Haven't played in years - need help with scouting

[Fancy Gaffot]

Last FM I played was 2016, bought FM2020 last week. I finished my first season and still haven't figured out the scouting system. I currently have 18 scouts and apart from the one who scouts the next opposition I have created assignments for all other scouts as I used to.

But the amount of players they find is laughable. Europa League scouted - 2 reports. Euro 2020 - 3 reports. Entire Brazil (which is playable and should have loads of talent) - 3 reports. I don't set any requirements except for transfer budget - as I don't know what 'Automatic' means I set it to 200m.

 

Any tips? I'm even thinking of letting my DOF set scout assignments for the first time.

[Barcafan27]

Have to say that it appears to me that having your GM or Chief Scout assign the scouts yields a lot more players than manually setting the assignments (especially after a few months).  I spent a lot of time finding a broad array of scouts and precisely setting assignments, but this didn't yield anything like just having the GM/CS assign the scouts.

[Fancy Gaffot]

Even with AI assignments it seems broken.

 

Here's my scouting focus, no specific requests.

Unfortunately when leaving the screen all the information reset for some reason so current assignment reports are all at 0. (or maybe it reset when I opened scouting focus window)

But they were at 1-3 as seen in previous assignment

And every scout had approximately 15-25 matches seen, including top club and national teams. Yet they only had a couple of reports from all these matches. What's going on?

[LetsNotScoreGoals]

Yeah scouting is a big garbage. I remember waiting two seasons for them to dig up a defender for me (telling them a number of things like "replacement for X defender" and "defender with high tackling"), but no dice. I just did the cheaty thing going to South America and forcing them to scout all the players with a good rating that season and I immediately found a number of good candidates.

I also realise that you have to manually spam the "keep scouting" button, otherwise you'll just get a highly inaccurate report.

[Barcafan27]

17 hours ago, Fancy Gaffot said:

Even with AI assignments it seems broken.

 

Here's my scouting focus, no specific requests.

Unfortunately when leaving the screen all the information reset for some reason so current assignment reports are all at 0. (or maybe it reset when I opened scouting focus window)

But they were at 1-3 as seen in previous assignment

And every scout had approximately 15-25 matches seen, including top club and national teams. Yet they only had a couple of reports from all these matches. What's going on?

Weird.  Do you have a Worldwide (or at least continental wide) scouting range?  I assumed you did since you mentioned you had 18 scouts.  Try same settings, but with "peak."  I have played a lot of FM 20 and tried really hard to do my own scouting before just switching back to AI assignments (as I mentioned) and the jump up in number of reports was noticeable.  I am currently managing Barcelona in 2025 and have same settings as you, except "peak."  For younger players, I've been splashing in short term focuses where I set age to 19 and under, CA to 1/2 star and PA to 3 stars and I get tons of reports.  Good luck.

[HUNT3R]

@Fancy Gaffot in that first screenshot, showing the assignment settings, what's under "Additional Conditions"? It says "estimated ......." and then I assume the next one say "is at least" 200m?

Disregarding the screen that shows 1 or 2 reports total, for a moment - Do you still have a lot of scout reports coming through the Scouting Centre?

[Fancy Gaffot]

1 hour ago, HUNT3R said:

@Fancy Gaffot in that first screenshot, showing the assignment settings, what's under "Additional Conditions"? It says "estimated ......." and then I assume the next one say "is at least" 200m?

Disregarding the screen that shows 1 or 2 reports total, for a moment - Do you still have a lot of scout reports coming through the Scouting Centre?

It says "at most" there.

In the scouting centre I do get reports, quite enough. But there are a lot of sources - manual "scout this player" assignmens, staff recommendations, analyst recommendations etc.

[Fancy Gaffot]

Found a little trick in scouting center filter settings - now all scout reports come to my inbox labeled with assignment so I will know which players are actually found by my scouts.

 

And my first test with short term search seemed to give at least some result, 44 players in 1 month from 20 scouts.