Scouting

When I send my scouts out they come back with NO high recommendations. This is happening with every scout I send out. Has scouting been reworked in 9.3 like coaches? Do I need other attributes besides JA and JP now?

Determination would be one of the factors in a scout wanting to find the type of player who is highly recommended.

depending on what club you are managing, the number of guys that will be high recommendations can vary wildly. For a club like Southampton, or going even lower down the totem pole, there are a ton of players that would prove to be extremely good at achieving the goal you have for that season, because you can buy players from higher leagues that would be stars in the league you are playing.

Conversely, playing as Barcelona, where your goal is to win La Liga and get to the final of the CL, the number of players that can be considered to be quality players or above, hence excellent players for your goals, is significantly reduced. You will still get plenty good players, that can be starters and get you to your target, but the world only has so few star players, hence few 'quality' and above recommended guys. Going off the top of my head right now, since last I played with Barca was a month ago, but most of the squad they start with (including Eto'o, Henry, etc) is only considered to be 'good', in respect to their lofty goals, so think about how good a player must be to improve that. Fabregas, Pato, Cristiano Ronaldo, Rooney, Gerrard, Ibrahimovic, will be the kind of players that get high recommendations.

I suspect that you are playing with a high caliber team, because this is the only time that this would apply.

I think anohter stat you have took for is adaptability. If your scout has a high rating here, he will do a better job finding a player in a region he knows nothing about. The one scout I always try to get is Steve Rowley from Arsenal. I send him to a lot of countries where he has none or little knowledge yet he always manages to find good players and then he has a good knowledge of that are for future seasons. I agree with golfpunk as determination seems to be another good stat to have as well.

There are a lot of times that my scouts do not have a high recommendation for me. It probably woundt hurt sending the scout back through an area again if you have enough scouts. The more you scout a player, the better info you get so I would imagine that this would apply here as well. Of course Im only guessing, its hard to tell sometimes

I think you got to count in your clubs and leagues reputation too, since the scout will, as it appears, filter away players he think would be unrealistic signings.

I am managing Fulham in the EPL. I just won the FA CUP and finished 5th in the league. I'm in year 2015.

Sometimes I wonder if it's not reputation as much as it is the caliber of the players already on your team.

For example, say you have Messi. Since the scout is comparing all potential new attacking midfielders to the best attacking midfielder on your team, your scout is going to have almost no chance of finding someone who should be signed to replace Messi; even if you find someone who's only a couple notches below Messi, he'd still only be a "good" or "decent" signing. He can't surpass the talent of your current player; at best, he can only match it.

Now, say that same "notch below Messi" attacking midfielder is then scouted by a team with some awful regen as their best player at AM; now, that player that was only a decent signing for Team A becomes a "must sign at all costs" player for Team B.

That kind of skews the results, though; just because I have some world-beating striker doesn't mean that finding another player of his caliber isn't important. So if you've got a really good player at one position, be sure to cull through your scouting reports to find others of equivalent skill.