Undy

Interesting, what does it say about his level of interest? Is he one of the very few U18s interested in a move abroad before his 18th birthday or is he completely uninterested? I guess maybe the latter since there's no max wage demand listed?

Have you definitely had reports for overseas U18 players who aren't interested? I can get reports for players aged 16-18 from my own country because they're allowed to transfer, but with 30+ scouts assigned to look for players aged 15-18 with minimum half a silver star CA and PA over the course of four or five years, I have not had one single report for an overseas player aged 15-17.

Thanks for the detailed explanation. The sentence "Given you are Arsenal that's basically a player of the same standard as someone like Emile Smith-Rowe or Eddie Nketiah that is interested/available to move" is interesting. Can you confirm please whether interest / availability affects the binary factor of whether or not a player appears in the focus at all rather than the recommendation grade the scout gives them? This may point towards why some people think scouting is "broken" when it is working per SI's expectations. If this is the case, it effectively excludes non-domestic U18 players appearing in recruitment focuses, which would be against the expectations of many FM players. I have never had a single non-domestic U18 player appear in a scouting focus even with min CA/PA set to half a silver star. It would also be useful to get just the slightest peek at how this works under the hood - is player interest already "known" to the scouts even at zero player knowledge, therefore they will not begin to produce reports, or will they get up to a certain low-percentages knowledge to determine interest before abandoning the player?

I feel like there's still a bit of a misunderstanding here that is affecting how the issue is being addressed. A lack of recommendations is a symptom of the issue but it is not the issue. The issue is that scouts are simply not scouting enough players, whether they are worthy of recommendation or not. @wazzaflow10covers it well above. Edit: to elaborate, if I am manager of Barcelona and decide I want to find the next Messi, I can assign a few scouts to a recruitment focus looking for u18 players with five star potential. It might take ten years for them to produce one single recommendation and that's expected, because there aren't dozens of Messis out there waiting to be discovered. Alternatively, they might produce more recommendations but the players will fall short, and that is also acceptable given the number of hyped kids who "only" become very good players. In either scenario though, these scouts should be producing reports on thousands of players until they find the promised one. They might only be taking these reports to 50% knowledge before satisfying themselves that the player isn't good enough, but they should still be looking at the players and producing the reports.

It being a factor is fine and I don't think anyone is disputing that, but if it's a blocker on players being recommended at all then it's broken. Because U18 players from other nations will by default have zero interest in moving outside their country because of youth transfer rules, this suggests that if I'm managing Real Madrid there could be a 17 year old player in the 5th tier in Luxembourg with 200 CA and 200 PA and my scout assigned to players aged 17 in the Luxembourg 5th tier will not recommend him (or, as many of us seem to be experiencing, even compile a report on him) just because at that point in time he has no interest in signing for us. Surely that's not the design intent behind recruitment focuses?

@Zachary Whyte Just to echo what others have said, it is absolutely essential to scouting, especially of u18 players, that the scouts will look at them and create a report regardless of interest. We should be able to find these players, understand their ability, potential, personality etc, and add them to our shortlists so that we have full knowledge of them if a time comes when they are interested in signing. This is especially the case for young players who will often go from completely uninterested in signing to very interested over the course of one day as they turn 18 - our scouts should be able to identify and keep tabs on them so that we're ready to make an offer when they're ready to listen. Likewise for more established players who might become more interested if we gain a promotion or qualify for Europe - my scouts should be able to identify that dream 6'5 striker with good aerial and hold up play for me to look hopefully at even if we're a couple of years away from him taking us seriously. After all, the reports in my scouting centre are often full of potential squad players earning £150k/week even when my star man is on £25k, why not also recommend players who are currently uninterested?

After about one game year of this approach, it is working just about adequately for me. Across 23 scouts, I've signed two or three good signings based on their recommendations. I did decide to try narrowing the area focus again and changed one scout to look at just Colombia (which he has full knowledge of) rather than the whole world, leaving all other criteria the same, and he averages about one report every six weeks. Not one recommendation, but one player in progress every six weeks. I'm playing with max database settings so the players are there to scout, he's just being insanely slow about it and this reflects all my previous attempts at national or regional level focuses. Something is very broken there. On any rational information gathering or traveling logic you should expect a scout to produce more reports per unit time if his focus area is narrower, even if the players he's looking at are of a lower talent level. The tldr advice, set the focus area to any if you want to gather reports at any decent rate, then just like real life you need to hope the law of large numbers delivers someone worth signing.

Interesting update - I played through to the next recruitment focus update and Toninho is now looking at 11 players in progress, from 10 different countries / 3 continents. He is doing his job, albeit in a pretty haphazard fashion, and ~11 players in a week is a good rate to be scouting at. What this doesn't explain though is why it drops to consistently zero in progress when I restrict his scouting area to a nation or even a region.

I've tried this and made no difference for me. Scouts would still go on assignments and not even have a single player in progress. I've also noticed though that having a narrow area focus (i.e. a nation or even a single region) would result in next to no scouting taking place, even if the rest of the criteria were quite broad. In exasperation, I took control of scouting back from my chief scout, deleted all existing assignments, then created this one: I duplicated this for every single one of my scouts. Obviously with the minimum PA at 4.5 stars this is a very restrictive focus, so I don't expect many, if any, recommendations from most of the scouts, but I do at least expect them to look at people. I have 22 of these assignments - one for each scout. Currently eight of them have zero reports in progress, near matches, or recommendations. The others have 1, 15, 15, 13, 11, 22, 13, 28, 18, 7, 14, 8, 13, 9, and 16 in progress. They are at least looking at players now, but it's far from an ideal setup. It might help SI understand the nature of the bug if we lay out expectations for how our focuses would work to see whether it matches with intended functionality within the game. For this setup, I would expect the scout to follow a process something like this: Look at players he already has scouting knowledge of Look at players he doesn't have prior knowledge of in the most reputable clubs in countries he has knowledge of (in decreasing order of country knowledge) Given the age range is low, look at clubs in countries he has knowledge of and which have an academy rating of (e.g.) 3 stars and up Look at all other clubs in countries he has knowledge of Repeat steps 2-4 but in countries he doesn't have knowledge of Repeat It would be understandable if step 5 was missed out and he instead repeated steps 1-4 in an infinite loop given it's an ongoing assignment. What isn't acceptable (indeed should be sackable behaviour) is not looking at any players in any clubs at all. In the case of Toninho Cruz, he has extensive knowledge of Portugal, Argentina, Brazil, England, France, Spain, and Angola, and very good knowledge of Belgium, Cameroon, and Colombia, has no other active assignments, but has zero in progress reports. If I look at Porto, the most reputable club in his home country, they have 12 players aged 20 and under who we have no knowledge of, which begs the question, what the hell is he doing? Why isn't he scouting these guys? With a little snooping, I can see one of them is a 19 year old with CA 133 and PA 172. Toninho should be raving about this guy but he isn't even looking! In a recruitment focus like this, what should I expect my scout to actually be doing that could convince me that the behaviour i'm seeing isn't a bug?

What are the focuses he's set up? I have scouts with full country knowledge scouting Sweden, Croatia, Brazil, Argentina, Japan and Paraguay in separate focuses, all ages 15-20, any position, min PA 3 gold stars, min CA 3 silver stars, and between them there are 5 reports in progress (3 of which are in Japan), zero near matches and zero recommendations. These focuses have been ongoing for a few years. I recently (a couple of game months ago) set up another focus ages 15-23, any position, min CA 1 silver star, min PA 4.5 gold stars(!), any region and ongoing with just one scout, and there is one recommendation (an 18 year old Cypriot midfielder) who I've already agreed to sign, and 50 in progress. This definitely points towards a bug of some sort as there's no way the other focuses are too restrictive to even have reports in progress - a scout in Brazil for a mid-level European team (Rangers) should at least be able to find an under 21 player in any position to at least look into, if not recommended, who might have the potential (min 3 gold stars) to be a squad player at least.

I'm searching any role and any position, so shouldn't be too restrictive in that sense. I'm also playing with the max database size so there are plenty of players out there who could fit the criteria, they're just not finding them.

Long time FM player but I took a break last year so the new recruitment focus mechanism is new to me. I've approached it in much the same way as I'd previously have used scouting assignments, but so far over two seasons with 13 scouts, the only good players I've found are ones I've "manually" scouted by requesting reports on specific teams. In fact, looking at player knowledge, it looks like my scouts aren't even watching any games. As an example, I'm playing as Rangers (so fairly mid-level players in the squad initially) and have had a scout on an ongoing recruitment focus In Paraguay (he already had extensive knowledge of the country) for around 18 months. The filters for the focus are ay position and role, transfer and loan, min CA 1 star, min PA 3 star, age 15-20. In 18 months, he has recommended zero players, and in fact when I search players in range and filter to based in Paraguay, there aren't even any players with scout reports against them. He has literally produced no useful knowledge. This is replicated across all recruitment focuses. Even the three scouts I have across Brazil and Argentina, which should have no shortage of promising young players, can't produce a single recommendation. I tried a different approach of a high priority assignment to look for a replacement for James Tavernier, and not one of the four scouts assigned found anyone. I'm a bit at a loss here and don't really fancy persisting with the gamey approach of requesting team reports on clubs with good youth systems. Can anyone give any pointers on why my scouts aren't finding players (or even generating knowledge), and how the recruitment focus mechanism can be better used?