True. I booked a stay in Rio a couple months in advance, which was cancelled a week after booking. Hotel prices had risen by then, so Booking.com actually provided free stay at a different hotel.
Things have been changing really fast in the last couple of years in the football world and nowadays most clubs use all kinds of tools at their disposal. Some examples I can think of: GPS technology to track the training sessions, relying on OPTA to provide detailed statistics about matches/opponents/players and even using the database of a game such as Football Manager for their scouting network. Rafa Benitez is an example of a coach who takes it one step further but there a loads of other coaches who rely heavily upon statistics. It's an industry where there are still a lot of opportunities for entrepreneurs.
Prozone (http://www.prozonesports.com/index.html) is a big factor as well. (And as much as I love Football Manager, I'm dubious of its value as a scouting tool. It seems more a compilation of conventional wisdom, and is just plain wrong often enough that it's hard to manage any team you follow or know well in real life.)
Prozone! When I was typing the comment I was also thinking about them but couldn't remember the name. They're also a major player.
Football Manager relies on a network of 1000 scouts in 50 countries monitoring 20,000 teams. It's a useful first step in the search for the next star. Everton are the first club who signed a deal to get access to the full database.
I'm sure they do, but the flaws in the database are very noticeable to the observant fan. I haven't gotten around to buying FM12 yet, but in FM11 they got a lot of big things wrong: Philipp Lahm is rated as a natural right-back even though he's a natural left-back, Gareth Bale's pace is underrated, Lionel Messi is rated almost as a pure right winger even though he plays effectively in a more central role, Sergio Busquets is underrated (Sergio Busquets is always underrated though), and a lot of wingers are very underrated playing in inverted positions compared to their real-life counterparts.
