I work in the world of IT and technology and I have several clients in both Premier League and other top level sports. The company I work for does a lot with BI and IOT and this has lead to lots of conversations are scouting etc.

Most, if not all Prem teams rely on actual scouts these days. I had to sign an NDA so can't disclose the actual club, but they are always in the top 6. They literally use their own in house, software and DBA built systems to scout players and only really send scouts over when they've narrowed it right down, but even then, they normally have decided before the scout goes there.

The toolsets they use these days can tell you a ridiculous amount of data. This particular system had the player data for every player in the top 4 leagues of the major footballing nations and top 2 of the emerging nations like some of the African leagues etc.

The detail was to the extent that it could show you, as an example, the last 10 penalties the player took. The trajectory & velocity, the perceived pressure associated with that particular penalty. The detail around if a penalty/penalties were missed, the percentage of the miss down to the taker, the keeper, outside factors - i.e. opposition time wasting/intimidation, home or away end, state of the pitch etc.

Using the BI toolsets, they would then input things like position, desirable attributes that are weighted in importance and a multitude of other aspects to then spit out the relevant options to them.

The modern scouting system has massively changed and evolved to the point that a scouts role is less going all over the country to watch hundreds of games, but to know analysing data, understanding the requirements of the team and matching the players to the teams budgets.

I've never worked directly with Palace, but I would be shocked if they haven't got their own in house system that is collating in house data & external scouting databases to create a data lake that is then processed into useable data outputs to make decisions on incoming players.