Tips on finding the top youngsters and world class bargains!

Has anyone got any tips on finding top young players and quality bargains on FM?

Turns out this is one of my weaknesses on the game. I'm so used to fighting it out for free transfers in the bottom divisions on FM that I don't really have a transfer strategy for when I play in the top leagues.

I rely on my scouts and also have attribute masking on. I definitely don't want to use any third party scouting applications, just so people know not to recommend that to me!

I'm on FM10 by the way but I don't think there is any real difference between that and 11, is there?

So, anyway, I'd love some hints and tips on how to unearth some quality talent and how to improve my scouting strategy! Fire away!

Oh no, I've just realised there is a typo in my thread title. :o

Could a Mod please change it to 'youngsters' if they happen to drop by. Thanks in advance.

Scout every nations youth teams + "cheat" and use player search based on value. Also scout as normal around time of regen creation date. Works for me and I get most of the big talents.

Well it depends what nations you have active, if you're into putting in some legwork you can go through and check various sides who you know have a bit of history producing half decent players. Getting loan reports from teams can help a lot, it shows you players who the clubs may loan out and in the past I've found loaning a player for 2 - 3 years from a young age means at 21 if he's still not getting games at his club theres a readymade player waiting for you. I did this myself with Bradford and Jay Emmanuel Thomas, loaned him for 4 years his contract was up in the summer and he wouldn't renew at Arsenal so I bought him for half a million as Bradford were a favoured club of his.

If your funding is low check the under 18's and under 21 national sides for a variety of countries. Some from the likes of Italy, Brazil etc will be expensive. Ghana, South Korea, Canada etc - you can find decent players who are unknown and cheap.

The 'value' search is very misleading and will cause you to miss massive amounts of transfers, taking the time and being thorough is of course the best way to get them. I would also advocate checking the very weak nations, FM likes to throw curve balls every now and then with a world class Andorran coming through.

Try scouting the U20 tournaments, usually brings up a few youngers for me!

Thanks for the answers so far. Nice post from Santy in particular.

One thing I've been thinking lately is that I have quite a few scouts on a 'World roaming' and they are spending large amounts of time finding zero players in obscure countries, which isn't exactly useful. I think I may have to re-evaluate where I send my scouts.

Just stick them roaming in Scandinavia, Eastern Europe and North America - you won't find a plethora of world class players but there is more than enough readily available and quite cheap premiership players. As you get more money obviously move on to the more expensive regions like central europe, south europe, south america and central america. This is all assuming you've not got too many scouts, if you have an army then just get them all probing the world and then have one scout who is your man to check out players you find interesting.

In regards to your scouts (especially if your playing as a top team) try to have one scout who has complete knowledge of one country, for every nation you have loaded and/or the major leagues (England, Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Holland, Portugal), and set the maximum age to 21.

Then try to have a scout that can do the Under 18/19 league in whichever country you are in, and as said, scout the Under 19/20/21 international tournaments.

It's better to send your scouts on regional trips or as people have said the U-20 tournaments.

For finding bargains you can scour the big African nations (Ghana, Ivory Coast, South Africa etc.) manually a few days after the regen creation date and get reports on any player valued at more than 100k (which is a value most of the future stars have). You can do the same for other regions such as Asia, Central- and South America with higher values like 500k.

I would take em off mate, the world roaming has never worked for me personally. I usually set up roaming scouts for each major region like south america, central europe,etc then the rest are used for scouting more obscure regions but are not set to roam. The rest are used for scouting competitions.

If you use player search(i've been trying to avoid it to use as much as i can lately) i like to use this filter:

-Age at most 17,18

-Youth caps(goals if looking for a striker) at least 3

Then just scout all of them, i like doing this since even if i can't give them playing time right away for the first team, they will still get some nice development from playing Young international matches.

Completly agree with the loan report from the Ass.man. you can get some really top regens from that.

And if you have the patience just go through all the U-21 Nations of Africa and Eastern Europe and just select all of the players and right-click to scout.. though i don't patience to do this anymore tbh.

Just stick them roaming in Scandinavia, Eastern Europe and North America - you won't find a plethora of world class players but there is more than enough readily available and quite cheap premiership players. As you get more money obviously move on to the more expensive regions like central europe, south europe, south america and central america. This is all assuming you've not got too many scouts, if you have an army then just get them all probing the world and then have one scout who is your man to check out players you find interesting.

I've got quite a lot of scouts so I decided to reorganise them based on regions (using this post - http://community.sigames.com/showthread.php/194155-FM10-Regions?highlight=regions - to work out the best regions to look at).

Thanks for the answers so far. Nice post from Santy in particular.

One thing I've been thinking lately is that I have quite a few scouts on a 'World roaming' and they are spending large amounts of time finding zero players in obscure countries, which isn't exactly useful. I think I may have to re-evaluate where I send my scouts.

i used to do that in FM10, it doenst work well at all, if anything you want to focus your scouts' searches. I tend to track all the youngster competitions especially the international ones

1- Wander the teams all by yourself. This is my favorite method to spot the gems before they are discovered by any others. Then get a scout report for a PA.

2- Wait for half the season to pass and start sending your scouts to Western and Northern Africa ("roaming" which is by default when set to scout a certain region). The game produces so buffed up regen players that you'll eventually find investing on the real ones useless which bothers me A LOT.

I got such a database that it starts with around 140.000 players, mind you.

What is the difference between scouting a region with and without roaming on?

Search for 'national team is main' and 'person age is at most 19'. Scout these players. Brings up a lot of crap players but also some gems.

If you look for bargains, Africa is the place to scout. Most of the players are useless but the African clubs also produce a lot of top players who are available for less than 1 mil!

Check this out

http://community.sigames.com/showthread.php/245650-Discussion-Training-your-very-own-wonderkids

Well it depends what nations you have active, if you're into putting in some legwork you can go through and check various sides who you know have a bit of history producing half decent players. Getting loan reports from teams can help a lot, it shows you players who the clubs may loan out and in the past I've found loaning a player for 2 - 3 years from a young age means at 21 if he's still not getting games at his club theres a readymade player waiting for you. I did this myself with Bradford and Jay Emmanuel Thomas, loaned him for 4 years his contract was up in the summer and he wouldn't renew at Arsenal so I bought him for half a million as Bradford were a favoured club of his.

If your funding is low check the under 18's and under 21 national sides for a variety of countries. Some from the likes of Italy, Brazil etc will be expensive. Ghana, South Korea, Canada etc - you can find decent players who are unknown and cheap.

The 'value' search is very misleading and will cause you to miss massive amounts of transfers, taking the time and being thorough is of course the best way to get them. I would also advocate checking the very weak nations, FM likes to throw curve balls every now and then with a world class Andorran coming through.

Rubbish! There's no decent footballers in Canada!

When you scout, set the specific to like U18's or something and they can spend more time finding those players and yielding very good results. I would not roam because the results aren't very good imo. Sometimes it's a little down to luck as I've been offered players by agents who have turned out to be very good. And there's always the transfer list if you want to find a good bargain with potential very good (maybe not necessarily world class) but is another good tool to use.

I send my scouts to scout the international Uxx competitions a lot.

Also I check the squads of those teams and ask my scouts to scout all of them fwiw.

Another thing I do is to read the papers, i.e. the transfer rumours page. I check who the biggest clubs are after and if it's a newgen, then often enough they are great potential players. Whose rumours you pay special attention to should be up to who you manage and how good the team is.

Also especially at the end of a season it's worth going there to check out the rumours about players moving on the Bosman rule. Very often I find free agents this way which I missed before. Especially in the CC I managed to sign a lot of simply great players for the CCC on a free by checking out the EPL rumours page and looked who the likes of Fulham, West Ham and Blackburn were linked to.

Nice tip regarding the rumours page there jayahr.

Nice tip regarding the rumours page there jayahr.

One of the better features in FM. No one even whines about it being broken on GD which means SI got that feature spot on.

Didn't even think about that, nice one mate.

I check regularly the transfer rumours of my own competition but never thought about checking of other competitions(one level above as he said) that's a great tip!

Oh no, I've just realised there is a typo in my thread title.

Could a Mod please change it to 'youngsters' if they happen to drop by. Thanks in advance.

Done

Looking for some good youngsters... hmmm.

Well, where we differ is the attribute masking. Have to say that I've never liked it and never used it at any level of play. Because I like to pinpoint certain attributes when looking for players, to suit my tactical preferences, attribute masking would simply add far too much time to a game I already take a great deal of time playing.

That said though, I am very reliant on scout reports, because there's a wealth of information in those reports I look for, that you don't "see" simply by looking at a players attributes screen.

Assuming I have a very highly attributed scout, with good JPA & JPP, I do tend to have some faith in the quality of their reports. What I'm looking for in particular though, is the distribution of attributes being attuned to my tactical preferences and roles I use. I also look at the information in scout reports regarding their character traits, personality, things like their consistency and professionalism, if they're injury prone, etc...

All these things in the reports, will lead me to make more informed decisions. If I'm a bigger club and a player is cheap enough though, I'll sometimes take a chance on signing a player anyway, even if there's some negative feedback in the reports.

Although as others have said, there's usually strong countries we all know generate good batches of youngsters year in, year out, it's still worth keeping an eye on the minor nations, they can sometimes produce a few gems. During my Granada CF save in FM10, I happened across two Slovenian youngsters in the same season, who went on to form the core of my midfield for many years. They were my Xabi and Iniesta if you will.

To summarise what I look for particularly:

· Attribute distribution & position/role suitability.

· Personality & character traits.

Aside from these, a rough idea of when newgen/regens tend to be generated in-game, is sadly imprinted in my mind. Anyhow, you already know I'm not a purist and that I spend many hours simply trawling teams and countries

The 'value' search is very misleading and will cause you to miss massive amounts of transfers, taking the time and being thorough is of course the best way to get them. I would also advocate checking the very weak nations, FM likes to throw curve balls every now and then with a world class Andorran coming through.

True but while my scouts do introduce me to some obscure and potentially world class talent, they have a habit ignoring some of the more expensive and more first team ready youngsters. So I have to find them myself.

Essentially, if you have a global scouting network, and you supplement that without searching for players yourself, you can pretty much cover all the bases.

scout countries, not regions as they spend more time travelling and less time scouting. if you have a scout in brazil, do not ask him to look at a player in europe as it will cost you scouting time.

as said before, scout youth tournaments

So I take it you guys only sign those players who your scouts say will be 'leading' players for your division in the future? Is this the best indication that they have the best potential or do the scouts get it wrong more often than not?

So who get three stars (good signing) may be worth buying depending on their stats, and also who they are being compared to in your squad. Example, you find an AMR who would be a good signing, and yet is compared to Cristiano Ronaldo, will more than likely be a cracking signing.

That's how I go of it anyway. And 3.5 or more, again depending on their stats, I'll usually buy. Unless they are a striker with 5 for Finishing, like I have seen lol

So who get three stars (good signing) may be worth buying depending on their stats, and also who they are being compared to in your squad. Example, you find an AMR who would be a good signing, and yet is compared to Cristiano Ronaldo, will more than likely be a cracking signing.

That's how I go of it anyway. And 3.5 or more, again depending on their stats, I'll usually buy. Unless they are a striker with 5 for Finishing, like I have seen lol

I tend not to look at the stars, as they are a measurement made in comparison to your squad, and instead look at the scouts verdict about the player's level (e.g. he is a good Premier League player) as this is a consistent measurement.

I'm always looking for players with the potential to be 'leading Premier League' players. If they have that on their scout report then I tend to think about buying straight away.

The only thing I have found is one or two of my young players get to the age of, say, 21 and they haven't made much progress and all of a sudden their rating drops. I can't work out why this happens. I give them plenty of first-team football or loan them out etc. Anyone else have this experience?

scout the argentina/ brazil under 21's squad is my tip find some nice gems there

How about hard manual searching?

Just go to the top league in your chosen country and trawl through the under 18's around the regen creation date.

Time consuming but worth it in the end.

I search the national sides. Especlally the u-21s

Sort the squad view by age youngest on top, and any players that are 18 or younger that are in the u21 rather than the u19 are usually worth looking at. Especially at the big clubs and when the bigger nations are involved.

Other than that its all about manual searching for me, ill spend a good couple of hours each pre-season at each 'regen respawn' point for each country and trawly through the u19 sides looking for the high value 14 and 15 year olds. If a player is worth £6m at 14 there is a fairly good chance he is going to be something special!

Thanks for all of the tips in here.

I've been spending a lot of time scouting and finding talent in my current save. Hopefully these tips have helped me to move my youth policy on to the next level!

my main way of doing it to get bargains

1, scout countries where you know there will be plenty of quality youngsters in the game. e.g brazil and turkey on my save. plenty of players available for around 1m

2. scout areas where theres not so many quality players but they are cheap, e.g scandinavia and africa. quality players are often well below 1m, sometimes less than 100k

3. scout at age restricted international competitions.

4. look at top countries youth squads or for youngesters already playing full internationals

5. read the transfer rumours for top leagues you have running

I tried Brazil quite a bit but I don't seem to be returning much talent according to my scouts.

My main source of income is actually my backroom advice screen (this is for Hibs though). I scout every player recommended as prospect. I've got a lot of player 19 and under on frees thanks to them. I also scout any major country that I don't have good knowledge of (currently Spain and France) and then I use the player search which shows me both interested players and values, and scout all them.

To summarise what I look for particularly:

· Attribute distribution & position/role suitability.

· Personality & character traits.

I'm not particularly bothered if their attributes aren't great for their position. I can simply get them to learn a new position that they are more suited to and, if they are young enough, I can easily mould them to how I want them using custom schedules and the handy addition of individual training.

EDIT: Oh, and if you want a really good bargain, the best bet I've found is agents. Especially from the Czech Republic.

The way i do it is by doing a player search and filter the age so it shows players with a max age of say 18. I then sort them in order of value. In my experience any 15/16 yr old worth 3mill or more usually are worth picking up.

I used this method and saw there was a 14yr old worth £4m. I picked him up and now at 22 he is classed as a 'world class midfielder'.

How much do you have to shell out for those guys though Dave Byrd?

How much do you have to shell out for those guys though Dave Byrd?

between 3 and 8 mill. I play in England but if you get them from abroad you can 'aproach to sign them' rather than being held to ransom if its a fellow English club.

Worth it though in the long run.

i have scouts roaming with age limits on them that seems to work very well, also as people say going through youth international sides can produce good results, scouting youth tournaments is usefull. I have found the agents after a couple of seasons are very good for finding good youth players, i get offered tons of good youth all the time.