Scouting

The Best Way To Set up Scouting Assignments in Football Manager

Nothing beats the feeling of being promoted to the Premier League, or any other first division for that matter, and your board finally getting generous and giving you the leeway to sign some extra staff, most importantly scouts.

But how do you go about optimally using these scouts to scour the best regions in the world and in turn giving you the best chance of unearthing some good regens before they are snatched by the likes of PSG and Barcelona.

When you are first promoted to the Premier League, you will most likely have around 15 scouts to work with. Bigger clubs with higher reputation will have a few more, while smaller clubs will understandably have less.

Increase your Scouting Range

The first thing you need to do before setting any scouting assignment is making sure you can scout the entire world. If your scouting range is only at national or regional level, go to the Club Vision tab and make a board request to increase the scouting range for your club. Ideally, you should have the ability to scout globally to get the best out of your scouts.

Buy World Scouting Packages

Once you have the ability to scout globally, the next step is making sure you have bought the best scouting package for both your first team and the youth team.

Football Manager Scouting Packages

Scouting Packages in Football Manager determine the number of players that are available to you, to search from. You can think of it as buying a scouting database, the more expensive the database is, the higher the number of players will be available to you.  

Scouting Packages will also increase the knowledge level of the players covered as well as their role capabilities. But to get full knowledge of the players with details such as consistency, injury proneness etc, you will have to individually scout them further.

Scouting Packages are divided in two, the Senior Packages and the Youth Packages. The Youth Packages only cover players under the age of 21.

You should ideally buy the World Packages for both the Senior and Youth Players. They will cost a pretty penny, but they are totally worth it as they will potentially save you millions in the transfer market.

Once we have the right scouting package and also allowed to scout the whole world by the board, the next step is assigning our scouts to these areas. There are a lot of ways in how you can go about doing this, but I will lay out what works for me in my saves. There might be more effective ways out there in the wild, but I always try to maintain some realism in the game.

I will assume if you are managing a Premier League Club, or any other club in the top five leagues, you have at least 15 scouts. If not, speak to your board and ask for more.

Assigning Scouts to Different Regions of the World

Scouting the next opposition

The first assignment should be given to a scout with decent tactical knowledge. This scout will be responsible for giving a report on your next opposition before every match. 

To set the scout up to give you an ongoing report on the next opposition; 

  1. Navigate to the scouting assignment page 
  2. Create a new assignment 
  3. Choose team, then select ongoing reports on next opposition.
Setting Scouting Assignments in football manager

Scouting for first team players

The next 6 or 7 scouts should be set up to scout the best leagues in the world for first team players. Create an assignment for each of the 7 scouts. To do this, on the scouting assignment page, select add competition on the scope, then the country that competition is played in, i.e. England if you want to scout the EPL, then finally choose the competition to be scouted.

On the additional conditions option, set the required scouted ability to be ‘at least good’ so that your scouts can give you players that will challenge for a place in your first team. 

Repeat this process, sending different scouts to scout La Liga, Bundesliga, Serie A, Ligue 1 and EPL. If you have a few more scouts to spare, you can also scout the top divisions in Portugal, Scotland, Belgium and a few more top division leagues from the European countries you loaded at the beginning of the save game.

Scouting for bargains in South America

The next step is scouting South America, where it is normally possible to get some excellent players for a fraction of what they would cost if they were playing in Europe.

Send 2 or 3 scouts first to scout Brazil, Argentina and Colombia. I also normally add a condition for their age to be not greater than 24 and their current ability to be ‘at least good’. 

This will provide you with players who are currently good enough for your first team while still having some space to develop further. After a few months or half a season, you can switch these scouts from the two or three nations you selected earlier, then allocate them to different nations like Uruguay, Chile and Paraguay.

Scouting youth competitions

At this stage, if you had 15 scouts at the beginning, you will have around 4 that you have not assigned a role. Depending on the number of scouts you have left over, send at most three of them to scout the youth competitions of countries where signing their young prospects is not expensive.

Countries in South America or Eastern Europe are great candidates for this. It is wise to avoid the top five leagues’ youth competitions for the time being, unless you have a large transfer budget, as their youth players are normally too expensive, especially for sides that have just earned promotion.

Scouting the rest of the world in football manager

If you still have one or two scouts left without an assignment, send them to scout different regions, such as Scandinavia or Central America, where the other scouts, already on different assignments, are unlikely to cover.

This scouting set up is normally able to carry me through a few seasons until the board adds a few more slots for scouts. This gives me the ability to scout a few more youth competitions to unearth gems before they are picked up by the top sides.

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