Scouting - is it normal to only have a handful of recommendations in reports?

[Mike Fordham]

It's 2023 in my FM14 game and I play with a large database with three nations activated (Spain, Italy, and England).

I play as Southampton and I'm always up near the top of the league and do ok in the Champions League (never won it though). I have 17 scouts with region based assignments. The Chief Scout determines their assignment but he basically assigns them to a region for which they have knowledge.

Over the past 3-4 years I've not had any new players recommended - the number of players in the reports (across all regions) is 70 and many of them are duplicates. The number in the list goes down every year. I've never had this before on FM - is this an issue with the game or do I need to tweak something in the game as I'm not keen on spending thousands on scouting if a brief look at the player search screen is going to provide me with a list of players my scouts have no idea about.

The scouts are all ranked very highly for JPA and JPP, and there are no players filtered out when I remove the 'unrealistic transfers' tick.

[podunkboy]

I'm managing Arsenal in 2028, I have 14 scouts costing me $99K/wk, and some of them (with JPA/JPP of 18/20) haven't turned up a single prospect in a year. Others are still producing 10-20 reports a year. Aside from the cost ($5 million/year), it doesn't worry me that much, because between the yearly youth intake, agent suggestions, and the scouts, I only need to sign 3-4 players a year. I'm really wondering if I NEED 14 scouts.