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A Guest Post from Skacel who you can find posting at FM View & FM Fanboys
Scouting is essential whether you are at the top or the bottom of the footballing world. Yet so many of us seem to disregard it and just use the player search for our players or we sort out all our scouts and then don’t listen to them at all.
Scouts are more then just two attributes
The most vital thing for any and every scout is his mental stats. A select few Mental stats at that, the first stat I’m going to say is vital is a scouts adaptability. Adaptability comes into effect when you send a scout to a country that he has little to no previous knowledge of. A scout with higher adaptability will settle into his new country or region quicker and crack on with his reports a lot quicker. A scout with lower adaptability will obviously take longer to settle and he will take longer to produce reports of quality. So if you do bring in a scout and you have him scouting a region or country he has no previous knowledge of or little knowledge of, give him time. Dont keep changing his assignments every two minutes, he will do a much better job if you actually give him a chance and allow his knowledge to build.
Determination is also vital for a scout. The determination stat determines a scouts dedication to his job and his dedication to finding you good players. A scout with higher determination will put more effort into looking for players and more effort into compiling reports on players. On the flip side a less determined scout will obviously not put as much effort into finding players and compiling the player reports. This doesnt mean that a scout with 20 Determination will find a host of world beaters in his first few months of scouting, that depends on other factors such as his Adaptability, Judging Player Potential (JPP), Judging Player Ability (JPA) and his country knowledge.
A scouts knowledge of a country is vital
for two main things;
- Players appearing on the player search from that country
- The quality of a scouts reports from that country
Generally a scout will be more effective in countries that he has knowledge of, but a scouts knowledge can increase if the scout is based there for a while. The better a scouts knowledge the better your clubs knowledge, this means that more players from those countries will appear on your player search. A scout with a higher knowledge will also be able to dive straight into scouting the country, whereas a scout with less knowledge will obviously take more time as he will naturally have to take time to build a knowledge of the country.
Say if you are managing in the Premiership you should try and get scouts with 14/15 + for these areas. In the Championship try 13/14 +, in Leagues One and Two try for 11/12 + and when in the lower leagues try for 10 and up. Obviously this wont always be possible so eliminate stats you wont need, for example you wont really need a good JPA stat if you have your scout just looking for U18s and if you cant scout foreign countries due to managing a small club you wont really need a high Adaptability stat. But make sure you always have at least scout, they can make or break you as a manager.
Sending you scout out
Now we can touch upon assignments for scouts. If you are looking for youth players make sure you assign your scout to specifically look for U18s, U17s or U16s. If you fail to do this your scout will obviously be wasting his and your time by looking at players over that age bracket and he will spend less time looking for young players. If you cant scout foreign countries and you are managing in the low leagues it is worth having your scout just scouting your own nation with no specifics or scouting the next opposition if you feel your backroom staff dont give detailed enough advice, but if you have more than one scout then it is worth having one of them scout the top divisions reserve league. In doing this he could find prospective loan signings and cheap transfer signings.
In my opinion it is well worth getting as many scouts as you can. I like to have the majority of mine scouting in regions for players U18, I only have a few scouting in domestic leagues and I have one scout scouting the next opposition. Having too many scouts scouting competitions wastes them I think, as they seem to collect less reports than they would scouting a nation or a region. Having one scout scouting the next opposition will help you a lot when deciding on your tactics for the next game, you can find out your opponents weaknesses to try and exploit them and their strengths so you can try and counter them.
How SI could improve scouting
The scouting system got an overhaul a few year ago and it really was a breath of fresh air, but I think we are in need of another overhaul. Scouting internationally is especially weak, we get reports on players we know everything about, the scouts never seem to go out of their way and watch players who aren’t expected to be in the squad everytime. It would be nice to see the international scouts branching out a little and recommending players who we haven’t really shown much of an interest in, in the past. It would also be nice to see scout reports talk more about how well players would fit into our current tactics. That kind of knowledge obviously wont come straight away but once a scout watches a player a few times he should get some sort of idea regarding it.
And really I think that’s that. Determination and Adaptability are two of the four main stats the other two obviously being Judging Player Ability and Judging Player Potential. If you have any questions, comments and all that lark then just fire away.
You can catch Skacel in many places around the FM Community, but most of all you will see Skacel regularly posting in the FM View forums, involving himself in many of the FM discussions
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for your work Skacel, this article points out well that Scouts aren’t just there with two statistics and that if you want to put together a good scouting system then you really should be looking at different aspects to ensure a balanced a effective team in all quarters for the hardcore FM’er.
I think that for the casual game the two attributes JPA and JCA are still the most important things to consider and you will get a reasonable amount of the right reports back to help you pick the players you want.
I have already wrote what I think about the player search option in the game being to easy a way to grab players and the scouts should be made more a focal point to pick up new players and not the search engine.
How tried and tested are these attributes and the difference that they make though? In all honesty I have never really considered anything else other then JPA and JCA when picking my scouts and I have never really seen much problems in the reports that I have got back, although I still think that I need to take a more indepth approach to my FM games and I am still learning on FM2010, its amazing how I can play the game for so long and still be learning so much about it.
Do you have banks of scout teams in your side? I think that I am going to set up my next save game with a big side and with the resources available utilise them as best I can and make a whole much more holistic approach once again.
Thanks for the guest post Skacel!
Determination and Adaptability definitely make a difference, Ive tested around with it a bit and I noticed a difference. Theres two more things that I still need to test abit though, Tactical Knowledge for scouting the next opposition and Personality. Ive had scouts with high TK and scouts with low TK and I honestly couldnt see a difference in their reports when it came to scouting the next opposition, but I havent experimented enough to see whether it does make a difference. And Personality could have a huge effect on reports but I havent had enough time to truly test it all out yet.
As for my scouting system I used to have a few scouts assigned to the same regions but honestly it was a waste, they were all coming back with pretty much the same players so I ended up having all my scouts doing different things and it worked a lot better. The only time I have more than one scout in a region/country is when Im in South America and looking for youth players, Ill have one scout looking for U18s, ones for U17s, one for U16s, etc And although the majority of the players are the same they find a few different ones which helps in South America. As your main source of income is selling youngsters.
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