Footy Labs lands €450k to replace football's recruitment phone calls
What's the deal? Footy LabsDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → has raised €450,000 in a pre-seed round led by Plug and Play and Orion Ventures, with business angels from football and tech also joining. The startup builds an AI-powered recruitment platform connecting clubs, agents, and players.
What's the endgame? Footy Labs wants to move player recruitment away from personal contacts and toward data. Clubs define squad needs and receive targeted proposals; agents see where their players fit; players stay visible whether under contract or not.
Its matching engine is trained on 30,000 transfers across 135 leagues.
Why now? Launched in October 2025, the company says its first year exposed how much time clubs and agents waste on outreach that goes nowhere — and how often out-of-contract players slip through unnoticed.
What's the money for? Footy Labs plans to expand its team and operations, bring more clubs, agents, and players onto the platform across more markets, and widen access to data-led recruitment.
"Football recruitment has always run on who you know. We believe it should run on what you know," said Danius, chief executive officer of Footy Labs.
The signal: At €450,000, the round sits toward the lower end of pre-seed deals, a modest start for a team betting that structured data can crack a market still run on relationships. If it works, scouting edges once reserved for big-budget clubs could reach the rest of the game.
Read more: footylabs.ai
Image credit: Footy Labs
