited than others for the application of quantitative data to the decision-making process. With football, for example,
@parklane1 has it partially right when he says that it is, at its heart, a simple game, and followed by hundreds of millions of people who might not particularly appreciate ultimately needing to take refresher courses in statistics (or perhaps a statistics degree, even) to begin to have an understanding of the recruitment process behind what is, at its heart, the endeavour of kicking a football around for ninety minutes while sets of fans cheer for one shirt or the other. In time, the relentless improvement in numerical literacy and collective understanding of the usefulness of quantitative data will mitigate this, but at present, there's definitely going to be a problem if clubs go all in on scouting using quantitative methods, since they themselves offer a 'product' to the fans that give them money - far from being just the fielding of eleven players on a grass pitch for ninety minutes, that 'product' includes getting fans to pore over every detail of their chosen club,*particularly* transfer details (and I expect that no one here will dare dispute that - admit it, you're all equally guilty of paying more attention to transfers than you should). And if the fans find it arcane and beyond understanding, then that bit of the experience fades away, and what then do you have to talk about with your fellow fans beyond the games themselves?
Secondly, there's also a case for the idea that qualitative scouting resurges in importance when the adoption of quantitative scouting methods by clubs across the relevant league diminishes the competitive advantage gained by using those scouting methods. Moneyball was an example of this - yes, the Oakland A's stunned the world with their unorthodox recruitment policy, for a time. But when the Red Sox and the other big boys adopted quantitative scouting methods, the As found themselves right back where they started - trying to compete against teams capable of spending far more on player recruitment than they could. In those instances, the intangible element to scouting a player, the things that the eye sees that big data cannot yet correlate...in those instances, that element returns to its elevated position in the art of scouting. Just my two cents.
