Tips for scouting

How do people go about intensively scouting to try and find players they might not otherwise find?

Do you scout regions, nations or competitions?

Do you spread your scouts around as much as possible or get a few to focus on one area/nation?

Do you narrow down the search, say to position or age? Depending on what you're after.

Do you give roaming assignments or not?

What attributes do you look for in scouts? How important is the scouts knowledge of a nation?

Please embellish a bit rather than just formulaically answering those points.

Woah, that's a lot of questions! I can only tell you what I have found out to be working.

How do people go about intensively scouting to try and find players they might not otherwise find?

Do you scout regions, nations or competitions?

Do you spread your scouts around as much as possible or get a few to focus on one area/nation?

Do you give roaming assignments or not?

Basically I try to scout the nations I have loaded, if I have loaded most nations in Central Europe I make a scout work the region. I try to cover all regions I know a lot of talanted players are regenerated in, i.e. Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, France, Germany, Italy, etc. If it's possible I prefer to scout the regions, because you never know when you're gonna find a world class player in Malta, if you know what I mean.

The nations I know generate lots of players are usually the leagues that are loaded, I use this as a vague rule. I try to rotate my scouts in the leagues, but I always keep at least one scout in the nation I'm currently playing in - number of scouts depend on rule about non-EU players, etc. If I plan to have a big focus on players from the country the club is located, then I have more scouts in the country.

It is probably everyone's dream to find a cheap future world class player. To do this I go through teams, manually. So for example I can go through teams from Brazil, look in their U20 squads. Signs to look for is value (players with high potential usually cost more, not helping when trying to discover cheap ones, but a good tip nevertheless) and ratings, but also random scouting is good. Sometimes I scout every single youngster in a league.

Do you narrow down the search, say to position or age? Depending on what you're after.

I do use the search function a lot, when I look for new players. Using the filter is a very good way to find gems in my opinion. When deciding what atrtributes to select you have to figure out what you want the player to be good at, i.e. what would his future role/position be in the team? Are you looking for a good player no matter age? Or are you searching for youngester, if so you must remember that their stats aren't as developed and instead of 12-15 you might have to go down to 7-10. This is just an example. It's really down to you, I can't tell you what to look for. Learn by doing

What attributes do you look for in scouts?

How important is the scouts knowledge of a nation?

The first question I cannot answer, I have just assumed that judging potential is the key factor when trying to find players with high potential. When I set someone to scout the next I pick ones with high tactical knowledge.

When you set a scout out to look for players in a region or nation I'm sure he will do a better job if he is familiar with the nation/nations within the region. Scouts gain knowledge as they scout a nation, which means you can ''train'' a scout to have great knowledge about a nation.

The trouble I found with roaming scouts was that they spent too much time in very minor countries, so now I use individual nation assignments.

I have the max number of scouts I can, and send them off to regions so they dont come back or stop, then also assign them a tournament each like the europa league, WC qualifiers etc.

This way I get at least 7-8 regions scouted and also alot of other matches

If I have 5 or more scouts I send 4 to reasonable regions like Central Europe, South America etc and send 1 or 2 for Africa and the far east. I do this because i like bringing no name poor country (football wise) players to my team, then sell them on high fee's.

check players age only 16. get them any add them to ur youth

Chosing a second nationality usually has a huge impact on the nationality of the players you find in your 'Search'. For instance, while managing Wimbledon I set my second nationality to 'Polish' and got loads of Polish footballers in my searches. After about two years, 80% of my first team was Polish, because I was able to pick up quality players and either paid peanuts for them or got them for free.

A lot depends on choosing the right nations to be added to your database before you start a new game. For example, before my first season with Wimbledon I added all footballers from top divisions in Poland, Norway, Finland, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Slovakia, Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria. First of all, these are EU members, which means no work permits. Second - footballers from these countries have good stats, are cheap and accept low wage contracts (I am talking about key players in League Two, who are on a full time contract worth £100 per week).

To summarize - knowledge of countries other than your own is absolutely key in low leagues, as it allows you to see footballers from these countries in your searches. Obviously, you won't be able to get a detailed scouting report, but as soon as you offer a contract your scout will advise you by saying something like 'x is a must buy'.

To answer your questions:

How do people go about intensively scouting to try and find players they might not otherwise find?

A: I don't, I usually just send my scouts to different parts of the world and occasionally look through their reports. Most of the time I search manually.

Do you scout regions, nations or competitions?

A: Nations - if in a low league

Regions - after a few months into the game or in higher leagues

If I can't be bothered to change scouting assignments all the time then I set to 'World'.

Do you spread your scouts around as much as possible or get a few to focus on one area/nation?

A: Spread, as far as possible although I tend to avoid Asia, Africa and Northern America - I rarely add countries from these continents to the database and my scouts normally would take around a year to find 5 - 10 footballers.

Do you narrow down the search, say to position or age? Depending on what you're after.

Depends on the league again. If low, the age doesn't matter too much. I usually search by position and stats (e.g. a DC with >15 in tackling, marking and heading).

Do you give roaming assignments or not?

Depends, but not too often

What attributes do you look for in scouts? How important is the scouts knowledge of a nation?

Judging player ability and potential (duh!) and determination (all >15). I also try to have a lot of diversity in terms of nationality in my scouting team - if finances and league position permit, that is. Even in the lowest leagues I will try and have someone from England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and France (or whatever countries I initially chose to add to the database).

Chosing a second nationality usually has a huge impact on the nationality of the players you find in your 'Search'.

... knowledge of countries other than your own is absolutely key in low leagues, as it allows you to see footballers from these countries in your searches...

Your second nationality will give you a fairly decent amount of knowledge of that particular country, of course. (Tip: Setting "Switzerland" as your second Nationality gives you Italian, French and German as additional languages, if you're interested in that.)

What I actually do is set up my training to a standard I find acceptable, and then fill up every other staff slot I can with individuals of different nationalities, picking from nations I do not have full scouting knowledge of.

For example, I hire a Coach from, say, Croatia, even if his stats aren't that fantastic so I get full knowledge of Croatia. One scout from Belgium, another from Mozambique, New Zealand, Trinidad, etc.

Soon you'll have a very broad view of the footballing world, and if you DO have a scout with really good ability, use him to scout individual players that the lesser ones pick out on their regional roaming adventures.

E.g.: I send my Turkish scout to take a long look at Southern Europe, and after a few weeks he comes back with a list of players he recommends. The ones I like, I tell my awesome scout (whoever he may be) to take a look at and offer his (admittedly better) opinion on.

This approach, together with picking feeders from different regions, allows you to have very in-depth Scouting Knowledge of the world in FM, leading to more accurate and detailed Player Searches, etc.

Generally, for a top European club, this is my approach:

Scout A - Central Europe + European Championship/European World Cup Tournament/Qualifiers

Scout B - Central Europe + U19/U20 Qualifiers/Championships

Scout C - South America + SAM World Cup Qualifiers

Scout D - Scandinavia + Champions' League

Scout E - South Europe + other European Competition

Scout F - Central America + Copa America

Scout G - Eastern Europe + other European Competition

Scout H - Next Opposition

Scout I - World/No assignment (used to scout individual players)

Depending on the number of scouts I have and their nationalities, I also like to scout Oceania, North America, parts of Africa, East Asia and South-East Asia, though if I get a Coach/decently-sized feeder from those regions it takes a load off, I guess.