Scouts not finding any players

In my first FM game I’ve got Woking up to League 2 (season 2013/2014). I try to play realistically so I only sign players that my scouts dig up. That went well for the first few seasons but now I’m starting to struggle. I have two decent scouts (judging player ability 13 – 14ish for both types) operating in the UK and Ireland and for some time all they have been turning up is (rubbish) 18-year olds.

I must be overlooking something but I can’t think what it is. My transfer budget is limited of course (£ 30K at the moment) but I used to get plenty of free agents suggested to me. It doesn’t seem to make any difference whether I use the switch to filter out unrealistic targets or not. I’m only using the most basic of criteria (position and left or right footed). I understand that the club doesn’t have a great reputation, but does that affect the kind of player your scouts will even suggest ?

The free agents seem to be out there as my assistant manager is making some very good suggestions in his team report (but we don’t always agree on the positions that need strengthening). Why can’t I find them ?

Try it without any "criteria" at all.

In my experience scouts only suggest players whom they believe might be interested in signing for you. It might well be that your reputation isn't sufficient enough to attract any players who the scouts would recommend as an improvement to your squad.

Your scout reports should improve at the end of the season when all the good players are released.

I could understand that it if I were in a position where I could only sign free agents. But that's not the case, I've got 30K which is decent money for League 2.

What's even more bemusing is that most of the players I'm getting reports on are actually under contract and would have to be bought from clubs. But all I'm getting are 18 year old reserve players from the Blue Square leagues who wouldn't even improve my youth team.

I then turn to my assistant manager and he immediately comes up with 3 great players with Premiership experience who are out of contract and will sign for me no problem. :confused:

In my experience scouts only suggest players whom they believe might be interested in signing for you. It might well be that your reputation isn't sufficient enough to attract any players who the scouts would recommend as an improvement to your squad.

This is probably your problem.

I would suggest that you manually look for:

youth player released by premier clubs (there's a list you can display at some point in the season, or you can just find them in other ways)

experienced players released by clubs in your league/one league above you (best done at the end of a season/beginning of a new one)

Send your scouts out to look at these guys and offer them trials. Your scouts will tell you if they'd be interested in signing or not (many won't be) in the scout report. Your scouts miss out on a lot of players who would sign for you, and this is a great way of giving them some handy pointers of where to look. Especially the 17/18 year old premier league rejects will have low reputation and be much more likely to join you than more established players, while probably also being halfway decent.

And if you think telling your scouts to go and look at those players released by EPL clubs/attending trial days etc. is "unrealistic" then tough luck

"realistic" should just mean you don't use any prior knowledge of players from your previous games, you dont use fmrte or another app to search for players, you use attribute masking. Other than that, it's all fair-game.

Another thing to suggest would be maybe asking the AssMan for some loan recommendations to tide you over until you have the draw power to sign some decent players.

Another thing to suggest would be maybe asking the AssMan for some loan recommendations to tide you over until you have the draw power to sign some decent players.

Signing the players - once I've managed to find them - is not a problem. I've got plenty of Premiership club ex-trainees in my squad and have just signed Gary Taylor-Fletcher (ex-Blackpool).

I make use of all of those suggestions (trial days, assistant manager suggestions, getting a parent club and looking through their youngsters, I might even look at listed players as that would also be commonly available information I suppose).

But I want useful input from scouts who are payed by the club for the specific purpose of going out and finding players that you would otherwise not know about, that seems to me to be the whole point of building up a scouting network.

It worked fine for 3 seasons while I was in the BSS and the BSP. Now that I'm in League 2 it doesn't seem to work anymore.

I'm having a similar problem at the moment in the Scottish Premier with Hibs. I've got four British scouts out scouting the UK since the start of the season and by the end of August none of them has found a single player. Surely I must be doing something wrong, but I can't work out what.

why not use the search facility and search for players aswell yourself ? look for players with expiring contracts in 6 & 12 months in the future. That's half f the fun of Football Manager

Try having your scouts scout competitions individually. I've found that scouts who scout competitions come back with more players than scouts who just scout regions; for your level, you should probably have a scout looking at the reserve league, both cups (maybe the Paint Cup as well), Ligue 1 and the Blue Square. You can assign a scout to more than one competition by finding the competition in the search bar, right-clicking on the heading, and finding the "Assign Scout to Tournament" line in the menu; that'll help you maximize your presumably limited scouting staff.

why not use the search facility and search for players aswell yourself ? look for players with expiring contracts in 6 & 12 months in the future. That's half f the fun of Football Manager

A lot of people consider the player search function unreallistic, whereas scouting is what real managers have to rely on.