Signing wonderkids and watching them develop into world beaters is one of the best experiences in football manager, especially when you are on a long-term save that would ideally last until your wonderkids hung up their boots then join up your backroom staff as scouts, coaches, assistant managers or any other role they are suited to.
However, as already mentioned in a previous article, the wonderkid media description does not always tell the whole story as the player might have already peaked at a young age despite his media description describing him as one since he is already much better than other players in his age group.
Therefore, relying only on a player’s media description of wonderkid and expecting him to be the next Mbappé or Haaland might set you up for disappointment.
A high potential player in a weak league might also not have the wonderkid media description because of the low reputation, but he will still be very good.
Therefore, in this guide, I will show you steps I normally take to sign high potential players when they are still young, which in turn gives me the best possible chance of having a few of them develop into genuine wonderkids who can dominate your football manager save games for more than 10 years.
Steps In Finding Genuine Wonderkids in Football Manager
- The first thing to do is to go to the scouting tab, and make sure you are in charge of setting up scouting assignments.
- Once you have put yourself in charge of scouting assignments, click on ‘Create New Assignment’
- Since we want wonderkids who will give their all towards developing into stars, I normally put a limit on the determination of equal to or greater than 10. Click on the determination attribute, then ‘specify attribute values’ then pick the lowest value of determination you think you can work with, for me it is 10. However, it is worth noting that this can be improved through tutoring.
- The next step is inputting the amount of transfer money we are willing to spend on the youngsters we are going to find. I always pick the highest value here which is £200m so that I don’t end up missing on being informed on good prospects by my scouts who might think the club might not be able to afford some very pricey high potential players.
- Next step is putting an age limit to the youngsters age. This is found in the drop-down under ‘additional settings’. If you are really aggressive, you can put this at 17 so that you only get scout reports on players under this age. However, I find the sweet spot to be 18 or 19 as they still have a lot of years ahead of them for development.
- Under ‘scouted potential ability’, this is where things get interesting. If you are managing a team in the lower leagues, select ‘Star’ as this is the highest. This is because your players are relatively poor, and a player with a star potential ability according to your scouts might only be a decent Premier League player. On the other hand, if you are managing a real powerhouse, select ‘Good’ or ‘Fairly Good’ on the potential ability, since players your scouts will only consider to be ‘Good’ or ‘Fairly Good’ will already be at a very high-class level.
- Finally, choose a location for your scout to travel to and click start assignment.
- Once you have created the first assignment, repeat the whole process, only selecting a different scout from the scouting pool and a different competition, nation or region to cover until you have used all the scouts you can spare or have covered all the regions.
Once you have set up your network according to this guide, you will periodically get reports on the players your scouts have come across. Not all of them will be wonderkids, but you have the highest chance of getting them through this method, unless you resort to gamey methods that I find to break my immersion.
For a more general guide on scouting for first team players, check this guide. Once you get players that look promising, sign them up then either put them in your academy to develop, or loan them out for first team football if they are ready.
