Could anyone shed light on scouting?

Alright, I want to have my scouts essentially find all regens, and any other young players or foreign players worth grabbing.

I have most of them set to roaming in regions, searching for players under 22..a few are in specific nations (Italy, Germany, Spain, England, Holland) and a few are scouting the world.

On top of that I try to have everyone of them scout a competition as well, a few are in the English U18s, Holland U18s, African Cup of Nations, English reserves, etc etc..basically set to all the competitions I can still scout.

But it still seems like I'm not scouting enough players. I have 18 scouts in full force and when I search for all players under 20, only about 1/6 of them or so have reports on them. Is there anything I can do to scout better, without manually assigning players? Most of my scouts have thorough knowledge of where they are scouting, and most are very high quality (worse is a 13/12 I believe). Does giving them 2 assignments (roaming and competition) divide their time too much? Is it wise to 'double dip' in this fashion, or just give them one role? Anything else I should know?

The best and simplest way is to go: Search, set the player filter to 17 and under, arrange the players by their value, assign your best (20/20) scouts to scout the top 20 or 30 players in the list. You should do this routinely. Also, you could arrange them by stats like 'finishing' if you want to check out good strikers.

Yeah..I was hoping that manually doing it wouldn't be the only way, but I just assigned a crapload of youngsters to my scouts. Fortunately I have a lot of 20/20s and 19/20s (regen scouts are so cheap, even the ones who have world class attributes).

Think of all the travel time if you have for example one scout scouting both the English reserves leagues and Italy.

But are 18/18 newgen scouts (with 1s and 2s in every other attribute) really good?

Also, you might assign as many scouts to whatever region, and some of the best newgens won't ever get noticed by your 20/20 scouts, for reasons I don't really understand

Quite frankly I find this "randomness" a bit annoying, as IRL you don't really need the King of Scouts to know who the best prospects in your region are.

Say, I have 8 scouts, all above 15/15, yet "the new Ronny Johnsen" has been playing for Brann in the last two years without ANY of my scouts (I have two constantly scouting U19s in Norway) ever dropping me a line about him...

I can vaguely understand a young talent being overlooked in a major country, but hell... in Norway a sort of talented 17 years old kid would make the headlines after his second game and everyone and their mom would know he's good.

Instead in FM you could easily miss San Marino's one and only talent despite scouting every square inch of the country...

How stupid is that?

how do i get the scout to look at the first 20 players? do i have to individualy select them with ctrl + select ?

Click the first guy on the list, hold down "Shift", then click the last guy; all of them should be selected now. Just right-click as normal to assign a scout for all of them.

But are 18/18 newgen scouts (with 1s and 2s in every other attribute) really good?

Also, you might assign as many scouts to whatever region, and some of the best newgens won't ever get noticed by your 20/20 scouts, for reasons I don't really understand

Quite frankly I find this "randomness" a bit annoying, as IRL you don't really need the King of Scouts to know who the best prospects in your region are.

Say, I have 8 scouts, all above 15/15, yet "the new Ronny Johnsen" has been playing for Brann in the last two years without ANY of my scouts (I have two constantly scouting U19s in Norway) ever dropping me a line about him...

I can vaguely understand a young talent being overlooked in a major country, but hell... in Norway a sort of talented 17 years old kid would make the headlines after his second game and everyone and their mom would know he's good.

Instead in FM you could easily miss San Marino's one and only talent despite scouting every square inch of the country...

How stupid is that?

I think regen scouts as just as good as older scouts. They have limited knowledge, true, but as long as you find ones with higher determination, you can build their knowledge up real easy.

And I hear what you are saying, I signed one of the best regens in my game a couple years ago, he was 20 until any of my scouts noticed him, yet by the time they did he was already playing at a 4 star level. He was from Uruguay and I had 3 scouts in South America for years, none of whom ever noticed him. Thanks to that, I had to pay nearly $30 million for him.