how to create scouting assignment fm22

Two Playmakers

Guide to football manager tactics, roles, scouting and transfers, 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.

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; 

• Navigate to the scouting assignment page 
• Create a new assignment 
• Choose team, then select ongoing reports on next opposition.

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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Football Manager 2022 Scouting Guide: Scout and sign the next generation of stars

Turn your team into world beaters by following these tips

Published: 03 Jan 2022 9:43 AM +00:00 Updated: 03 Jan 2022 9:43 AM +00:00

Football Manager 2022 is here, which means it's time to start preparing your scouts for another season of wonderkid hunting.

Table of Contents

Fm22 scouting, scouting specific players, scouting assignments, types of scouting.

From regions to staff, we've got you covered as to how to make the most of scouting in Football Manager 2022 , and how to ensure that you're recruiting the best players for your team.

Scouting is a huge part of Football Manager, and we've broken down some of the key sections to ensure that you are recruiting the best talent into your team.

The best way to optimize your scouting in Football Manager 2022 is by utilizing your staff and their scouting assignments.

One of the easiest ways to optimize your scouting is to scout specific players until your staff attains full knowledge.

By going to a player's profile and scouting them specifically, you will ensure that you are provided with the most accurate and in-depth report possible.

Scouting a player until full knowledge will also allow you to compare a said player to the rest of your squad, giving you the chance to weigh up the value of the transfer.

If you're looking for a certain kind of player, but you don't have any in mind, utilizing your scouting staff and sending them on assignments is a good way to broaden your reach.

From expanding your scouting region to targeting specific players with a particular statistical make-up, scouting assignments are the key to finding those wonderkids and hidden gems.

Click here to read about the best wonderkids in FM22.

There are many different types of scouting in Football Manager 2022 and striking a balance will be key to your success.

You can request your scouts search for players with a certain star rating, a certain age range, and also specialize in a certain position.

Balancing your scouting approach will give you a broader outlook on the best players in the game.

Each assignment will also affect your scouting budget depending on location, duration, and specificities.

Naturally, if you're a bigger club with a bigger scouting budget, you will have a head start over the competition when it comes to finding the next big thing.

Wonderkids are the lifeblood of Football Manager and there is nothing better than discovering the next best thing.

Scouting wonderkids through specific scouting assignments will ensure that you are recruiting top players for the future.

Here are some helpful guides on the best wonderkids in Football Manager 2022:

• English Wonderkids
• Wonderkid Defenders
• Wonderkid Strikers

Click here to find out everything we know about Football Manager 2022.

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• Football Manager 2022

Transfers and Scouting

Scouting Centre

This is the hub of your activity and the singular reference point to return to for all your scouting and player identification business. Everything begins with the choices you make from the bar at the top of the main screen area.

Scouting Responsibility: This allows you to either take charge of things yourself or delegate them to a chosen member of your backroom staff. If delegated, scouting assignments are handled automatically, otherwise you get to decide. You can still handle the recommendations yourself if these assignments are delegated.

Recruitment Focus: Determine the type of players you want your scouts to go out and find. Set the tactic you want the main focus to be on, and then instruct your scouts and analysts on specific details you want them to find in prospective new signings.

The Recruitment Team section details your current scouts and links to the Assignments Panel.

The Scouting Budget section displays the monthly remaining budget, which can be used for upgrading Scouting Packages and/or undertaking assignments outside of your scouting range. The final section outlines the current Transfer and Wage Budget, from where you can adjust the money allocated to each aspect.

The Recommendations panel is the most important aspect of the Scouting Centre as it’s where you go through the brief reports filed by your recruitment team, agents, affiliates or players directly approaching you. It is split into two views – Cards and List – and you can cycle through each player report card before actioning it. The most common actions are as follows:

Not Interested: Dismiss the report and forget about the player.

Acknowledge: Retain the player within your Scouting Centre to keep track of their progress.

Fully Scout Player: Add the player to your scouting assignments to generate a full Report Card.

Make Offer: Immediately begin negotiations to sign the player or you can offer trial to the player

You can also choose to Add to Shortlist to continue to monitor the player.

The List view looks similar to the Player Search screen, described immediately below.

Player Search

This is where the heavy lifting is done in terms of identifying new talent and sifting the wheat from the chaff. To begin with, click the ‘New Search’ button (or ‘Edit Search’ when a search has been made) to bring up the search dialog.

This enables you to start filtering down to the exact specifications of your player search. Flick between the ‘Quick’ and ‘Advanced’ modes to find the right settings for your requirements and then select ‘OK’ to refine your results; these actions can be undertaken from both the ‘Player Search’ and ‘Scouted’ screens, the latter only filtering through players you’ve actively scouted (and can subsequently be filtered by assignment from the foot of the main screen area).

There is also a ‘Quick Search’ drop-down menu that acts as a shortcut to refine the search results for a particular type of player based on a single criterion.

A host of information on each player is presented to you from the Overview view but perhaps the most important is the Scout Recommendation score. This takes the scout’s report on a player and distils all the information provided into a grade from A to E (where + and – within each grade indicate an additional positive or negative to the overall grade, so A+ is the strongest possible recommendation) and, in essence, makes for a much easier comparison when attempting to weigh up the pros and cons of multiple potential targets. There will naturally be times when even this isn’t enough to separate them, meaning you must dig even deeper to determine the best of the bunch, but it’s yet another tool at your disposal in the hunt for greatness.

It is quite likely that for one reason or another you’ll have a target you can’t currently sign, but you would like to keep track of their progress and be informed of any action involving them. This is where your shortlist comes into play. The shortlist allows you to add players to it for a desired period of time and for that duration you receive news to your feed whenever a key event involving that player occurs. To add a player to your shortlist, right-click and select ‘Add to Shortlist’ or select the same option from the ‘Transfer’ section of their profile. A box pops out asking you to choose how long they should remain on the shortlist. Select your choice to finish adding them.

The Shortlist screen itself looks much the same as the Player Search screen but instead features players you’ve added to it. A powerful set of filters can be applied from the ‘New Search’ button towards the right of the main screen area, while the ‘Positions’ sub-tab allows you to break it down position by position (and subsequently role by role) with direct comparisons to players within your current squad.

Select a player and then use the ‘Scouting’ button at the bottom of the screen to get a Scout or an Analyst Report should you wish to get further information.

To remove a player from your shortlist at any time, load up their profile and from the ‘Transfer’ section on the tab bar, select ‘Remove from Shortlist’. This act can be performed on multiple selections by selecting all the players you wish to remove from your shortlist, then right clicking and selecting the same remove option. To remove everyone at once, from the ‘Shortlists’ menu below your shortlist of players, select ‘Clear Shortlist’ and then confirm your decision.

The same menu is used for saving and loading different shortlists should you wish to keep different ones for multiple purposes.

Assignments

This screen lists all ongoing scout activity, featuring details of each individual’s previous, current, and future scouting assignments, and links to their reports. The ‘Scout Priorities’ Assignment screen holds details of tasks to watch an individual player in action as opposed to an assignment covering a broader region, country, or competition.

If you make several requests and find your scouting and analyst teams unable to handle the workload, some of those requests are queued up until an available member of staff can be found. These screens list those such requests. It also allows you to easily clear a number of queued assignments at once.

Every non-player in Football Manager™ 2022 is considered to have a certain level of knowledge about a country. Depending on their experience and where they’ve spent their career both as a player and a member of staff, they may increase their knowledge of certain areas and indeed hold knowledge about different countries and regions.

The knowledge bar doesn’t necessarily equate to automatically identifying the best talent in those countries – the scout’s attributes and overall ability play a massive part in that. What it does do is allow you to see where they do their most comprehensive work and therefore guide you to assign them to countries they know well. If you do choose to assign a scout to a country they are unfamiliar with, over time they will gain knowledge from that country. They will also progressively accumulate more knowledge the longer they reside there.

The Knowledge section offers an overall indication of the club’s entire knowledge base; beginning with a world map indicating the overall knowledge at the club, then a regional breakdown on the lower left sub-panel, before breaking it down into specific nations (and who holds that knowledge) on the right.

A club’s scouting knowledge is largely made up of the knowledge of their non-playing personnel, the region in which they play, and any affiliates they can lean on for further information.

A staff member’s knowledge comes from their career history and the places they’ve been tasked with scouting. The improvement in their knowledge is loosely attached to their non-playing Current Ability as well as the time they’ve spent in each country (which in turn opens up knowledge to neighbouring or nearby countries). The better they are at their job and the more time they spend in a given place, the quicker they accumulate knowledge.

Reports and Feedback

Clicking on any player and selecting ‘Scout Reports’ from their Tab Bar allows you to access the scout’s detailed reports on the player.

This is the real work your scout does when on assignment. They file a report on the player’s strengths and weaknesses (Pros and Cons) and the potential fit into your team. Each time the player is watched, the information fed back is a little more detailed and informative. The Player’s overall playing style is also featured for comparison with any scouting assignment focuses you might wish to undertake. You can keep fully appraised of how far along the recruitment team is in assessing a player by using the tracker at the top of the screen indicating the knowledge level (%) and gaps in knowledge still to be filled in.

What is the difference between each scouting package?

Scouting is increasingly done within the club as part of a wide-reaching operation to refine a massive pool of players into a powerful list of potential signings, and it’s all made possible by Scouting Packages.

Put simply, the better Scouting Package you have, the more players you have access to. Applicable to both senior and youth teams with separate packages, they come in different shapes and sizes, with the cost increasing the higher you go.

World: The best package available. It covers almost every player in the world without restriction.

Continental: Covers almost every player within the chosen continent, an example being Europe.

Regional: Covers almost every player within the chosen region, an example being Central Europe.

National: Covers almost every player within the chosen country, an example being England.

Divisional Plus: Covers almost every player within the chosen division PLUS the divisions either side of it in the national hierarchy, an example being EFL League One plus the EFL Championship and EFL League Two.

Divisional: Covers almost every player within the chosen division, an example being the EFL Championship.

Clubs without a package are restricted to only those players known by members of staff. You are free to choose any package if it remains within your scouting budget, while also downgrading to add funds back to your budget. The scouting budget itself is used for packages as well as undertaking Assignments outside of your immediate scouting range on a per-case basis and requires monthly management to always keep your club in with a chance of keeping up with the competition.

What is the benefit of undertaking additional scouting reports?

Each time you request a scout report on a player, you unlock a little more of their profile, and get more information. The more information you have, the better understanding you’ll be able to put together about the player, and you can therefore make a more informed decision about whether to sign them or not.

It typically takes three to four full matches of watching a player before your scout can put together a 100% complete report, so time becomes a factor, as well as the cost of that scout’s assignment. You might need to balance the need for comprehensive knowledge against the urgency of completing a deal or moving in early before a market develops for the player.

Making a Transfer Offer

The Transfer Offer screen allows you to compose your offer in as much detail as you like. Begin by deciding whether you want to make a Transfer offer or a Loan offer.  You can also offer a trial or make an enquiry from the player’s right-click Context Menu or the Tab Bar, but for the purposes of this section we’ll deal with the two main types of offer to make.

Sticking with the Transfer type, you then need to decide upon a fee for the player. The information panel to the top of the main screen area indicates the player’s current transfer value and any fee the club are likely to demand (if known). Unless the player has been transfer listed, you usually need to bid their value at an absolute minimum to hold the interest of the owners, and most likely you’ll have to offer above that to get anywhere.

The ‘Transfer Date’ allows you to set when the deal will go through. A lot of the time you’ll leave this as ‘Immediate’ so it goes through at the first opportunity but, should you not have the required funds at the time, or if you want to leave the player to develop for a longer period, you can set the deal to complete at the end of the current season.

Once you’ve set the core components of your deal, you can begin tweaking it with Additional Fees and Clauses to entice the other team into accepting. For example, you can break down the payment into instalments, or offer add-ons based on performance or international recognition. These in particular are of interest to any prospective selling club as the potential income in months and years to come can help long term financial security and prosperity.

Many aspects of a deal can be insisted upon by ‘locking’ them into place using the padlock icon (once for non-negotiable (red), twice for semi-negotiable (orange); semi-negotiable means the other party is aware that you want to insist upon it, but you might be prepared to budge if another part of the deal is sweetened), and they can be either removed by clicking on the circular icon with a ‘-‘ through the centre, or removed permanently and excluded from negotiations by selecting that option from the menu produced by clicking it.

There is also the facility to offer a player in a part-exchange deal. This is usually only of benefit if the selling club has an interest in one or more of your players. Your Assistant Manager informs you of any positions they are in need of in the comments panel at the left of the screen. Use the ‘Add’ button to include players in the deal.

Once you’re happy with the package, you can either click on ‘Make Offer’ and await a response, which typically arrives 24-48 hours later, or you can click ‘Suggest Terms’ to negotiate ‘live’ in a bid to get your business done swiftly. In this situation, the other party in the deal tells you what they like and dislike about the offer, with colour-coded references around the screen leading you to identify which areas need further work if you’re to strike an agreement.

Making a Loan Offer

Loaning players typically benefits all parties. The player gets first team football, the owners benefit from the player either developing or leaving the club temporarily, which reduces the club’s wage bill depending on the deal, and the loaning team get a player they presumably want, having offered to loan them.

Note that you can offer a Playing Monthly Fee and Wage alongside a Non-Playing Monthly Fee and Wage. In essence this means that you can try to sweeten the deal by offering to pay a greater sum and/or contribution should the player not play a certain number of minutes for your first team perhaps while not paying so much for the privilege of actually playing them. It could theoretically encourage a team to enter into a loan agreement with you if they are being compensated for their player not playing, but – as with all transfer negotiations – it’s a fine balancing act.

When composing a loan offer, you can set the duration of their spell at your club, as well as your wage contribution and any fee you may offer as an incentive for their club to accept. A series of clauses and loan options may then be configured; for example, if there is any intention to keep the player long-term, you can set a ‘Future Fee’ that you can meet at any time and offer the player a permanent contract.

You are also able to inform the player’s parent club of your intentions by declaring their role in the squad and the position you’re likely to play them in.

Free Agents

If your club is short of money and short on numbers/talent, you’ll have to look elsewhere for your additions. The free agent market comes into play here. It’s not just for the lesser teams; clubs of all sizes can find a vast array of talent, particularly in the lower leagues, where long-term contracts are rare, and annual player turnover high.

Selling and Loaning Players Out

Selling players is just as fundamental a part of management as buying.  Whether you’re doing it to get rid of dead wood, or to ensure financial stability, it’s going to happen. If you receive an offer for a player from another club, you can negotiate the deal in the same way as you may have put together a bid as described in the previous section.

However, if you wish to initiate the sale of a player, you have the power to set the ball rolling. From the ‘Transfer’ tab on a player you wish to sell, select ‘Offer to Clubs’. The screen is similar to the Transfer Offer screen in appearance.

Initially set the fee you’re aiming to receive for the player. Try to consider the target club(s) and what they may be able to afford. If necessary, ask for less up front and more money over a longer period of time or incentive-based payments, available from the ‘Additional Fees’ section. At the same time though, don’t forget you’re the selling club – try to get back as much value as you can. One such way is to include an additional clause. If you’re selling a young player with potential, try to include a clause where you get a certain percentage of any fee the club may sell for in the future. If you suspect the player may not get a lot of first team football at the new club, or might reach their full potential, maybe include a ‘Buy Back’ price, where you can attempt to bring the player back to your club for a fee lower than their potential long-term value.

Your Assistant Manager sends the details of any proposed deal to all clubs deemed suitable. If you don’t want a player going to a rival club, tick the appropriate check box on the Targets tab before clicking ‘Confirm’. Any interested parties will indicate as much in the days immediately following by making an offer of some kind. From here, it’s up to you to negotiate the best deal possible.

Alternatively, you can add the player to the ‘Unwanted List’ and have the responsible person, e.g. your Director of Football, manage their departure.

If you are loaning a player out, you may want to consider whether the player is able to play in matches against your club or play in cup competitions (therefore becoming cup-tied should they return to you), and whether you may want the option to terminate the loan early. Additionally, ensuring that the player is going to play regularly and in a position you wish to see them used in is an advisable approach, and there is plenty of flexibility to ensure you’re suitably compensated financially for allowing someone else to borrow one of your assets.

Transfer Deadline Day

One of the most intriguing and dramatic days on the football calendar, Transfer Deadline Day often brings about some of the most unpredictable and high-profile transfer activity during the window. Football Manager™ 2022 brings that to attention with tons of content, media interaction, and all of the latest happenings as the clock ticks down and teams aim to get that last-minute deal over the line.

When Transfer Deadline Day begins, you will be given the option of taking part in the excitement. If you choose to, a special themed colour scheme will be enabled and you will notice a new icon on the sidebar appears called Deadline Day. Here, your Director of Football will detail players being touted by their agents through the day, while the Transfer News tab will keep you abreast of all the done deals, latest rumours and social media reactions to the deadline day drama.

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Scouting in Football Manager 2024 | The Definitive Guide

With major changes to scouting and recruitment in Football Manager 2024 this ultimate guide brings you all the scouting tips and tricks you need to master the art of scouting in Football Manager 2024.

Scouting in Football Manager can be a straightforward affair but by immersing yourself with scouting and recruitment, it will give you long-term joy and success. Whether you are scouring through the world for the best Football Manager 2024 wonderkids and talents or searching after a new star player, how you scout will be essential to your success!

Our definitive guide to scouting in Football Manager 2024 let you get a closer insight into the different methods of scouting and its main objectives, as we guide you through how to scout in Football Manager. Here’s everything you need to be successful at scouting, recruitment and expanding your scouting network to spot more players!

To improve your take on scouting and make it more enjoyable, more knowledge about how scouting in Football Manager works, together with specific scouting tips, can lead to more successful results when you shall search for potential targets or identify future stars on your own. Our guide to scouting aims to give you everything you need in one place!

PS. I know the length of this scouting guide is massive but feel free to use our table of content to jump around to the sections that interest you the most.

This article is aimed at both FM novices and veterans, as it’s packed with information and tips on how I approach the scouting area. It’s the first post in a wider series relating to scouting in Football Manager. Get a full overview of the other scouting guides here!

How to approach scouting in Football Manager 2024?

It’s easy to relate the success of a football club to tactics and what’s been done at the training ground. In reality, much of the success can be related to the hard work and effort put into scouting and recruitment. Often the key to success isn’t whether the right tactical instructions were given in the 80th minutes to take home the victory but through a long-term plan of signing the best players for your team.

This is a statement with a deeper meaning. In order to find the best players, they must both:

• fit your tactics
• and, easily blend into your squad.

Scouting is as essential as training or tactics, and enables you to take your team to the next level by recruiting players that fit your system. Your setup of the scouting and recruitment team, how you look to expand your reach or how you send out scouts on a mission to get more knowledge about the teams and players around you can be a contributing factor to long-term success.

Today I’ll take a closer look at how to approach scouting in Football Manager 2024 by looking at the different areas related to scouting and recruitment of players. You’ll perhaps get some useful Football Manager scouting tips to take with you into your own save, or get a deeper insight into how scouting and its underlying features works.

Our Football Manager 2024 scouting guide gives you everything you need to know about scouting and recruitment in Football Manager 2024 and its terms. In this guide to scouting in Football Manager we will take a closer look at how to set up your scouting network and assign scouts to assignments, how to set up recruitment focus in the best way possible to identify potential signings, whether it may be finding some of the best FM24 bargains , hidden wonderkids in Football Manager 2024 , or or spot quality newgens in the future.

Basically, we can divide scouting in Football Manager into two main parts:

• Everything you do to affect the organizational structure (e.g how you set up your scouting network)
• Specific scouting activities and how you scout for players

1. The Objectives of Scouting

Creating a foundation for all scouting activities starts by understanding what your missions are. Getting an insight into the objectives of scouting helps to better set up an efficient scouting program that provides long-term results.

In order to fully grasp how to set up the most efficient scouting program, it’s important to understand why you should take scouting seriously. The reasons for scouting might seem simple, but by clarifying the main objectives it may be easier to set up an efficient scouting network or scouting program which delivers great results.

Having a clear idea about why you should put effort and time into setting up a scouting program will make things easier when approaching the different methods of Football Manager scouting. By getting an overview of the different areas the recruitment team is responsible for and what options at hand, it will be easier to set up appropriate recruitment focuses (previously known as scouting assignments), search filters and shortlists according to your ambitions.

There are basically eight different objectives with scouting . These objectives basically summarize everything relating to scouting and recruitment and will affect how you intend to approach scouting in Football Manager. It literally summaries and connects all of our published and coming scouting guides together, clarifying the overall mission of why we scout players and set up assignments.

• Improve the squad with suitable targets for your tactical system
• Increase competitiveness by improving the squad depth
• Learn more about the next opposition’s strength and weaknesses
• Improve the club’s financial situation by selling for profit (short-term and long-term objectives)
• Replace aging players or players not good enough for your system.
• Provide tactical options or more versatility in systems used
• Consistency in performance (back-up and/or rotation options)
• Improve the overall performance level in regard to statistical data.
• Modify the squad dynamics to improve player’s performance by making changes to squad personality, morale and interpersonal relationships on and off the pitch (aka player partnerships , team cohesion and dressing room atmosphere).

The way you set up your scouting program must revolve around these objectives. After all, the aim of scouting is to be better prepared for situations where you need to improve your squad, either it’s due to long-term injuries on key players or not able to get the most out of squad players, for whatever reasons.

Your take on scouting and recruiting is all depending on the situation within your squad. There’s no such thing as a ‘good or bad’ approach to scouting but it helps to have an overall mission relating to how you approach it.

The key to scouting is to get to know as much about the player and how he fits into your team. You want to learn as much as possible about the player to make more informed decisions relating to the final recruitment.

1.1 The Club Vision’s influence on your Scouting Program

Setting up a scouting program will determine the club’s overall recruitment focus , whether it’s for the short- or long-term. My preference is always to think long-term and be strategic with how I scout players in Football Manager .

Your recruitment focus and how you set up your scouting network should adhere to two important aspects within your club:

• It must link to the Club Vision relating to recruitment, which can be described as your club’s transfer policy
• It must fit the playing style and football philosophy (e.g. fit your tactical system(s) and club DNA!).

Most often when entering a new club it already exists an established club culture relating to the recruitment and development of players. They got a way of doing things that have either worked successfully in the past or which the Board (and the fans) believes will take the club to success. The club vision can be seen as the club’s mission statement. What’s stated is simply the preferences and expectations the club has on your managerial achievements. Here you’ll see specific recruitment philosophies – the transfer policies within the club.

Despite you’re not forced to follow the established cultures relating to scouting and recruitment, the preferred club vision relating to recruitment can act as a limitation for your leeway. It can both increase the challenge level for your save and intensify your focus in all scouting matters.

In some ways, the influence of club vision for your scouting program must be taken into account when setting up assignments. Whether you keep full focus on it or not, throughout the save, doesn’t matter. There will be times where you simply must sign a back-up player due to an injury crisis or you’re forced to pay more attention to recruiting more experienced players since most of your starting XI wants to play at a higher level and will soon be out of the doors. Perhaps a larger fraction of your squad is not good enough to play at the level you want to take the club to, either.

Club Visions

In Football Manager 2024, there are eight club visions relating to the recruitment focus – which should affect how you scout for players.

• Sign Players Under X age for the future (e.g. under the age of 21)
• Sign Players Under X age for the first team (e.g. under the age of 30)
• Sign players based in a specific nation (e.g. homegrown players in the same country you’re managing in)
• Sign Players of a specific nationality (e.g. of Senegalese origin or only Basque players)
• Sign Players of high-reputation
• Sign players from lower levels of Domestic game (e.g. a good percentage of recruitment’s must come from divisions lower than yourself)
• Sign Players from Domestic Rivals
• Don’t Sign Players over the age of X (e.g over the age of 23)

These club vision provides you both with restrictions and possibilities in regard to how you set up your scouting network and the way you scout for players. Most importantly it affects the level of scouting range necessary to live up to the club’s expectations, according to the scouting coverage.

For one, it’s not necessary to scout the regions of Asia or Africa if you got a transfer policy of only recruiting homegrown players under the age of 23. Likewise, it’s not necessary to ask your scouts to provide reports on players over the age of 30 if your transfer policy is to buy young players for the future.

Your club vision and transfer policy will therefore set restrictions on the types of recruitment focuses you shall set up and the scouting range you need to identify the best players for yourself.

Creating a foundation for all scouting activities

Before you can have any hopes of having regular success with scouting and recruitment it’s important to lay down the foundation for an effective scouting program. It’s a matter of creating a wide-reach scouting network that finds the right players for your club – those players who with their status, personality and skills can get the most out of his teammate and make each other better both on the training ground and on the pitch.

In your quest to identify potential targets, it is important that your approach to scouting is both strategic and methodical.

It’s a matter of setting some guidelines to follow that will limit your leeway in all your upcoming scouting activities. How you set up your scouting network depends on your objectives and football philosophy. Learn more about how I set up my scouting network in Football Manager here.

2. Assessing the Scouting & Recruitment Team

Once you enter a new save in Football Manager, one of the first things you need to do is to analyze your scouting team and make any necessary adjustments in order to find the best players for your club. Your scouting and recruitment team must include scouts and data analysts that helps you to effectively visualize your scouting objectives.

To assess your clubs scouting and recruitment team, you’ll be able to get a full overviews of the current staff’s level of abilities by heading to:

Staff > Overview > Recruitment Team

After entering the screen, you shall pay close attention to their level of Judging Player Ability (aka JPA), Judging Player Potential (aka JPP) which are the most crucial attributes for any scouts or analysts who shall determine a player’s current standard of skills, and potential future standard of his abilities.

All scouts required to travel the world for players should also have high Adaptability . This is essential if he’s required to roam around regions or multiple nations and needs to settle down quickly to bring you more reports of players, sooner rather than later.

Your team also needs a chief scout who can oversee all scouting assignments. Alongside JPP and JPA, the great chief scout needs a decent level of people management. This attribute determines his level of keeping people below and around him happy and monitor their workload to an appropriate level so they doesn’t overload them with too many assignments and reduce their effectiveness.

The level of the scouts attributes will depend on your playing level, but I try to find any scouts with an higher score than 15 if you are managing an elite club. At lower levels, 10 might be decent enough but as always, the higher attributes as possible, the better.

The Recruitment Team Comparison within the same page, will give you a great insight to how your scouting team ranks within your league.

With a specific custom view, you’re able to analyze your scouting and recruitment team to a whole new level than what the standard staff view provides of options.

Within the Recruitment Team Overview, you can even see the current size of the recruitment team, and the maximum number of scouts, data analysts and Directors allowed. From here, you can easily place advert to fill any vacancies spots available, or make any requests to the board to increase wages or allocate more spots to expand your scouting team.

One of the first tasks on the agenda within the first week of management, is to hire and fire scouts and other necessary staff for the Recruitment team. This way, I can poach some of the best free scouts, as well as tie up any scouts which can expand the world knowledge at a great cost.

You can use the current World Knowledge status (found within the Scouting Coverage screen), and the current staff’s abilities, to determine what type of scouts you need.

As described in our guide to finding the best scouts , there are four types of scouts I wish to have within my scouting team – how many depends on the club’s finances.

• roaming scouts – expand club’s world knowledge – highest priority on Adaptability
• youth scouts – used to identify future players (e.g. wonderkids & talents) – highest priority judging player potential
• next Opponent scout – used to scout teams – highest priority tactical knowledge and judging player ability
• general scouts – identify players who can improve the current squad – highest priority judging player ability & JPP

READ MORE | Ranking the Best Football Manager 2024 scouts

3. The Scouting Centre

The Scouting Centre in Football Manager is the go-to place in all matters relating to any scouting activities. From here you’ll able to manage your entire scouting project; from setting up recruitment focuses and other assignments to flicking through scout reports and recommendations . Even though identifying potential signings is a huge part of the Scouting Centre, as player recommendations take up 90% of the screen, it includes valuable information about your Recruitment Team, the current level of scouting knowledge and scouting budget.

The purpose of the Scouting Centre is to be a one-stop place to find a collection of potential signings your Recruitment Team has identified and which they believe you should be aware of. Most of the players that are recommended have been found by your scouts or analysts from specific scouting focuses, such as scouting priorities you’ve set in Recruitment Meetings.

However, it may even include highly recommended players or offers from agents.

The Scouting Centre features literally everything we’re going to talk about in this guide, whether it’s more related to managing organizational purposes that helps you manage the foundation for any future scouting activities or more actionable steps to take. For instance, setting up your scouting assignments or other long-term or short-term recruitment focuses.

This overview gives you an insight into how we can divide the different aspects of the Scouting Centre in Football Manager;

Organizational Structure

• Scouting Responsibilities
• Scouting and Recruitment Team (Staff Abilities)
• Scouting Knowledge or Scouting Coverage
• Scouting budget
• Scouting Range (previously Recruitment package)
• Scouting Priorities
• Delivery of Reports and Recommendations

Scouting Activities

• Recruitment Focus aka Scouting assignments
• Scout Reports / Analyst Reports (of Individual Players or Next Opposition)
• Player Search – Basic, Quick and Advanced Methods
• Basic Scouting Focus on Player types, roles or according to club vision
• Quick Searches (player status and availability)
• Advanced Player Searches (Filters and Shortlists)

* The different scouting activities will be covered in our upcoming article about how to scout for players in Football Manager .

3.1 A Closer Insight to the Recommendation Panel

The recommendation panel features Reports from the Scouting Team and Analyst Team, in addition to files and offers sent from Agents, Affiliates or players who alerts you of their interest.

These reports are often collated by the person in charge of providing feedback on scouting assignments. They are delivered according to your current transfer strategies and preferences relating to how you want these reports filtered.

TIP! By clicking on the little cog drop down button next to Filter you are able to select what types of recommendation cards you like to receive. Learn more in the section about how to set up recommendation filters .

For instance, it may include players you have little to no knowledge of, since an Agents wish to bring attention to one of his players, or may include unattached players, who get in touch with you. It can even include players that your Scouting team will suggest at an upcoming Recruitment Meeting or players who have been identified at these meetings.

Most of the players in the recommendation panel are just suggestions on potential signings the Scouting or Recruitment team believes you should take further actions on, as the recommendations are collated from your ongoing scouting assignments or Analysts reports.

The Scouting Centre ensures you never miss out on potential signings that could be a perfect match for your team!

The benefits of the Recommendation panel is to make you aware of players for positions the Scouting and Recruitment believe you lack depth in. They may take into account current transfer interest, transfer status, abilities, age and performances and link their recommendations to your wishes and demands specified in Recruitment meetings and through specific recruitment focuses.

In some ways, it summarizes your current transfer strategy by collating scout reports of players who best fit your current scouting instructions into a list which are handed to you at Scouting Meetings.

How do you want to see the reports?

The reports compiled to the Scouting Centre can be seen in two different ways; Cards or List view. Both views have their benefits.

The List View simply collects all the recommended players in one view. It includes a fairly brief report about basic information such as positional abilities, age, Recommendation rating and star ratings (CA and PA) in addition to the scout’s opinion about the maximum asking price and wage demands.

The Cards View enables you to focus your attention at individual players, getting access to more information about each. You’ll get a more detailed report about the recommendation, his transfer interest and an opportunity to read the scout report featuring pros and cons or check his attributes, position and role suitability or fitness level.

Taking further actions

At the bottom of the list of recommendations you’ll get the chance to take further actions to either dismiss or follow up on the recommendations. Here’s a quick overview of what happens when you click the action buttons.

PS. These action buttons will only appear when you select one or multiple players in the list view.

• Tick the Shortlist button to add the player to a shortlist. If the player is already on a shortlist, ticking the button will see the player getting removed from the shortlist.
• Fully Scout Player will only be actionable as long as the scouts does not have extensive knowledge about the player. If the knowledge is poor, the scout will watch the player according to the Recruitment Actions within the Recommendation View preferences menu (see the small cog in the upper right corner)
• Discuss With Agent gives you a quick way to monitor a player’s interest, availability and demands. By clicking the button you’ll get a deeper insight to the player’s transfer cost and wage demands, along with other expectations the player may have if you should sign him.
• Make Offer gives you a quick way to make a bid on the player. Even though it’s smart to contact the Agent before making a bid, the option is there.
• Not Interested will inform the Recruitment team that you no longer wish to get recommendations of the player. It includes if the player will match a specific recruitment focus later on (RF Matches).
• Acknowledge will remove the player from the Scouting Centre. You will signalize that no further actions is required to be taken.

3.2 How to Set up Recommendation Filters to Reduce the Number of Recommendations Delivered?

A major part of the Scouting centre is to let your Chief Scout sort through the number of scout reports and deliver the most useful recommendations to you. As you receive reports and offers from players, agents and your scouting and recruitment team, the Recommendation panel may feature a whole lot of players out of your interest. By all means, there might be some handy players there, but going through hundreds of reports from 15+ scouts will take time.

The Scouting Centre features several options to limit the number of reports and recommendations sent to you, either it’s players to discuss in the Scouting Meetings or scout reports and feedback sent to your inbox.

Let us take a look at how you can set up your recommendation filters and preferences to receive the reports that matter the most to you!

Show All vs Specific

Whichever view you prefer, Football Manager enables you to show only recommendations from a specific department, whether it’s from the Scouting Team, Recruitment Team, Analyst Team, Agents, Players or candidates to discuss at the upcoming Recruitment Meeting, which your closest staff believes would make a good fit for your squad. By displaying only players from a specific department within your club you can focus your attention to these recommendations without having to deal with offers on players most likely out of your ability level.

Filtering the Recommendations

Football Manager enables you to decide which type of recommendations you want to receive and where you want them to be delivered. The recommendations can be delivered in different ways, all according to your preferences:

• i. Don’t receive. . You reject to be notified about recommendations or offers. Personally, I tend to use this option for Free Agent Offering his services and for Agent offers.
• ii. Show in Scouting centre . You want these reports to be delivered only to the Scouting Center, from there you can take further actions.
• iii. Forward to Inbox . The person in charge of collating and providing feedback will forward the recommendation to your inbox when it happens. I find it useful to be informed about when scouting assignments or individual scouting trips are finished, suggestions on upcoming competitions, potential hot prospects and suggestions the Recruitment Team and Analyst have. It can even be used to get information about when players you’ve scouted are out on the transfer or loan list enabling you to take actions immediately!
• iv. Mixed Delivery which will vary where the recommendations will be sent – all depending on the Scouting rating, cost, transfer availability and how he fit your transfer policy.

Minimum Recommendation Levels

It’s not only which types of recommendations you receive and who you want to receive from which will affect the number of Recommended players in the Scouting Centre. You can even ask the Scouting Team to filter away any scout reports under a given minimum recommendation level .

When it comes to receiving these recommendations from the scouting team I prefer to receive reports with a minimum scouting grade of B+ delivered to my inbox. It means I might have to pay attention to the Scouted Players and the ongoing gathering of Reports from my scouts and Analyst to keep track of other players that they have identified, that could potentially be useful.

For a full overview of Scouted players go to either;

• Scouting > Players > Scouted Players
• Scouting > Scouting coverage > Scouts > Name > Scout Reports
• Scouting > Players Players in Range > Sort by Recommendation Rating *(Column must be added to the search view)

3.2.1 Taking advantage of Advanced Filters

A major part of scouting is to receive feedback from the scouts whenever they got something to report. It may be players they have spotted whilst out on a mission, when a player has been transfer listed or other events happening around the world.

Setting up the advanced filters relating to scouting can provide the feedback you need to stay informed.

Managing these advanced filters is possible when clicking on the cog drop down menu within Scouting Centre. Once you’ve entered the overlay (see illustration on the left side of 3.2 section), you’ll be able to click the Advanced Filter.

Here you can decide when you want email notifications delivered straight to your Inbox and when certain news can be sent to the Scouting Centre. Since you don’t want to be flooded with hundreds of Inbox messages you can tailor the filter to not receive notifications about certain items.

Personally, I find it beneficial to receive inbox messages about players the Scout has spotted out on another duty that he can recommend. Similarly, I like to get a reminder from the Scouting team when competitions they can suggest to scout is about to start. With a range of possibilities, you can instruct the person in charge of providing scout feedback to deliver the notifications that are most relevant for you.

Perhaps you’ll even spot a few bargains or cheap transfer targets as you get valuable information as soon as a potential signing have been spotted!

4. The Recruitment Team

The recruitment team includes all backroom staff responsible for either scouting, recruiting and analyzing the abilities or performances of both the next opposition, other teams and players within or outside your own club.

A wide-reach recruitment team includes six different staff roles;

• Director of Football ; normally handles ‘all’ ingoing and outgoing player transfers in addition to negotiating contract extensions.
• Technical Director ; is responsible for handling all affairs relating to recruiting backroom staff no matter if it’s hiring or firing personnel to the scouting team, medical team or coaching team, both for your senior and youth teams. He can even decide who should undertake coaching courses and thereby decide the overall development of coaches qualifications and abilities.
• Chief Scout ; is originally responsible for managing the scouting team and its assignments, and is the link between the scouting pool and you.
• Scouts ; perform assignments and identify potential targets by delivering scout reports-
• Recruitment Analyst ; assesses the performance of players outside your club and potential targets by gathering and analyzing statistical data to compare scouted players’ abilities, performances and playing level to the standard within your league and the club.
• Loan Manager ; will focus his attention to track the development of, and performance of, players out on loan. He will track their happiness and form whilst even being able to suggest player’s who can aid on loan moves.

How you set up your recruitment team depends on your finances and playing level. It even depends on how much control you’d like within your club and what you favor to delegate of responsibilities to your staff.

In our guide on how to find the best scouts in Football Manager , you’ll learn more about the different types of scouts and their most important staff attributes. It even looks closer at the chief scout’s responsibilities and his role in your scouting team.

All in all, the most important thing is to focus your attention to bring in more and more scouts whenever you can to expand the current scouting knowledge. How to assign the scouts will be covered in our guide to setting up a scouting network .

You can ask your board to increase the number of scouts allowed by making a board request. Whether this item is in the list depends on whether you’ve reached the maximum allowed in your Recruitment team.

The allowed size of Recruitment team is displayed in the Staff > Overview > Recruitment Team .

There you can also compare your current average levels of key attributes compared to your league level.

Making a board request to increase the scouts allowed; Club Vision > Make board Request > Staff > Scouts Allowed

Making a board request can also let you increase the scout wages or increase the allowed size of staff for any other staff position. for a lower league team that climbs the ladder, it might be a question of asking the board the permission to sign a Technical Director by allocating the funds necessary for it.

4.1 Required Staff Attributes for Scouting

What’s required of the personnel within your scouting and recruitment team will depend on their job and overall responsibilities. While I cover this topic more specifically in pieces about each of the staff roles we can broadly speaking say they need;

A) For Scouting:

• Judging Player Ability ; describes the ability of a Staff to estimate the current standard of a given player or team.
• Judging Player Potential ; describes the ability of a Staff to estimate the potential future levels of performance of a given player or team whilst taking into account several other factors that could influence on the outcome.
• Adaptability ; describes the ability of a Staff to settle in at a new country, new role or at a new club. It determines how fast the person is able to adjust to cultures and new working environments. Higher ratings means the person will be able to quicker deliver reports once entering a new nation to gain knowledge of.

B) For Analyzing Players/Teams:

• Analyzing Data ; describes the ability of an Analyst to comprehend data of a player or a team and interpret it in a manner useful to the Manager.
• Tactical Knowledge ; describes their level of experience in the game. His knowledge of a certain tactical style or formation may affect how accurate reports about certain teams are.
• Judging Player Ability

C) For Recruiting players:

• Negotiating ; shows how good the staff member is at negotiating transfer deals and contracts. A lesser skilled person will more likely agree to less favorable contracts and transfer packages, whilst a person with higher ratings will be more skilled and seek better financial deals for his club or a player.

5. Scouting Coverage

The main intention of the Scouting Coverage screen is to give you a real-time insight to the current knowledge level within the world.

The scouting coverage screen has basically three intentions:

• provide you with a quick overview of the current scouting assignments by placing the different scouts on the world map. It enables you to see which areas of the world the different scouts are gaining knowledge of, or perhaps who is currently without a task – helping you to address that ‘issue’. Frankly, you’ll be able to see what types of recruitment focuses the specific scout are assigned to.
• provide you with a deeper insight to the club’s World Knowledge by detailing which nations or regions you have partly or full knowledge of – helping you to address which areas you need to focus on in order to expand your current scouting network to be able to discover more players.
• provide you with more information about specific clubs as you’ll able to request analyst reports about specific teams of interest, the next opposition, or perhaps information about a Specific Match – helping you to get Match and Team Analysis to identify strengths and weaknesses of the next opposition.

5.1 World Knowledge

The World Knowledge screen gives you an entire overview of the club’s knowledge level of regions and nations. This screen gives you a valuable insight to areas of the world you could considering scouting to enhance your knowledge of players, or which areas it’s probably best to send out your scouts on a mission, as you’ll receive extensive reports of players far quicker.

The club’s overall knowledge of a (scouting) region can vary from worst to best:

• None (grey)
• Minimal (Dark Orange)
• Nominal (Light Orange)
• Broad (Yellow)
• Widespread (Light Green)
• Comprehensive (Green)
• Exhaustive (Green)
• Unrestricted (Green)

The level of scouting knowledge of a nation or region will have a huge impact on your knowledge level of players based in those nations and regions.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that having an exhaustive knowledge will automatic lead to identifying the best talents within a nation, but that it’s an higher chance to identify more players of higher abilities.

Your Regional or National Scouting Knowledge will impact on the degree of individual player knowledge. It will affect who’s visible in Player search and what’s visible within a player’s profile. With greater knowledge comes a more complete picture of the player’s capabilities and a higher detail level of the players based in that specific nation/region.

The knowledge level of a region, or a nation, is basically determined by three factors :

i) Non-Playing Staff Regional Knowledge The level of knowledge of a given nation depends on the experience the non-playing staff have gained throughout his career. He may have had a past playing career in Argentine, or have worked as a youth coach or assistant manager in China before moving to your English club. The length of his spell within a specific nation or region will affect his individual scouting knowledge.

It’s not only his past experience that affect his knowledge level, how long time they have spent in certain countries affects the level of knowledge. The longer they reside in a nation, the more knowledge they will gain about neighboring and nearby nations.

If you select the ‘Nations’ overview, and click on the magnifying glass, you’ll be able to discover which staff or club that provides you with a certain level of knowledge.

A golden rule is; the higher knowledge level, the more effective the staff will work to gain information about the players within that particular nation. The result is that he’s able to do a more comprehensive work quicker.

You can learn more about how to find the best scouts in Football Manager in this guide.

ii) Affiliated Clubs Acquiring senior affiliates that are either financial or just mutually beneficial can help to increase your scouting knowledge since both clubs will share scouting knowledge.

This means that for any affiliate links where your club has first option to buy players from a second club, or where the other club can send their players to train and develop, will let you profit from the knowledge the minor club has gained from the presence within a nation and/or region and specific members world knowledge (e.g. their managers or director of football’s scouting knowledge.

iii) Sending scouts out on assignments It’s not only a non-playing personnel’s past career history which influences the knowledge score. Sending the staff (typically a scout) out on assignments to a specific nation or region will enhance the knowledge of that particular area. The more time spent within a nation, the better knowledge. The better knowledge, the more information revealed about the players within that nation.

A scout out on a scouting assignment will gain first and foremost knowledge of that particular nation but also about neighboring or nearby countries. How effective and accurate he is in delivering reports and recommendations of players, depends on his Adaptability and his abilities to settle in quickly, as well as his Judging Player Ability (aka JPA) and Judging Player Potential (aka JPP).

Finally, the non-playing staff’s Current Abilities together with how long he’s been stationed in a nation/region and how good is it at his job will affect how fast he can accumulate knowledge of a nation.

Setting up an efficient scouting network should go to expanding the club’s regional knowledge by setting up scouts assignments and improving the scouting team with scouts with knowledge of nations or regions outside your current regional knowledge.

Which regions or nations you prefer to gain knowledge of comes down to your own preferences. Our overview of the different scouting regions and nation’s youth rating gives you a better insight into nations and regions beneficial to scout.

4.1 What’s the benefits of improving the scouting knowledge?

The main objective of scouting is to enhance your knowledge level of players and teams around you. With more information about the evolving world around you, you’ll able to make better decisions both in terms of recruitment but also about what to do when facing the player in upcoming fixtures. As you increase your scouting knowledge, hidden bargains, potential future stars and likely key members for your future squad may be revealed to you.

Basically, when we refer to scouting knowledge we can divide it into what you know about; individual players, teams, competitions, nations, regions and continents.

Improving the knowledge level of a region or nation will basically increase the number of players visible in the Search and add more real players to teams around the world, both senior and youth players. The higher knowledge level of that region or nation, the more information available to you, especially about the player based in that area.

Improving your scouting knowledge of specific teams will give you more information about the way they play both relating to tactics and systems used, but also give you an insight to key players, strong partnerships together with form and statistical trends. With more information about the team’s strength and weaknesses, it will be easier to make decisions relating to how you want to counter their threat. For instance, in the likes of applying certain tactical instructions or using specific systems or strategies that might make you victorious. It enables you to work on specific weaknesses or strength in training that increase your chance of a favourable result in the upcoming fixture, such as set-piece routines.

The most essential part of improving the scouting knowledge relates to learning more about the players around you, whether they are part of future opponents, potential signings or just peripheral player’s based in your country, that could be likely targets in the future.

By improving the player knowledge , more information within the player profile will be available to you, which would be valuable when facing the player and you need to set up opposition instructions. Similarly, the information you get can enable you to make better decisions in recruiting players.

In addition to enabling basic information to you, such as his current and potential abilities, positional abilities, increasing the player knowledge by compiling scout reports will go to assessing four aspects of a player’s profile.

This overview will let you see some of the benefits of improving the scouting knowledge of players:

Basic Information

• Current Abilities
• Potential Abilities
• Positional Abilities
• Hidden Attributes
• Media Description
• Media Handling Style
• Favored Personnel
• Player Style

On-Pitch Performance

• Player Attributes (Strongest & Weakest)
• Role Suitability
• Player form
• Games played in position

Personality & Dynamics

• Personality
• Player Happiness (Positive & Negative)
• Adaptability
• Dressing Room; How he will fit into the club’s Social groups
• Future Plans (long-term & Short-term)
• Relationships

Contract Status

• Availability e.g Transfer & Loan Status
• Actual Playing Time
• Minimum/Maximum Asking Price
• Estimated Cost e.g Agent Fees

By increasing the knowledge about players hidden attributes will be revealed. These hidden attributes are related to a person’s Adaptability, Consistency, Dirtiness, Versatility, Injury Proneness and Important Matches.

4.2 Setting up Your Manager Profile | Specific Scouting Trick to Enhance National & Player Knowledge

Every non-playing staff have the potential to influence the club’s scouting knowledge no matter they are a scout, Performance Analyst, Coach or U23 Manager. It’s not only the current backroom staff which can affect a club’s scouting knowledge.

You have the potential to affect it as well!

Besides signing non-playing staff with knowledge outside your current scope you can set up your Manager Profile in a way which enhances both the knowledge of specific nations as well as senior and junior (Under-23) players. There are two important sections when setting up your Manager Profile that will affect both your knowledge of players and potential influence on the club’s scouting knowledge.

1. Nationality and Second Nationality

One way to improve a minor club’s scouting knowledge is by setting your Nationality (and/or Second Nationality) to one outside the nation you’ll be managing in. Whilst your primary nation will give you full knowledge of that particular nation, a second nationality will give you widespread knowledge (50-80%) of your second nation.

Without the required scouting scope or suited scouting package, your knowledge through Nationalities can actually increase the number of players visible in the Player Search.

The second way to improve your knowledge of players can be done when setting up your Managerial Style. I’m talking about using some of your points to boost the mental attributes ‘ Player Knowledge ‘ and/or ‘ Youngster Knowledge ‘.

While Player Knowledge will affect your knowledge of senior player’s player attributes, Youngster Knowledge will do the same by affecting your default knowledge of Under-23 player’s attributes.

With Attributes Masking ‘ON’, a player’s attributes are either displayed as ranges or not revealed at all – meaning you reduce your knowledge of the player’s within your database size. The only way to gain knowledge of these players is by scouting them for a longer time or interacting with the player. Information about him may also be revealed through matches or as part of a team in the same division. As a result, it may be beneficial to boost Youngster and Player Knowledge to increase your default knowledge level of players around the world.

Attribute Masking makes certain attributes not visible to the Human Manager as FM assumes the manager will not know everything about every player in the world. It’s one of the advanced options when selecting active leagues and game start date. By ticking the box you’ll disable attributes masking and make attributes and personality visible to you. It will increase your general knowledge of the players. Disabling attribute masking will remove the effect of the points allocated to Youngster or Player Knowledge when setting up your Manager’s attributes.

Disabling Attributes Masking will make you less dependent on the level of the Youngster or Player Knowledge within your Manager Profile as attributes and basic player information is visible by default.

4.3 How Scouting Range & Database Size Relates?

Scouting is a widespread process where the recruitment team scour through thousands of prospects to identify targets that fits your tactics, the club DNA or the club vision. To refine the massive pool of players, you have scouting ranges, which limit the search results according to the database size.

The database size determines the approximate player count and is influenced by the number of nations and leagues loaded. It takes into account whether you opt for an advanced, large or minimal database size when setting up your save. As you know, Football Manager enables you to load all players from a continent, region or nation within the advanced function as well as letting you select the playable nations and leagues.

It’s important to consider which active nations and leagues you should load according to the transfer policy and club vision you want to incorporate with your team.

It may be beneficial to load neighboring countries and nations with a similar reputation level as the club you intend to manage in, in order to be able to sign players at a similar level, both financially and in terms of player’s ability levels. It also enables you to send out players on loan to give them playing time at an appropriate level.

It’s wise to consider the pool of available players right from the start when setting up your career.

There’s no use of loading all players from Asia or from Asian countries if you’re looking to do a youth development save in France – aiming to develop players from your own academy. Similarly, it may be smart to load all Scandinavian nations or nations like Poland, Croatia or Serbia if you’re managing in Holland or Germany due to the club’s finances and availability in signing affordable players.

Another aspect, is to consider nations with high youth rating and features club’s with great youth academies if you restrict yourself to a transfer policy of mostly signing players under the age of 21.

Yet again, you’ll see the link between club vision, transfer policy and your objectives and challenges with the preferred save.

4.3.1 The Different levels of Recruitment Packages: Scouting Range

4.5 How to take advantage of the scouting range? Money saving tips!

Depending on your club’s financial situation, what scouting range is allowed by the Board, the club’s level and your available Scouting budget, you’re able to edit the allowed scouting range by selecting the appropriate scouting range.

Not every team will have the necessary funds available to take advantage of the higher-end scouting packages. If you’re struggling with low transfer budgets and/or scouting budgets, it may be financially smart to decrease the Scouting range to National or Surrounding Divisions outside transfer windows, or when you’re not looking for players and are happy with your current squad. With this approach you’re able to save money on a monthly basis!

However, since the scouting range determines the number of available players it’s smart to take advantage of the higher-end scouting ranges. But if you’re playing in the lower leagues, or not having the financial strength to acquire an global, continental or regional scouting range, there are one trick to take advantage of.

• Whenever you’re in the process of scouting for players, select the highest available scouting range. Go to players in range and use filters to search for players. Now, it’s important to NOT advance in the game by clicking the Continue button. Instead, take your time to finish your business and put the players you’re interested in, in a shortlist. This way, you’ll be able to receive more players in the Player Pool without having to pay for the monthly cost of that Scouting Range.

5. Scouting Responsibilities

Like with everything else in Football Manager, you’ll have the options to take charge or delegate responsibilities to your backroom staff.

Whether you are more of a hands-on manager who likes to be involved in the smallest affair, or you prefer to delegate and spread responsibilities around, your decisions in this area will affect how involved you’ll be with any Scouting Activities. It’s a decision of going for a more basic approach, where you trust your scouts to find suitable targets that fit your system or rely on more advanced methods to search for players by scheduling assignments and use filters to both improve your overall scouting knowledge and identify more players.

The Scouting Centre gives you a quick way to manage your scouting responsibilities . In total there are six areas which you can take control of regarding scouting and data analysis, but it’s only the ones specifically aimed at scouting which you can take control over from the Scouting Centre. For managing responsibilities relating to analysis reports, you’ll need to head to; Staff > staff responsibilities > Scouting .

The different scouting responsibilities are;

• providing scout feedback
• assigning scouts (e.g, setting up scouting assignments for your scouting team)
• handling scouting meetings

Apart from affecting how you scout for players, this area will decide upon how much feedback you’ll get from the scouting team and their recommendations.

Let us take a deeper look into the different responsibilities areas and what they do.

5.1 Providing Scouts Feedback

The person in charge of providing scouts feedback , normally a Chief Scout, Scout or Director of Football, will give feedback on the scouting assignments. He will sort out a list of Player Recommendations which the scouting team has gathered out on missions and send his feedback about the reports to you in your preferred way; inbox messages, emails or make them visible in the Scouting Centre.

Besides providing you with feedback about recommendations, the person in charge will notify you about when scouting assignments have finished, or when a scout starts/finish scouting individual players.

I tend to let my Chief Scout handle this responsibility as he will update you on everything concerned with your scouting program.

5.2 Assigning Scouts

Whoever in charge of assigning scouts will basically determine who will set up the assignments for your scouting team and keep your scouts busy with compiling reports and recommendations.

By delegating this area to either your Director of Football or Chief Scout, depending on which role you got, will mean scouting assignments are handled automatically by the staff in charge. He will then randomly decide which nations, competitions or matches to watch, meaning he will basically run your entire scouting program, regardless of your objectives.

He will keep track of how the ongoing assignments go and schedule new assignments once the previous assignment is finished without letting you have any influence on how scouting knowledge is improved. Instead, he’ll use his own judgement of favorable places to scout within the current scouting range and will literally manage the scouting team.

If you shall have any influence on the scouting program and establishing a specific scouting policy it’s of utmost importance to take charge of setting up scouting assignments yourself!

By taking charge of it yourself, you’ll be able to set your personal mark on all scouting affairs and take advantage of advanced tips and tricks to identify likely prospects. You’ll have total control of every scouting activity as you can prioritize assignments according to your ambitions and objectives, or according to your preferred scouting philosophy and recruitment policy.

This is one of the few set and forget options. Changing the person who shall manage this in the middle of the season will cancel and delete every current ongoing scouting assignments. Despite the assignment is cancelled and all scouts are called back home, none of the compiled scout reports is lost, even though the shortcut of players found out on the mission is removed from the overall assignment page.

In addition to being forced to start from scratch, you’ll lose all progress made in improving the scouting knowledge. It’s not like the knowledge the scout has built up is deleted, but rather kept on hold. This can be devastating for your scouting program for a longer period as gaining knowledge of a nation takes a vast amount of time!

5.3 Scouting Meetings & Handling its Responsibilities

Scouting meetings provides you with a summary of Reports your Scouting Team recommends you to look at. You can look at these meetings as reminders that occur in intervals, and makes you aware of potential targets which you are encouraged to browse through and take actions on.

In some ways, it’s an extension of the Scouting Centre as it brings awareness to the recommended players from the Recommendation panel. To grab your attention about these players, the Scouting Team will forward an inbox message at specific intervals determined in the Scouting Centre Preferences. It enables you to get feedback on the determined scouting strategies and focuses decided in Recruitment meetings.

You can handle these meetings yourself, or delegate the task to the most suited person in the Scouting Team – most often the Chief Scout.

When handling these meetings yourself you’ll be provided with a list of players which you can take further actions on, either you want to keep scouting the player, acknowledge or discard interest, put him on a shortlist or the transfer target list, or formalize a bid.

The number of players which you can go through at Scouting Meetings depends on the number of recruitment focuses and scouting assignment you have set up to identify potential signings.

When handing scouting meetings to one of your Scouts, you delegate the responsibility of going through all the player recommendations. He will then take the actions he deems necessary, whether it’s to keep scouting the player, discard interest or notify you about the player.

This could be an option if you don’t want to browse through hundreds of players but simply receive inbox messages about the best players you should be aware of. This will reduce the amount of reports delivered but makes your involvement with Scouting more pinpointed in regard to feedback from assignments as you hand over some control to scouting.

Delegating the responsibility:

There are two ways to delegate the responsibility of handling Scouting Meetings to the Chief scout, or one in your Scouting Team;

• Scouting > Scouting Coverage > Scouting Responsibility > Handling Scouting Meetings > Delegate to (by using the drop down menu)
• Staff > Responsibilities > Scouting > Handling Scouting Meetings

NB! You will find more options to delegate the responsibilities of your Analysis team relating to Analysis Reports in the Staff Responsibilities.

How frequent should Scouting Meetings be held?

The frequency of the scouting meetings depends on you, the situation within your team and how effective your scouting team is to find players and gather reports. It can be held from every day to once a month, no matter if it’s within or outside transfer windows.

How frequent they should be held is up to you and how important you deem it necessary to keep track of the ongoing scouting activities. My personal preference is to increase the frequency of when these meetings are held within transfer windows to avoid missing out on likely targets and great suggestions.

In the Scouting Preferences you can decide how frequent recommendations of players should be delivered to your inbox. You can set an quicker interval during transfer windows, and a longer interval outside transfer windows.

In fact, I tend to set the frequency to once a week at the beginning of the pre-season or transfer window, increasing it to every second day if I’m in desperate need of strengthening my squad in the latter stages of the transfer window. This means I like to handle these meetings myself.

Outside transfer windows I want these meetings with the scouting team to occur on a monthly basis. It lets me get a better picture of the efficiency of my scouts and enables me to judge their job while browsing through scout reports of potential signings.

Actionable Steps to take at Scouting Meetings

As you browse through the reports either in the Scouting Centre or in Inbox messages, you’ll have several options to take further actions for each individual. There are eight different types of actions you can take.

• Discard: Signals you have no interest in the player what so ever. clicking the button will inform the Scouting Team that you don’t want the player to be recommended or appear in any future player searches. Basically, you dismiss the report and removes him from any future suggestions.
• Acknowledge: means no further actions are required on this player and simply want to remove this entry from the Scouting Centre.
• Get Analyst Report: If the report card hasn’t been provided by an Analyst, you can request that a member of that department files a full statistical report on the player.
• Scout Player: Will look to scout the player at the length of time determined in the Scouting Centre Preferences.
• Keep Scouting: Add the player to your scouting assignments to generate a full Report Card.
• Make Offer: Immediately begin negotiations to sign the player.
• Offer Trial: Formalize an inquiry about trial according to the specified length of time determined in the notifications preferences relating to action buttons.
• Agent Availability: Lets you get in touch with the Player’s Agent to monitor the player’s interest in joining your club. It opens a remote chat with the agent which let you get information about what it may require from the agent or the club to come to an agreement. The agent may describe some of the player’s needs or the cost relating to a potential transfer.

In addition to these actions, you’ll also get the option to:

• add the player to the Shortlist
• add as a transfer target puts the player on your wishlist and gives your Director of Football to formalize a bid. He will then make an offer based on the instructions you’ve given to him if any. If no instructions are given, he will proceed with a transfer offer according to his own preferences; what he deems necessary to successfully sign the player.
• Declare as Top Targets will notify the club and media about your interest. You are only limited to declare one (1!) Top Target, which means you should carefully consider whom to pick. You can take further actions about the priority of the transfer and which other preferences you got relating to the overall transfer cost (e.g. maximum wage and transfer offer amount) – giving your Director of Football specific instructions when making an offer.

If your club possesses a Director of Football, he will automatically handle all incoming transfer activities relating to players on the transfer target list. You can find your current list of Transfer Targets at: Transfers > Director of Football > Transfer Targets You can set specific instructions for your DoF when handling offers on potential targets such as setting the maximum cost, clarify the agreed playing time for any contract negotiations and set an expiry date of the offer.

At this screen, you can even let the Director of Football suggest his own transfer targets. You can ask the DoF to suggest potential transfer targets according to position and role according to the four different transfer statuses and scenarios; Transfer, Loan, ‘End of Contract’ and ‘Free Transfer’.

6. Setting up Scouting Assignments & Recruitment Focuses

The next step on the agenda is to look at how you can set up scouting assignments in Football Manager, or what is now called recruitment focuses in Football Manager 2024, and the different types of assignments you can take.

When setting up new assignments you’d like them to conform to your overall transfer policy and philosophy decided in the club vision, along with the overall objectives detailed in the first section. Your assignments will feature a mix of short- and long-term recruitment focuses.

These recruitment focuses may have been decided upon Recruitment meetings or by assessing the squad at the Squad Planner.

When writing this, I take into account you handle scouting assignments yourself. It will be far more effective to spend some extra time assigning scouts yourself rather than letting your Chief Scout or Director of Football randomly scout nations, competitions, teams or players. See Scouting Responsibilities .

How you assign your scouts must coincide with why we need to focus on scouting as much as training or tactics. The reason is simple; to improve our knowledge level of players, teams, competitions, nations and/or regions to further identify more potential signings!

The number of assignments you can set up will depend on the size of your scouting team, which means a team in the lower leagues with less available funds and a more limited scouting scope will need to scout for players quite differently than a top club.

How to set up scouting assignments (aka recruitment focuses)?

Setting up scouting assignments are basically easy. You simply head to either;

• Scouting > Recruitment Focus
• Scouting > Scouting coverage > Specific Scout > click Create a new Focus

New scouting assignments are also created in Recruitment Meetings – all depending on whether you got scouts available to look for new targets.

The scouting coverage screen lets you see which scouts are out on a mission and where. If you’d like to get an overview of all the reports the specific scout has gathered, you need to click on:

Scout > Reports > Scout Reports and/or Scout Assignments

The scout assignment page let you get a total number of reports acquired on the assigned recruitment focus and giving you the ability to adjust the focus if he doesn’t find as many players.

By visiting the Scouting Assignment page fairly regularly you will have full control of your scouting network and track the progress of all your scouting activities.

Types of Scouting Assignments

Generally speaking, there are three different types of missions to assign scouts on, each with their own objectives; Players , Teams and Matches .

• Scouting for players using different filters and preferences that truncate the results. Here you have a huge range of different methods from searching for specific player types to positions and roles, according to transfer status, current and potential abilities, attributes and statistical data.
• Assigning a scout to acquire reports about a specific team or the next opposition more focused on key players and overall strength and weaknesses relating to that team’s abilities.
• Assigning an analyst to get ongoing reports about the next opposition . These reports are more focused on the opponent’s recent performances relating to statistics, overall performance and trends in addition to how they play in an analytical perspective.
• Assigning scouts to attend specific matches to acquire knowledge of future opponent’s players or potential signings you’re highly interested in.

A functional scouting program will include the use of all these three scouting options throughout a season.

Let’s take a closer look at how to set up recruitment focuses for players and teams and their specific benefits.

6.1 Creating A Recruitment Focus

The first option when creating new assignments is the option to look for players. When assigning scouts, 90% of your scouting network will be tasked with working on a Recruitment Focus to find potential transfer targets.

A Recruitment Focus allows you to set a series of specific parameters for your recruitment team to use as the framework for identifying potential new signings.

These types of tasks looks to identify recommended players using a number of different options to help to refine the search results exactly to the type of player you desire. Here you’d like to identify potential signings according to your current needs; whether it’s to find players to develop for the long-term or to simply identify first-team candidates that can take your club to another level in the short-term.

When creating a recruitment focus you’ll be able to select from a set of criteria. The recruitment focus screen is split between main and further details which enables you to set a number of conditions to limit the number of matching recommendations.

When creating a new Recruitment focus you will need choose whether you wish to choose a specific position, or ‘any position’ before entitling the assignment and select from a range of other details.

The main details ranges from anything between the age range to position, role, priority and which scouts to travel on the mission.

The Further details screen enables you to specify and limit the focus by scouting for players transfer value, wage, contract status and other useful criteria that will help you find suitable players according to a certain transfer policy.

A closer insight into the different conditions to select from when searching for players will be covered in our guide on how to scout for players in Football Manager.

6.2 The Different Recruitment Focus Priorities:

These player assignments are basically a number of different Recruitment Focuses with different degrees of priority: Top , Standard and Ongoing.

6.2.1 Top Priority Recruitment Focus

Top Priority will ask the Recruitment Team to put extra effort, and resources on the focus to identify players and bring you the reports as quick as possible. You will ask a minimum of two scouts to work on the assignment. According to size of your scouting team, there will automatically be a limit of the number of Top Priority Scouting Focuses to set up.

These top priority recruitment focuses is basically short-term scouting focuses. Normally they are finished within a few weeks. Therefore I use them to scout for and to identify First Team Players that can be brought in and improve the Squad Depth immediately.

Personally, I use it only within Transfer Windows to find emergency signings, or when I’m in desperate need to replace a player. It may be the Squad Depth is poor for whatever reason, meaning you’re in a need to provide enough cover in that position to cover for injury crisis or fatigue. Perhaps you’ve got a player who have requested to be transfer listed, or is wanted by bigger clubs and you will find it difficult to keep him at the club. Perhaps you have just sold one of your key players, got a long-term injury in a key position or are looking for a short-term signing to improve the team.

Minimum Current Ability: Since you are prioritizing finding first team players, you need to set the parameter for minimum current ability to approximately two and a half star – the average level for the position. This ensures that you’re not missing out of any potential near matches, especially if your squad is loaded with high quality players. If you’re playing in a lower division, there’s nothing wrong to select a minimum three stars.

Assigning Scouts: Requires minimum two scouts to begin. For these missions, I prefer to select the scouts with the highest Judging Player Ability . This ensures that the scout report is as accurate as possible.

Assigning analyst: The same goes for piking the right Recruitment analyst. Select the one with the highest possible Judging Player Ability and Analyzing Data .

Choose Position / Role: When setting up top priority recruitment focuses you would ideally choose the same position and role as within your primary tactics.

Since you are basically looking for a player who can slot in and perform from day one, it’s useful to specify the preferred position and role – e,g if you’re looking for a new striker, choose ST (C) and the same role as within your tactics e.g Deep-lying Forward.

NB! By selecting the desired player role, you’ll limit the number of reports and increase the time it takes to finish the task as less players might match your settings. I recommend to either decrease the minimum proficiency to play the role from Good (Default) to Decent, or simply select ‘Any Role’ by clicking on the ‘Players suited to playing’ drop down menu.

NB! Top priority recruitment focus can be a useful option to get knowledge of a huge pool of players very fast. You may wish to use this option at the start of a new save to let your entire scouting team look for players according to your specific criteria – for instance any players between the age of 15 and 21 with a World Reputation of ‘Okey’ to quickly find those best wonderkids in Football Manager, bargains or players on free transfer.

READ MORE | How to scout for the best wonderkids & newgens on Football Manager

6.2.2 The Standard Focus

The Standard priority recruitment focus will only require one scout to be working on the mission, instead of multiple scouts. The result is that it will take longer time to find suitable recommendations and acquire appropriate reports, but will let you gain more knowledge of players within a nation, region, or a continent.

Normally, it will take around a month before a Standard Focus is finished. It’s therefore useful to set these up at least a few months before the transfer window opens.

You can use Standard priority when you wish to potential long-term signings – perhaps you’re planning for the next transfer window, or simply have a specific transfer policy and club vision that you wish to abide by.

Personally, I use these Standard focuses to increase my knowledge of players and simply extend the number of suitable options if I need to improve my squad. The criteria I go by for these searches is slightly different to the Top Priority.

Rather than choosing a specific position (unless I’m looking to improve a position in the long-term based on analysis in the Squad Planner), I favor to select ‘Any Position from Tactic’ and ‘Any Role’. The minimum current ability is also lowered to two stars, whilst minimum potential ability is set to three stars.

The preferred age of players is also changed – from the default 15 – 50 year old, to 15 to 28 – when players are peaking, or according to the desired Club Vision relating to recruitment.

Assigning Scouts: Requires minimum one scout to begin. Since you’re looking for future signings in a rather broad range, the scouts you select for these missions needs both decent Judging Player Ability and Judging player Potential.

Whether you decide to prioritize scouting specific nations or regions in a Standard Focus is all up to you. Covering the major nations with a Standard focus may give you a large database of player recommendations that you later can go back to in Scouted Players. Then you can create more specific filters to find the best targets.

If you have a limited scouting network, anytime you set up Top Priority scouting focus you will pause any Standard focuses.

A scout will only begin a standard focus once they have finished on a top priority. Football Manager

6.2.3 Ongoing Focuses

Ongoing focuses is more long-term scouting focuses that prioritize maintaining or increasing knowledge of a specific nation or a region. These recruitment focuses will have the lowest priority and do not have an end date.

You can use them to scout a specific nation, region or a specific competition of your preferences. Since these missions never last, how you set up ongoing focuses will be an important part of your club’s scouting network.

I use these to find Hot Prospects for the future – either they focus on players from a specific Nation or a region within a specific age limit but you can also use them to find specific types of players or within a specific transfer cost range.

Often, I ask my scouts to find players between the age of 15 and 21 with a minimum ability of 1 star and maximum potential of three or three and a half star, depending on the club I’m managing.

When creating ongoing recruitment focuses you are not concerned whether the players fit your tactics or not. In fact, you’d like to select ‘Any Tactic’, ‘Any position’ and ‘Any role’, to ensure you’ll get a broad selection of players. The reason is simple, I use these ongoing focuses to simply identify more talents.

While a Standard focus is probably a bit more focused assignment where you have a clear mission on what you’re after – for instance purchasing a new striker, you can look at an ongoing focus as a more basic and overall scouting assignment.

Ultimately, you can use these Ongoing focuses for missions you would like to run season after season regardless of the current quality of the squad and future planning.

NB! It will be useful to keep scouting the same nations/regions as players progress and new players enter the area, either as newgens in youth intakes or from transfers.

6.2.4 Scouting Duration

Prior to Football Manager 2023, you where able to set the duration of each scouting assignment according to the desired period. Now, that is integrated in the different types of recruitment focuses. Anyway, when starting a new scouting assignment it’s important to remember that the scout may take some time to settle in before being able to deliver reports of potential targets. This means that you should consider the desired duration according to the scout’s abilities (read Adaptability), current scouting knowledge (of a particular nation) and what you ask him to find.

The scouting duration depends on the priority:

• Top Priority – a few weeks
• Standard Priority – around a month
• Ongoing priority – lasts until you decide to end them.

6.2.5 Progress & Results of The Recruitment Focus

You can always monitor the progress of your different recruitment focuses. In the Scouting Overview, you’ll have the full list of all the different scouting assignments. Even though I miss the chance to view the number of players from the overview, you can click the > button to view the results of the desired recruitment focus.

This opens a screen with the recommended players. The In Progress tab let you see how many players that the scout is currently creating a report on. It may include recommended players from other recruitment focuses you got running if you have enabled it.

Sometimes you will see there are a huge number of players In Progress while very few or none are being Recommended. In the process the scout will sort the list and only bring through those that match your search criteria. Players that doesn’t quite reach the minimum requirements will either end up in Near Matches or fall through.

If you see a huge difference in players being recommended and ‘In Progress’ you might have set too strict conditions, either you have set an unrealistic low transfer value, or a too high minimum current / potential ability rating. It will be useful to keep track on the In Progress screen from time to time to see which players are missing the cut. You might find gold within that screen!

[image in progress]

The Near Matches list will notify you of any player(s) who have for any reason fallen outside the matching criteria but the scout believes is worthy to know of. These players might have just missed the cut for being recommended due to wrong current ability, different potential ability or is proficient in another role.

6.2.6 Using templates to scout for player types

(Used for Football Manager 2022 or earlier, but you can use these tips to set up appropriate recruitment focuses for FM23.)

To help you on your way to set up player assignments you’ll have different templates at hand. These templates are pre-set conditions that you can use to save time setting up specific missions. Which assignments to use will depend on your recruitment focus and types of players you’re after.

There are four types of player templates that are available in Football Manager by default. Each with their own specific conditions that ease your job.

The First Team Player Assignment will focus the attention on players who can become valuable squad member by improving the current squad with his qualities and skills. The scout will scour the determined scope for players with at least ‘Good’ current ability rating (aka 3 stars). The scout who should take on these assignments requires first and foremost high levels of Judging Player Ability as the objects are most often players above the age of 21 and fully developed.

This can be an option if you got first-team player(s) who wants to play at a higher level or are wanted by another club, which increases the risk of him leaving the club. It can also be an option to use this task when got a player who isn’t performing at the required level (perhaps due to current abilities, weaknesses in attributes or severe injuries that has affected his game).

The Backup player Assignment will prioritize the focus on searching for suitable targets who might not require as much playing time, but who would agree on playing a second fiddle and come into the first team occasionally, either due to provide a cover for injuries or give necessary rest to your star players. The scout will search for players with a minimum current ability of at least two 2 stars.

Choose further details: Actual Playing Time and select either Emergency Backup, Fringe Player or Impact Sub to search for potential back up options.

A Hot Prospect Assignment might be a great solution for any team focusing on youth development. This assignment might be the perfect option for teams with a club vision of signing young players for the future or to develop for profit. The scout will search for players that are 24 or younger and with a minimum potential ability of three stars. The scout who should undertake such assignments requires first and foremost high levels of Judging Potential Ability as the objects are not fully developed and require one who can evaluate the underlying factors that might hinder his future progress.

The Replacement for option lets you create an assignment that looks to find a player who can become a suitable replacement for a specific player within your team. In order to successfully set up this assignment, you need to refine it by selecting the position on the pitch and which player you want to replace. The scout will then use his knowledge about the player’s current abilities, potential and best attributes related to the position to identify targets who can be as good as the one you want to replace.

The scout you select to undertake these missions requires high levels of Judging Player Ability and JPP.

TIP! By using additional conditions like specifying specific attributes you can limit certain weaknesses related to the one you want to replace.

Related | How to use the ‘Find Similar Players To’ to identify future world class players

6.3 Team Assignments

Scouting in Football Manager is not only focused on gaining knowledge of players, nations and regions. A major part of it is to compile team reports by setting up team assignments.

In difference to gathering reports on players and their strengths and weaknesses can you ask your scouts… or should I say Data Analysts, to compile reports about specific teams or ongoing reports about the next opposition.

Gaining knowledge of teams around you has its benefits. By receiving reports on teams you’ll acquire a bunch of useful information you can take advantage of in a future encounter.

In reality, there are two types of team reports. One anyone within your scouting pool can carry out, and one which the Performance Analyst can undertake. The main difference between the Team Report and the Analyst Report are how in-depth they are.

The first focuses on the team’s overall abilities – strength and weaknesses while the latter focuses on the team performance and effectiveness with their tactics.

You can create any of the below team assignments by heading to:

Scouting > Scouting Coverage > Match and Team Analysis

6.3.1 Report on Specific Teams

This assignment type looks to get reports on a specific team’s overall strength and weaknesses, squad depth and other useful information related to their stats. You’ll be able to identify key players and top performers as well as giving you the ability to conduct a squad comparison between the two, focusing more on attributes relating to general stats, positional areas such as goalkeepers, midfielders or attackers, or player attribute’s divided by physical, mental or technical abilities.

You can compile a team report of any teams within Football Manager. Simply type in the name of the team you like to get more information about and conduct a search. Then, select a scout with high ratings in Tactical Knowledge and Judging Player Ability to gather the most accurate report possible.

Once a team report is finished, an inbox message will be forwarded containing links to a more in-depth report. The full report is also available at; Club Name > Team Reports > Scout Report .

6.3.2 Ongoing reports on next opposition

Ongoing reports on the next opposition will gather a somehow similar team report as above. Instead of searching for a team to scout, you will ask a scout to report on the upcoming opposition.

These reports will be available under; Team Report > Next opposition > Scout Report

This type of report is most often used in conjunction with analyst’s reports compiled by the Performance Analyst, or a member of your Analysis Team.

6.3.3 Ongoing Analyst Reports

One of the most important reports is ongoing analyst reports which together with reporting of the opposition’s strength and weaknesses compiles post-match analysis of your opponent and your own team. They will analyze statistical data about recent performances and trends. It enables you to get in-depth knowledge to goal analysis, formation analysis and expected tactical system and style.

A host of information relating to their tactic’s strength and weaknesses along with Stat Packs and Individual Match Analysis can be used to determine how you should counter them. These reports will be forwarded to you via an Inbox message a few days prior to the match.

When setting up an analyst assignment you can determine whether you want a specific Analyst to compile the reports and how many matches he shall analyze. You can decide whether he shall analyze the last one to three matches. More matches analyzed means a greater foundation for the analyst report. You’ll be able to see how your opponent set up their tactics home and away and when facing different opponents.

6.4 Attending Specific Matches

One of the most important aspects of scouting is to watch potential targets in action. Perhaps you’re highly interested in a specific target and you’ve gained full knowledge of him, but needs a better foundation to make the right decision.

Instructing a specific scout to attend a specific match will increase the knowledge level of the players featured in the match. You’ll get a full list of the matches played on that day, or upcoming matches, for all your playable leagues.

Visting the page will even let you see which scouts will attend which matches, displayed by a green magnifying glass together with the scout’s name. A match no one attends is displayed as ‘No Action’. Clicking the drop-down menu lets you select a scout to attend the match or edit the current setup.

Personally, I tend to visit this page just to control which matches are watched. For instance, it might not be highly likely to find a suitable target in a match between two clubs at a lower playing level which one of your scouts will attend. Then you can easily remove him from that duty and instruct him to attend a different match, perhaps the next day.

P.S. If you regularly want your scout to attend matches in a specific competition, I recommend you to scout that specific competition instead of frequently editing matches watched.

7. Scouting Priorities

The scout priorities page lists all requests you’ve made for players to get a scout report of. Here you’ll see all individual scouting trips you have going on and the order of when the scout report will be finished.

With a huge scouting network and many players on your radar, there might be several scouting requests ongoing. Perhaps you have requested multiple scout reports of newgens at youth intakes or a number of players within a player search. These players are added to the scout priority list. Even with a huge scouting pool, the result is most often that the scouts can’t handle the workload as players you wish to get a higher knowledge of get queued up until an available scout can finish the assignment.

Trying to get multiple scout reports of players will apart from increasing the scout’s workload increase the await time.

The solution is to manage the scouting priorities!

By managing your scouting priorities you can easily arrange the order of scout requests, get an overview of the time remaining until the scout report will be delivered, cancel one or multiple scout requests or increase the priority of a specific request.

Changing the order of priority is easy. Simply click and hold over the priority button and drag and drop. If you want to move a player to the top of the priority list, then I recommend clicking the Priorities Assignment which will change the priority to urgent and move him to the top of the list.

To reduce the workload of your scouting team and ensure they are as efficient as possible, I suggest to cancel any assignment for players with a recommendation rating of C+. This is especially useful if you have hundreds of reports on hold.

The list of scouting priorities is found at; Scouting > Recruitment Focus > Scout Priorities

8. Conclusions

Scouting, like training or any other area of Football Manager, can be as basic or complex YOU want it to be. It’s all about understanding when to use the different methods in your scouting toolbox and when to take advantage of the specific scouting tips provided in our guide to scouting in Football Manager.

For me, scouting is a long-term process where the focus can expand from using filters to identify players to more strategical methods where you aim to acquire knowledge of ‘valuable’ nations and regions known to develop great wonderkids and newgens by setting up appropriate recruitment focuses.

Whether you are looking for cheap wonderkids to develop and sell for a profit or search for an immediate first-team signing, knowing as much about the player as possible is important! It’s here scouting comes into play.

The process of scouting and increasing your world knowledge is not done in a year. It requires time and full focus. Attention to details will let you come a long way together with trusting yourself in the given project. Even though you might be required to carefully read hundreds of scout reports to identify targets that fit your system, it will all pay off once you find your gem!

Our ultimate guide to scouting in Football Manager has given you a deeper insight into why you should take a hands-on approach with scouting by interacting with the recruitment team and why it is beneficial.

You’ll have learned how to set up filters to receive feedback and inbox messages that matter the most to you, how to set up your scouting team for the most purposeful function and gained insight into the different types of scouting assignments to take advantage of, to increase your scouting knowledge.

All in all, you’ve received everything you need to set up the foundation for an efficient scouting network. Now it’s time to put it into practice!

In the coming weeks, there will come more in-depth scouting tips looking closer at how I approach scouting in Football Manager and other related aspects. If you have any questions or got any specific inquiries about other Football Manager guides to write, get in touch!

Please give us feedback on this article! If you enjoyed the article, please share it with your friends or give a Like or Retweet on Twitter.

I hope you have found these scouting tips useful. If you got some specific tips you’d like to share, please send them to us at Twitter or at our official Discord server .

Until next time, thanks for reading!

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Owner of Passion4FM since 2012. Football Manager content creator with a special love for tactics, wonderkids and player development.

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Scouting is fundamental to building and maintaining a strong squad, from the senior squad down to the youth squad. It can help you to beat your rivals to the best available players, particularly emerging hot prospects that do not yet have a high reputation. Having an extensive scouting network and using it effectively is therefore of great importance.

Your Scouting Network

Staff scouting knowledge.

Each individual staff member, including yourself, has a scouting knowledge level for one or more nations. A staff member has a 100% knowledge level for his own home nation (except physios, who have only 10%) and can also build up knowledge levels for other nations by:

• Scouting a nation as part of a scouting assignment – This applies to scouts only. A scout’s knowledge level for a nation improves as he spends time scouting that nation. However, his knowledge levels for previously scouted nations also gradually decrease.
• Working in a nation.
• Having favoured personnel from a particular nation – A staff member has a higher knowledge level for the home nation of one of his favoured personnel .

A staff member’s scouting knowledge levels are shown on his staff profile and his favoured personnel are shown on the Information section of his Overview tab.

Club Scouting Knowledge

Your club’s scouting knowledge is comprised of the knowledge levels of all of the sources in your scouting network . The sources in your scouting network include you and all of your staff , along with all of your club’s affiliate clubs and senior affiliates.

The knowledge level your club has for an individual nation is equal to the knowledge level for that nation of the best source; the best source being the source with the highest knowledge level for the nation.

The knowledge level you club has in a geographical region is based on the combined knowledge levels it has for the nations in that region.

The Knowledge tab of the Scouting screen shows your club’s knowledge level for each region and nation. The best source for each nation is shown next to the knowledge level for that nation.

The Effects of Scouting Knowledge

Your club’s scouting knowledge determines how many players you can view and filter on the All Known Players tab of the Scouting screen, and also how many staff you can view and filter on the Staff Search screen. The higher your club’s knowledge level for a nation, the more lower reputation players and staff from that nation you can view. Your club’s scouting knowledge also affects knowledge levels for individual players, as explained below.

An individual scout’s knowledge level for a particular nation affects how many players he is able to find when scouting that nation and how much time it takes him to complete his assignment. The higher his knowledge level, the more players he will find and the more quickly he will complete his assignment. A scout with a 100% knowledge level for a nation will finish an assignment to that nation after a very short period of time as he does not need to stay there to continue to build his knowledge level for the nation.

Building an Effective Scouting Network

It is highly advisable to try to build and maintain a scouting network with knowledge in a wide variety of nations , subject to the scouting range imposed by your club’s board.

In particular, it is recommended that you give greater priority to those nations that are more important for your club. More important nations include:

• Nations that are in the region of your club – Ideally, you want to beat the competition from rival clubs for players in your region. Also, there are likely to be less restrictive regulations on signing such players, such as work permit rules, while such players are more likely to settle well at your club and want to stay there in the long term.
• Nations in your club’s continent with high reputation divisions – Clubs in these nations are more likely to produce players with good ability and potential through their youth systems, develop players better and attract higher quality established players. In Europe, such nations include England, Germany, Italy and Spain.

To view divisions in order of reputation click the world icon, select the tab for you continent, click Profile and then select the Leagues section of the Competitions tab.

• Nations that regularly produce a large number of young players with good ability and potential – Having high knowledge levels for these nations in particular can help you to sign talented players before they establish themselves. Examples of nations with good youth production are provided below.

In order to build and maintain the knowledge of your scouting network you can:

• Sign scouts , and preferably other backroom staff, with good knowledge levels for those more important nations that your club does not already have good knowledge levels for.
• Send scouts on assignments in those nations (particularly more important nations) for which your club has low or no knowledge levels , if possible – However, you should be careful how you assign your scouts. Building up knowledge in a wide variety of nations, including less important nations, can be useful, but you should ensure that the knowledge of each scout remains manageable and that scouts refresh lost knowledge where necessary, especially knowledge lost in more important nations.

The Scouting Assignments guide provides more advice on how to set up scouting assignments.

• Request a new affiliate club or senior affiliate from your club’s board – An ideal affiliate would be one based in a nation that regularly produces a large number of good players.

In addition to building and maintaining the knowledge of your network, you should sign scouts of the highest quality that you can. You should try to sign scouts with good ratings in those attributes discussed in the Scouts guide. In particular, Judging Player Ability and Judging Player Potential are the most important attributes.

Player Knowledge Levels

If you have attribute masking enabled in your game then your club also has a player knowledge level for each individual player who is not at your club. This affects how much information about a player you can view. The player knowledge level for a player can be seen on the Scout Report section of his Reports tab.

You can disable attribute masking when starting a new game by ticking the Disable Player Attribute Masking checkbox. Otherwise, attribute masking is enabled. With attribute masking enabled, attribute ratings for players outside your club are represented as attribute ranges in cases where the actual rating is not known.

Your club’s player knowledge level for a player affects the following:

• Attribute ranges – The higher the player knowledge level, the smaller the attribute ranges that are used to represent the player’s attributes. With a sufficiently high player knowledge level all attribute ratings are known.
• Ability star ratings – The higher the player knowledge level, the less black stars are included in the player’s ability star ratings given in a scout report * for the player. Black stars represent uncertainty regarding ability and are explained in the Player Ability guide. Potential ability may remain uncertain for young players even where the player knowledge level is 100% or the player is at your club. Ability star ratings for scouted players are discussed in the Scout Reports guide.
• Pros and cons – The higher the player knowledge level, the more pros and cons are given in a scout report* for the player. You can check which pros and cons have not yet been assessed for a player by hovering over the areas yet to assess button at the top of the report. Pros and cons for scouted players are discussed in the Scout Reports guide.
• Roles – The higher the player knowledge level, the more roles the player is given ability star ratings for in a scout report* for the player.

*The information on a scout report is static, as explained in the Scout Reports guide, and is based on what the player knowledge level for the player was immediately following the report.

• Position familiarity – The higher the player knowledge level, the more position familiarity information you can see for positions where the player’s familiarity is less than natural .
• Personality – A certain player knowledge level is required to see the player’s personality and media handling style descriptions.
• Player traits – A certain player knowledge level is required to see the player’s traits .
• Plans – A certain player knowledge level is required to see the player’s short-term plans and long-term plans on the Information section of his Overview tab.
• Happiness – A certain player knowledge level is required to see details of the player’s happiness on the Information section of his Overview tab.
• Games Played in Position – A certain player knowledge level is required to see details of the player’s stats in the Games Played in Position panel on the Information section of his Overview tab.
• Player contract information – A certain player knowledge level is required to see details of the bonuses and clauses in a player’s contract .

Your club’s starting player knowledge level for a player is affected by various factors, including:

• Your club’s scouting knowledge level for the nation of the player’s club – The higher your club’s knowledge level for the nation, the higher your club’s player knowledge level for the player.
• Whether the player plays in the same division as your club – Your club has higher player knowledge levels for such players.
• The player’s reputation – The higher the reputation of the player, the higher your club’s player knowledge level for the player.

A player’s reputation description can be viewed on the Information section of his Overview tab.

• Your own ratings in the Player Knowledge and Youngster Knowledge manager attributes – These are explained in the Manager guide.

You can increase your club’s player knowledge level for a player by:

• Scouting the player – The longer your scouts scout the player for and the more matches they watch him play in, the more your club’s player knowledge level for the player will increase. There is a limit to how much knowledge can be gained by requesting report cards only. Furthermore, the better the quality of the scouts you use the more quickly your club will increase its player knowledge level for the player through scouting him.
• Increasing your club’s knowledge level for the player’s nation – The different ways of doing this are explained above.
• Giving a scout an assignment to scout the player’s club’s nation, region or competition – This can increase your club’s knowledge level for the nation the player is based in and can also result in the player himself being scouted.
• Managing your team in matches where the player features for the opposition team.
• Choosing to attend a match in which the player features – You can choose to attend a team’s match by clicking the “ – ” in the Result column on the team’s Schedule screen. You cannot choose to attend a match if your own team is scheduled to play at the same time.

Nations With Good Youth Production

New young players are brought into the game world, or generated, on a regular basis. These players are known as newgens . The nations given below tend to produce more high quality newgens.

Excellent – Brazil

Very Good – Argentina, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Spain

Good – Egypt, England, Holland, Mexico, Nigeria, Turkey

Okay – Algeria, Belgium, Columbia, DR Congo, Ivory Coast, Portugal, USA

Newgens may also be referred to as regens . However, technically a regen is a player who has retired and been regenerated into a new player, as happened in older versions of the game.

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• How to set up a scouting network

This guide will help you turn your local scouting team into a world-wide scouting network.

One of the coolest areas on Football Manager is finding that new super newgen that will develop into a world class player. Finding newgens (or regens) can be done in various ways.

Before we start the guide we would like to add that this guide provides guidelines to improve the chances of finding the best newgens. Following the tips and tricks from this guide will not guarantee a Messi-like newgen every year.

Setting up the team

First thing you will have to do is setting up the scouting team, depending on the size of your club and the possibilities you have available. The first position you will have to fill is the position of Chief Scout .

He is the person that will act in two different areas. Firstly he will need to set assignments for your scouting team (for which he needs high Man Management and Motivation), secondly he will need to be your ‘master adviser‘. The Chief Scout should always have the final say when scouting possible signings.

Once you have signed a Chief Scout you can continue setting up the scouting team. If you want to expand your scouting network, you will have to fill every possible position. You could even ask your board for extra scouts through a board request (keep in mind that they will only agree when all positions are already filled).

When signing scouts you have to make sure you only sign the best scouts possible (duh!).

Attributes your scouts definitely need are:

• Judging Player Ability
• Judging Player Potential
• Determination
• Adaptability

Learn more on scouts in Football Manager

Different scouts

A thing you will have to keep in mind whilst setting up the scouting network is you should sign different types of scouts. You have scouts that are looking for the next Lionel Messi, but you should also have scouts that can determine a players current ability.

That way you will not only find players for the future, but will always keep your current squad in mind as well.

Master scout

It is advised you appoint at least one ‘Master Scout’ . This is the best scout available for your club. This Master Scout will not be used to roam the world for new players. No, his key assignment will be giving the final judgement on players you have on your shortlist and really want to sign.

This scout is the one who will watch players during games and will give you an extensive report for those players. When your Master Scout has finished scouting several players for one position, you will know for sure which one you will need to sign.

Sign scouts from different countries

What is highly valuable for a scouting network? Scouting Knowledge . Scouts can develop their knowledge by spending time in certain parts of the world, but why develop something if you can get it for free? Make sure you create a scouting team with various nationalities from all available continents on Football Manager. The better the knowledge, the better players you will find.

Off course it will not be possible to sign scouts with knowledge from every single country in the world, but concentrate on the countries that will generate the best regens.

Set up & expand your network

After reading the first section of this Guide, you will be able to select the best scouts and have the knowledge to set-up your very own scoutingteam on Football Manager. For the next part of this Guide we will take a look at setting up and expanding your scouting network across the globe.

Scouting Package

The first thing you will need is a scouting package. Consider this to be a database of players you will be able to use for a certain fee. This pack varies from a single league, single nation to an entire continent or even the world.

Scout regions

The first step you will have to take to increase the knowledge of your scouting team is by scouting Regions. This way your scout will travel between countries for a certain amount of time and will gain knowledge of every single country in that region.

Scout nations

After your scouts gain enough knowledge of a certain region (approximately 60%) it is advised to switch to countries instead of regions. For example; your scout has been roaming South America for a year know and has a good knowledge of the continent.

The next step is to assign the scout for individual countries. That way you can skip countries that do not matter (Bolivia, Surinam, Guyana) and focus on countries that dó matter like Brazil, Argentina and Colombia.

Create a cycle

When your scout will be focusing on individual countries, make sure that you create an ongoing cycle of those countries. A period of 1 month per country should be enough for him to find the best players and keep his knowledge on a high level.

But be wary not to assign to much countries to a scout or have him scout a country for too long. That way his knowledge will drop and you will have to start all over again.

Feeder & Parent Clubs

Did you know that you gain knowledge when selecting a Feeder and/or Parent club? If your board agrees to selecting a Feeder club, don’t forget to check your overall scouting knowledge.

Selecting a Feeder or Parent club will give you automatic knowledge of the region and country it plays in. So that is basically free knowledge you get! So if you want to gain knowledge from Brazil, choose a Brazilian club as your feeder club (if possible).

Pick a second nationality

Even though your are fully English or Dutch; pick a second nationality at the start of the game. Why? Because it will give your club automatic scouting knowledge of that country and region.

To close this guide, here are some pointers to take with you.

• Sign a large scouting team
• Scouts for different jobs
• Look for scouts with different nationalities
• Set-up your network by scouting regions
• Expand the network by scouting countries
• Create a scouting cycle
• Pick your Feeder/Parent clubs from area’s you would like to gain knowledge
• Pick a second nationality when starting a new save.
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Compare games, what is fm, scouting for success: a guide to assignments in fm21.

The Scouting Centre… it’s the place where legendary wonderkids are found and it’s the key to taking your squad to the next level. It’s also the place where many tenured FM players have seen their scouting instructions return strong recommendations, only for those players not turn out to be quite what they seemed. Will Goddard aims to rectify those issues, detailing what the Scouting Centre is, how it works in FM21 and how to maximise the assignments you use it to create.

On the face of it, the many different tabs and dropdowns in the Scouting Centre can be daunting for the less experienced player. However, with care and practice, they can become valuable tools in your quest to find the missing puzzle piece to take your team from contenders to champions. This guide will help you to understand two key aspects of the scouting centre; Assignments and World Knowledge.

The Scouting Centre is your hub for all incoming signings and the pace where you discover new players from across the globe. The Scouting Centre offers a variety of options, but I’m going to concentrate on maximising the use of assignments.

Setting up an Assignment

Click on the Scouting Responsibility tab and you’re presented with the option to take full control of assigning your scouts. Taking full control of everything isn’t for everyone in FM21 (indeed delegation is often the name of the game) but this is one area where I’d recommend you take charge, if you’re serious about scouting.

Once you’ve assumed control, you can begin setting up some assignments. Think of assignments as a scout’s shopping list, a detailed set of instructions to develop a winning recipe for your squad. If you hover over the Assignments tab, you’ll see that there are three options; Assignments, Scout Priorities and Analyst Priorities. Click on the Assignment page and there’s an option to Create a new assignment. Here you can let your Scouts know exactly what it is you’re looking for – for example, you might need a right-back who’s both defensively solid and a vital attacking asset.

The beauty of assignments is that they can be as broad or specific as you would like. If you navigate to the Player Type drop-down, you will see that there are four preset options. If you don’t have any specific requirements in mind and are happy to just give your scouts something broad to work towards, these are a good starting place. For example, you might want to sign some younger players to reduce the average age of your squad (potentially working towards a Club Vision objective) so the Hot Prospect option is ideal for you. This means your scouts will look for players under the age of 24 who have good potential for you team (minimum three stars). To introduce more specific criteria, simply click through the Attributes options and/or the Additional Conditions seen above.

Where in the world?

Once you’ve decided the type of player you’re looking for, the next thing to consider is where in the world you would like to look for that player. To do this, select the Scope drop-down menu – here you’re greeted with a plethora of options. Getting the Scope right on an assignment can make a vast difference to your scouts’ effectiveness and the value of the reports they provide you with.

Every scout in Football Manager has a unique level of knowledge for certain areas of the world. This is usually based on where they’re from and the places they’ve worked. You can discover their World Knowledge by looking at their profile. If you decide to send an English scout who has only ever worked in England to Denmark, for example, they’ll struggle to find the right players because they simply won’t know where to look. The scout will learn, eventually, but it’s not a particularly efficient approach and you’d be better served using them somewhere they’re familiar with. It’s important to keep this in mind when selecting a country, or region, for your scouts to explore.

Who’s doing the looking?

The last two aspects to consider when setting up an assignment are its duration and the person you want to undertake it. Duration is self-explanatory – if you send a scout to a place for longer, they are more likely to find the player that you are looking for. However, there is a trade-off. The longer you keep your scout there, the more it will deplete your scouting budget.

We’ve already addressed the World Knowledge of individual scouts, but considering World Knowledge for the club as a whole is also a key tool. It’s a pool of all the knowledge possessed by your scouts, affiliates and staff on regions they’re able to scout. At club level, this increases the number of players that your scouts can find or be aware of. As such, it’s a brilliant tool to use when it comes to finding the next global superstar in a faraway region. However, while this will increase your knowledge of players, it will not find you the players on its own. This is where you intertwine the scouts you’ve hired, the scouting package you’re paying for and the assignments you’ve setup to maximise this World Knowledge and find the missing link for your squad.

Once you have completed your assignment and sent your scouts off to the far reaches of the world, you begin to reap what you’ve sown. After about a month, your scouts’ recommendations will begin to appear in the Scouting Centre and in news items, ready for your assessment. You might even get some additional recommendations that make you rethink your transfer business. But, if you’ve set everything up right in advance, you’ll see more of the type of player you’re looking for and will be recruiting smarter for the seasons ahead.

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How to maximize your scouting network in football manager.

Mastering Scouting in FM: Scouts, Setting Up Scouting, and Expanding Your Football Manager Network

Narrowing things down, expanding your horizons.

Finding the Right Scouts

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Football Manager 2023 Scouting Guide

Every successful club has backroom staff working tirelessly behind the scenes to make sure that processes are managed appropriately. This rule applies just as much in Football Manager as it does in real life, especially with certain categories of staff.

In my opinion, scouts don’t get as much praise as they deserve. They fly to different countries throughout the year, watching several players and deciding if they’re good enough to recommend to the club manager.

In FM23, scouts are just as important as they’ve always been. If you hope to get a lot of quality, accurate player recommendations to improve your squad, you need to make sure that you have the right personnel in those roles.

That said, there’s more to finding the best wonderkids or bargain signings on FM23 than simply hiring the best scouts. Having the right personnel is the first step, but you must also know how to use them to maximum effect.

How do you set up a scouting network? How do you assign scouts to assignments? This Football Manager 2023 scouting guide answers those questions and a few more.

Managing Your Scouting Department

When you start a new game in FM23, the first scout-related move that you need to make is to manage the scouting department. This involves conducting a full review of the staff.

Backroom Staff

When you navigate to the “Staff” section, you will see a full list of the backroom staff at your club. For this guide, we’re only concerned about the scouts.

The best indicators of a good scout are the ratings that they have in two areas – judging player ability and judging player potential. The names are self-explanatory.

You may have to adjust your expectations of how good you want your scouts to be depending on the level of your club. However, a score of 16 and above in each category is generally good enough.

If you review your scouting team and decide that you need upgrades, you can go on to search for new scouts. I included a list of the best free scouts in FM23 a bit further down in this section.

Each club has a minimum and/or a maximum number of scouts allowed by the board so sometimes, you have to let a scout go before you can sign another.

That decision may also become necessary as a result of financial restrictions. If your wage budget is not large enough to allow a new scout signing, you may have to let someone go

A possible solution to these two problems is to make a board request. You can ask the board to increase the wage budget for scouts or to increase the number of scouts allowed in the club at a time. However, these requests could go either way.

Chief Scout

While you’re hiring and/or firing scouts, bear in mind that you need a chief scout that oversees all scouting assignments.

Considering the fact that he’s the leader of the team, I would recommend assigning this role to the scout with the best ratings in the relevant areas. You should also check for good man-management skills as it’s often a good indicator of a strong leader.

The Best Free Scouts in FM23

The table below shows the best free scouts in FM23. I have set a limit of at least a 17 rating in Judging Player Ability and Player Potential for these scouts.

You don’t have to worry about compensation fees, but you should still try to negotiate wage structures that are favorable for your club’s financial standing. If a scout seems to be asking for a lot of money and won’t budge, move on to an alternative.

Managing Your Scouting Budget

As much as you might want to broaden your club’s overall knowledge of the players in world football, you must approach it patiently.

If you send too many scouts on too many assignments to distant places within a short period of time, your scouting budget will drain very quickly.

You can mitigate costs by reallocating funds from your transfer budget to the scouting budget, or you can make a board request.

However, even the teams with the biggest transfer budgets in FM23 can run out of transfer funds, so the most efficient way to manage your scouting budget is to plan better.

Recruitment Focus

In the scouting overview section, there’s a sub-section for recruitment focus. If you select the sub-section, you’ll see an option to create a new recruitment focus. Click on that and a pop-up menu should come up.

This pop-up menu allows you to assign a scout and analyst to compile reports on players that fit a very specific set of categories determined by you.

The filters allow you to specify the position, role, current ability, potential ability, transfer type, age, priority, etc. that you want, and you have the option to assign any scout and analyst or choose specific staff.

Scouting Recommendations

As the reports for your recruitment focus come in, you can view them all in one place on that same sub-section page, or under “Scouting Recommendations” on the Scouting Overview page.

There’s an “RF Matches” tab for the players that shows how many recruitment focus metrics each player matches with. The higher the number, the better the chances that the player is a fit for your team.

When a player’s full report is ready, they’ll also have an overall scout recommendation score, graded from A to F.

Managing Shortlists

Shortlists are a great way to group scouted players into as many categories as you want. That way, it is very easy to find these players when you’re ready to bid.

Obviously, scouting recommendations already group players according to the recruitment focuses that are set, but you won’t automatically get information about these players in your inbox unless they’re on a shortlist.

Also, since scouting recommendations will just keep increasing until you stop the assignment, the lists might become too long to go through after a while.

If you’d like to know when a player that you’re interested in throws a tantrum, requests a transfer, signs a new contract, or does anything that could have an impact on your interest, adding them to a shortlist is the best way.

You can manage these lists in the “Shortlists” tab of the Scouting section. If you’re starting a new game in FM23, it might be worth creating shortlists for free agents, wonderkids, and cheap signings for a start.

Scouting Assignments

When you’re ready to set up a scouting assignment, there are a bunch of options available to you. You can send your scout/s to watch and report on a particular player, team, league, nation, or region.

The duration and costs associated with each one of these assignment types vary according to several factors, so you should pay attention to the costs attached when you’re setting up any new assignment.

Scouting Players

If you’ve started the game with player attribute masking on, you’re going to be doing a lot of scouting.

If you’ve turned the setting off, then you can see the attributes of all the players in-game just by visiting their profile. However, you will still need to scout them to get detailed reports on their ability, potential, and how they could fit into your team.

If you’d like to scout a player, visit their profile and select the “Scout Player” option. Depending on the workload of the scout that you’ve assigned, you should get feedback within a few days.

Scouting Teams

Scouting teams can be really useful when your team is coming up against them soon. You can get a full report of the team’s lineup, formation, style of play, form, strengths, and weaknesses.

This information is crucial for preparing your team to play against them. You can set up tactical instructions that protect you from the opposition’s strengths, and you can also try to exploit their weaknesses.

Scouting Leagues & Nations

If you don’t have a specific player in mind, you can send your scouts to some of the leagues that are well-known for generating quality talent.

Apart from the obvious top leagues, your scouts can dig up some hidden gems and bargain signings from leagues in smaller European nations and South American nations such as Brazil and Argentina.

You could also scout entire nations instead of specific leagues within them. Each nation typically includes multiple leagues, which gives your scouts a wider pool of talent to choose recommendations from.

Scouting Regions

There are six main scouting regions in FM23, and each one of these regions is further broken down into sub-regions. South America, for instance, is divided into South America (South) and South America (North).

The other main regions include Africa, Oceania, Asia, Europe, and North America.

Familiarizing yourself with these regions and the ones most likely to produce the best wonderkids in FM23 will go a long way in making sure that you’re one of the first to know when a high-potential regen pops up somewhere.

Most wonderkids usually come from Europe and South America, but you’ll have even more success if you narrow your scouting down to the sub-regions that contain the most productive nations.

In no particular order, some of the best sub-regions to scout in FM23 are:

• Central Europe
• Eastern Europe
• Western Europe
• UK & Ireland
• South America (South)

Scouting Coverage

As your scouts scour the leagues, nations, and regions that you’ve assigned them to, the club’s overall knowledge of players worldwide will continue to grow.

If you’d like to see how much general information your scouts have about players all over the world, go into the “Scouting Coverage” section. There, you’ll find an illustration of the globe, color-coded according to how much data you have on each region.

Green indicates complete, extensive, or outstanding knowledge about an area while light green indicates a good/very good amount of knowledge. Anything less than that suggests that you still have some work to do in that area.

Final Words

There are three main takeaways from this FM23 scouting guide – sign quality scouts, be intentional with scouting assignments, and always make sure that your staff is not overworked.

If you can follow these fairly simple rules, it won’t be long before there’s a consistent stream of quality talent coming through the door at your club.

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What is the scouting process for NHL Draft prospects? Everything you need to know in 2024

This is my 11th year doing public sphere scouting, and you’re reading the eighth iteration of what has become one of my biggest passion projects: an all-encompassing look at how I do my job.

I wrote the first version of this in Future Considerations’ (now FC Hockey) 2016 NHL Draft Guide, and it has evolved in the years since into something more at The Athletic , where it has gone through annual updates from 2018 , to now, 2024.

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This guide to scouting is meant to be my manual for the work I do here on the evaluation side (which differs starkly from the work I do here on the storytelling side). It’s my opportunity to pull back the curtain for you, the reader. It’s also a chance for me to reflect on the work I’ve done in the preceding year, the way the game (and consequently scouting) is changing, my biases, areas that I need to emphasize and deemphasize, and the things that my process may be missing altogether.

The goal is transparency.

The outcome, I hope, is an annual primer for my final draft board which will give readers a better understanding of the why behind the choices I make in my rankings as you read through them. It should give you insight into the way I dissect the game and its players, while forcing me to map out and re-think it — all in an effort to avoid forming crutches.

The sport and its best young players are changing quickly, and its evaluators ought to be doing the same. The way prospects are playing the game and the tools they need to succeed at its highest level have already changed significantly in the decade-plus since I began this work. Teams are now developing players with wider consideration given to sports science, individualistic planning, and an emerging world of prospect analytics and tracking. Lessons are being learned in real time.

I hope you find what follows is both honest and introspective. That’s what this — along with some of my other annual projects like my re-drafts (I’ll be reviewing my 2021 NHL Draft ranking this summer) and my players I was wrong about column (each Fall) — is all about.

I hope it can also function as a companion tool for you as you evaluate players and watch the game in your own way. When you open up my upcoming 2024 NHL Draft package (out June 3!), the rankings and evaluations inside it are the end product of hundreds of hours of work. They’re also built upon the foundation laid out in this project. It is designed to fill in the gaps and answer as many of your questions as I can about my philosophy.

This season, I traveled to Plymouth three times (once for the World Junior Summer Showcase, once to see the NTDP, and once more for the Chipotle All-American Game), Buffalo (for the Rookie Showcase and soon a second time for the combine), East Lansing to see MSU (versus Wisconsin), Gothenburg for the world juniors, Espoo and Vantaa for U18 worlds, and now Saginaw for the Memorial Cup. When I wasn’t on the road, I hit dozens of OHL games, saw St. Andrew’s College play multiple times, pored over tape, and made countless phone calls to sources.

All of that work is informed by this, which is designed to fill in the gaps and answer as many of your questions as I can about my philosophy.

There is (or should be, at least)  a lot  more to player evaluation than what you see of a player on the ice. Because hockey’s not a static game that can be judged in isolation from one event to the next, it is increasingly important to contextualize all of the exterior factors at play on the ice (and off of it) that may impact the way a player operates and the results that he produces. Live and/or taped viewings are invaluable. So is data.

And I can’t effectively blend what I see (all of those viewings) with what the data tells me (the raw production and the growing amount of publicly- and privately-available analytics) without understanding everything else that influences those outcomes.

Peripheral influences matter a great deal more in evaluating prospects than in evaluating NHL players, and yet they are often overlooked when NHL fans pivot their focus to prospects ahead of each draft. In the NHL, you can still look at the scoring race and quickly determine who the best players in the world are more or less. That’s particularly true for forwards (we have learned in recent years that counting stats like points doesn’t have the same kind of value for defensemen, making them tougher to evaluate and project across all levels of the sport), where both the stats page and a night spent watching the Oilers on TV tell even the most casual fan the same thing. You can do that with individual teams as well, where the best players are still usually the ones with all of the goals and assists.

And while it’s true we can now use analytics to dig deeper on NHL players than ever before, available data gives the viewer a competitive advantage mostly in their understanding of good and bad depth players more than on the game’s true stars. The best players in the sport are, at least relatively speaking, agreed upon. Just about every top-50 ranking of NHL players probably includes the same 35 to 40 names, with evaluators differing more the further down the list they get.

But that NHL game view creates some serious pitfalls when you transport those biases and ways of thinking to the way you approach prospect evaluation.

The assumption becomes that point-per-game Player X on Team Y in League Z is better (or will be) than 0.75 point-per-game Player A on Team B in League C. And that often isn’t the case. The parity that exists in the NHL doesn’t exist anywhere  else in hockey.

In junior hockey, a player’s production changes  dramatically from line to line or team to team.

In a 2024 draft context, Terik Parascak’s 105-point season has to be understood within the context of his excellent linemates inside what was, when healthy, the best top-six forward group in the WHL. Those points are still his, but frequent linemates Zac Funk (the league’s leading goal scorer) and Ondrej Becher (a veteran play-driver) had a say in them. Meanwhile, Liam Greentree had to earn all 90 of his points on a rebuilding Windsor team that won just 18 of 68 games. On regular trips to Oshawa this season, I watched Beckett Sennecke struggle, get benched and then click and take off, all in a few-month stretch, on a Generals team that looked mediocre until it didn’t, the re-addition of Calum Ritchie back from shoulder surgery changing everything for its roster makeup and resulting in a win-streak that propelled the Gens into the OHL final a year ahead of schedule.

Those pieces of context are integral to understanding the full picture of a player. So, too, was doing my diligence on the health particulars of top prospect Cayden Lindstrom’s back.

All six Division I NCAA conferences aren’t created equal, either. The reality is that Atlantic Hockey and the CCHA don’t produce the same kind of talents as, say, the Big Ten or Hockey East.

Though all three of the SHL, KHL and Liiga now produce time-on-ice data and the excellent possession metrics that come with it, the same issues exist across Europe.

You have to know that the staff in Frölunda are more reluctant to play their best young players than the staff in Rögle are.

In Liiga, you must consider that prospects who are a part of a title-chasing club like Tappara have had a tougher time getting pro opportunities — and not because of their talent or their pedigree.

You have to understand the massive power imbalance that exists across all three levels in Russia, where the top KHL, VHL and MHL teams are backed by huge money, carry massive staffs, and play in big cities where all of the talent congregates, while the smaller rural teams have none of those things — and can play haywire hockey as a result.

In the CHL, there are always prospects who don’t hit their groove until the second half of the season for a myriad of reasons, including time spent at the Jr. A or B level the year before (London has made a habit of having top prospects play for the London Nationals at 16 instead of in the OHL, with 2024 prospect Sam O’Reilly as the most recent example), or a trade (this season, we saw Tij Iginla go from little-used 16-year-old on one of the deepest forward groups in WHL history with the Seattle Thunderbirds to looking like a he was on a rocketship with the Kelowna Rockets just a few months later with greater opportunity). Some coaches rely heavily on their top players, which can limit a prospect’s production early on in their junior career. But a coach on a rebuilding team might thrust a 17-year-old into first-line minutes and top power-play time.

These things matter.

Only by watching those players, learning their linemates and deployment, and understanding the strength (or lack thereof) of their teams can we come to the conclusion that in different roles, or with different linemates, their outcomes could vary.

A year ago, the production of first-rounders Calum Ritchie’s 59 points in 59 games and Easton Cowan’s 53 points in 68 games were less productive than, say, third-round Coulson Pitre’s 60 points in 59 games. But you had to know Ritchie was playing through a shoulder injury which needed surgery, that the minor midget AAA years of Ontario kids were more greatly impacted by the pandemic, and that Cowan was a big part of one of the best lines in the OHL playoffs with Denver Barkey and Ryan Winterton after those regular-season stats stopped being counted. This year, Ritchie and Cowan were arguably the two best players in the OHL. Pitre? His production was static.

Beyond the context of team, league, linemates and depth charts, etc., you also have  to consider age. Age is a hugely important piece of the puzzle for me in projecting (which is ultimately what this is all about) a kid’s development curve.

You could have expected a player like Iginla, born in August, just a month shy from 2025 eligibility, to take off down a steeper development curve this season, even without considering his move from Seattle to Kelowna. Michael Brandsegg Nygard, viewed as one of the most projectable and pro-ready prospects in the draft, should be further along with his October birthday.

Age is beginning to play a larger and larger role in player evaluation across sports, too. After publishing the 2019 update to this guide, I received a note from a director of amateur scouting with an MLB team about just that. “I’ve found that hockey and baseball have more similarities in how we evaluate similarly aged talent and found your piece to be particularly enlightening,” read part of that message.

It’s important to remember that these are kids and their development from one year to the next on and off the ice can be seismic.

We can lose sight of that in all of the attention they get — and in their otherworldly, “he can’t possibly be 17 years old” talent.

They’re teenagers. Their bodies are changing rapidly.

Some players add baby fat early, baby fat that helps them dominate at lower levels because they’re bigger and stronger than everyone else. Sometimes the development of those players turns stagnant as they get older and struggle to shed that weight, lean out and get faster (while the game around them does). Others grow two or even three inches in a year, add 10 pounds as a draft-eligible and their trajectories take off in a short period of time late in the year. Some of those kids have come into their own, filled out lanky frames, and learned to dominate. Some players struggle to keep weight on, no matter how much they eat, and may never add the weight they need. Others, who’d developed different kinds of skills when they were 5-foot-9, are suddenly 5-foot-11 with the elements of a smaller player.

In the 2024 class, we must consider — and know — that prospects like Cole Beaudoin and Artyom Levshunov are further along than their peers physically when evaluating both their games at the present moment and whether or not their frames are closer to maxed out. Part of the appeal of a Sennecke, or an E.J. Emery, is the room they still have to fill out their long frames. We need to know that a player like Emil Hemming adds weight easily, and may have to deal with that when it inevitably becomes hard to shed as he gets older. Teams are talking about all of this — and will challenge players on it in combine interviews.

All of these things make repeated viewings absolutely necessary over the course of a season because the player you see in September won’t be the same as the one you see in January and then May. They also highlight the importance of leaving your bias with a player from a previous viewing at the door and never trusting your first thought.

The growth isn’t just the physical, athletic kind, either. As they mature and their brains develop, their games change in imperceptible ways as well. Some players become more aggressive and assertive and learn faster than others how to find and take open space, or how to involve their linemates without having to slow down to survey. Others struggle with off-ice issues and their game suffers, or they plateau because they can’t problem-solve and bad habits put them into tough positions on the ice.

Other things, including proximity to their family, or a team’s travel schedule all impact a player’s season. Homesickness and culture changes have an even more pronounced impact on import players. The Soo Greyhounds are a three-and-a-half-hour drive from their nearest opponent and spend much of their season on prolonged road trips. The Mississauga Steelheads can get to Oshawa, Guelph, Kitchener and Hamilton in roughly an hour — and home to sleep in their own beds on the night of a game. In the more geographically widespread leagues, like the WHL or the MHL, some teams have the finances to take more flights than others.

In Europe, consideration must also be given to kids who bounce between levels more than others, and the lack of consistency that stems from going too often from playing big minutes with a junior team to sitting on the bench with the pro club, without the ability to develop chemistry and little things that matter more than you might think, like reps on the power-play unit. (Not to mention the life disruptions of a new level, a new housing situation, etc.)

We must also evaluate players and their skill sets through the size of the sheet of ice that they play on. Whether that’s the Olympic ice most common in Europe and played on at some major NCAA programs, the hybrid ice most common to Finland, or the smaller surfaces in Canada, right down to the almost-square corners of the Peterborough Memorial center.

I try to consider all of these things (age, team, role, available data, etc.) and then use relationships with coaches, managers, players, agents and scouts to fill in around the edges and build as complete a picture of each player as I can.

Though scouting still isn’t foolproof with all of that in mind, there are real advantages to be gleaned from maximizing your knowledge about a player (learning about Michael Hage and all that he has overcome in the last couple of years taught me a lot about him as a kid but also put his season, which took off in the second half after a slower start, into proper context). And the value of that knowledge is exponentially greater for draft-eligible players, where sample size can play tricks on you, than it is in the NHL where there’s no shortage of time to separate fact from fiction.

My viewing process and limitations

This has changed  a lot  over the years.

When I first turned this whole prospect evaluation thing into a job with McKeen’s Hockey and later Future Considerations, I was juggling it with life in journalism school at Carleton University, internships and freelancing.

At McKeen’s Hockey, I filed hundreds of scouting reports across multiple seasons on entire draft classes, relying on live viewings in Ottawa and nearby Gatineau, where I had access to both the OHL and the QMJHL within a short drive. And though I covered CHL All-Star Games, the Canada-Russia Series, Hockey Canada evaluation camps, some world juniors and the scouting combine, and made efforts to get to many other OHL markets to add live viewings for a wider range of prospects, almost all of my non-CHL, non-international viewings were done through video.

At Future Considerations, I filed reports on a more narrow group of players and contributed to our rankings as an OHL/QMJHL voice (a lot like an area scout does on the amateur side of an NHL operation).

But it wasn’t until after I graduated, when I joined  The Athletic  full time in 2017, that I began to make this my sole focus. And even then, as my time and travel budget expanded to include a wider range of destinations and viewings, I was also splitting my time with covering the Maple Leafs for the better part of my first two years at the company.

At the end of the 2018-19 season, when I began my current role and stopped covering the Leafs, all of that changed in the four years since. With the move came more thorough work, a larger number of viewings on a larger number of players, and the face time required to really dig in on developing sources.

My job still prompts a lot of legitimate questions from readers, though.

How do you watch a game? Are you watching every player or just one? What does your game sheet look like? How does your approach differ in a live environment versus when you’re watching on tape? How many players in a draft class are you able to get to and which leagues are you watching more than others? 

Some of you haven’t followed my work across all of those drafts and places, and may have questions about my record, too. Putting out a list or publishing scouting reports is one thing but being good at it over several years is something else altogether.

And then the answers to those questions are complex because the way I go about doing my job differs from the way many others in the public and private spheres do theirs.

I, for example, am one of the few that does all of my work at in-person viewings on a computer. Most scouts track their notes across player grids they build into notepads and I have never been able to do that. Part of that is driven by necessity (I have a tremor, leftover from concussions, which makes writing by hand almost impossible). Part of that, I truly believe, is about efficiency. I suspect that if my health didn’t make it a habit, I would have made it one by now regardless because the advantages I believe a computer provides (speed and detail) far outweigh the disadvantages (a distraction that can take your eyes off of the game if you allow it to).

The number of players I watch in a game has also changed over the years — and depending on the medium.

When I’m in an arena watching a set of players for the very first time, I try to really focus on only a handful. That’s because in a live setting the play is moving so fast and shift changes are happening so quickly that I find watching all of the players in a game who may be of some interest (which can be upwards of double digits per team in some cases) results in extremely thin postgame evaluations across the board initially . If I really want to get to know a player I’m not particularly familiar with, I want my notes on that player at the end of a game to be thorough. Keeping the total number of players I’m paying close attention to as small as possible helps accomplish that.

In doing so, it means that there are usually no more than one or two players on the ice at any given moment that I need to be following with my eyes. The obvious advantage there is that I can better isolate those players for their entire shift, rather than bouncing around the ice following the puck.

The obvious disadvantage to that strategy is making sure you aren’t tunnel-visioned to the player you’re tracking. Hockey at the highest levels is so fluid now that what’s happening around a player is as important as the way a player reacts to it. Isolation helps build my knowledge of a player’s raw skills (I do a much better job picking up on the little details in a player’s skill set when I’m honed in on them) but it can limit your understanding of a player’s ability to read the game around them. Some players (Eduard Sale comes to mind in this year’s class) can look great in isolation with the puck but can struggle or drift within the whole.

This isn’t to say I won’t pick up on other players in a game (you catch flashes here or there of everyone on the ice) but I try to limit the takeaways I garner from players who aren’t my focus. That’s because the really good plays or really bad plays are the only ones you’ll catch with a player you didn’t make an effort to watch closely. I believe that can work to an evaluator’s detriment, resulting too often in the wrong impression of a player at the end of a viewing.

Once I get comfortable with a group of players, though, I allow my scope to widen. By the time I was in Switzerland for U18 worlds this year, for example, I found myself watching all of the relevant kids with a wider lens, rather than tracking one player across the ice, because I’d already done that with almost all of them individually.

On video, my focus is even narrower.

For the first five years I did this, I tested all sorts of subscription platforms for my review of tape. But the tools and interfaces those services provided varied. Some didn’t even have playback buttons, so my focus was broader as I watched entire games.

But in the last five years, I have used both of the scouting industry’s two big scouting platforms, InStat and SportContract, providing feedback for the latter. InStat and SportContract, neither of which are available to the public (SportContract has asked me to make that clear in an effort to reduce requests), offer advanced interfaces and playback tools for virtually every junior, college and pro league on the planet. Now, I often watch just one player at a time — viewing only his shifts. This has made my process considerably more efficient, cutting a three-hour viewing into a half-hour one in many cases, allowing me to use the video days I set aside for myself during each month more effectively in order to take notes and catalog as many prospects as possible. They are, simply put, the most important tools I have.

Live or on tape, if I’m there strictly to watch a player and storytelling isn’t my focus that day, my game sheet is a mix of notes on the plays a player made (as well as all the videos I cut of them that appear in standalone evaluations, like the ones you’ll see in “The Gifted” series) as well as detailed descriptions of the player’s tools (more on the skills I care about later), strengths, weaknesses and tendencies.

Because my job at The Athletic is so wide-ranging relative to the job an area scout has to do (or the one I had to do when I was with Future Considerations, for example), the ability to speed up my tape viewings in recent years has been paramount. Even though this is my full-time job, there are only so many hours in a day.

That’s not a complaint, though. Having my work be mine and mine alone is far and away my preferred way of doing this job. Every evaluator would likely tell you the same thing. On one hand, if there are issues in it, or if I fail, it’s on me. On the other, I don’t have to trust anyone else’s eyes or evaluation of the available data but my own in forming my opinion. If I feel I have a blind spot on a player, I can ask people I know who are more well-versed in those prospects than I am. And if I’m confident I’ve seen enough of a player, I can rank them accordingly without having to consult anyone.

At Future Considerations, I had to trust others, not knowing their familiarity with the players or how their process works (this isn’t to say those people weren’t fantastic, because they were, but control breeds comfort with something like this).

Still, though, there is a reason NHL teams do what they do and build lists with massive staffs, and that needs to be understood before you dive into my rankings. NHL Central Scouting’s final ranking for 2024 lists 360 skaters and 50 goalies and I am not well-versed on all of them. My lists start at 32 players and build to 64 and then eventually 100 for my final board because it takes the full year to confidently get to that point with that large a group.

I have worked diligently in recent years to correct against blind spots that I’d identified in my lists with the USHL, VHL, MHL, CJHL, NAHL and U.S. high school talent pools; corrections that have resulted in higher representation for all of those leagues on my boards of the last couple of years. But I’m ultimately always going to return to the players I’ve identified as more worthwhile than attempt to build a book on every last player that I need to watch. While I feel like I’ve closed the gap on the USHL, VHL, MHL and CJHL fronts, I still rely mostly on recommendations from sources for the NAHL and U.S. high school kids that I dedicate time to. Not every relevant high school even broadcasts their games as of yet (though that list is growing) and even those that do aren’t under one streaming roof because of the different circuits most of the non-Minnesota schools play in. So I rely on their coaches (or on local scouts) for additional insights into their tools/upside in the early going.

It’s important to keep all of this in mind when you read my work. Those limitations are also reason enough to search out other voices than my own for their insight. There are intelligent, diligent evaluators at all of the major public scouting services. If you’re reading this, you already know that The Athletic ’s Corey Pronman’s work is a necessary resource. There are others, like Byron Bader , who’ve put together successful publicly available models.

Skills-based evaluation 

Two seasons ago, I was asked by the Stratford Warriors, a Jr. B GOJHL team here in Ontario, to do a presentation for their weekly coaches, management and scouts meeting. The presentation could be on whatever I wanted it to be on, and I chose to speak about the language of scouting, mapping out much of what I’ve laid out in this section of my guide over the years.

I chose it because this is where I feel I can be most useful in moving the conversation forward on player evaluation in hockey.

If this guide leaves you with anything, I want it to be what the last slide of my presentation to them outlined in my rules to live by:

• Ambiguity is the enemy of description. Specificity is the goal.
• Your audience (reader, or listener, or boss) shouldn’t have to guess what you mean.

When I’m reading about hockey, watching people talk about hockey or listening to people talk about hockey, I always try to keep those pillars in mind.

Because there are words that sound like they mean something but don’t, or words that mean something to one person that mean something completely different to another — jargon that we use that confuses and obfuscates. If the goal in analyzing the sport is to be nuanced, some of the ways we talk about it don’t quite meet that standard.

“Comparables” are my most common gripe. We all do them because you all eat them up. The same is true in television. But they aren’t the best version of player analysis, they’re the simplest. The average member of the intended audience spends the majority of the season focused on the NHL until it’s all over and suddenly the draft is around the corner. If you’re part of the league’s North American audience, that’s understandable because of how wide-ranging hockey’s lower-level branches extend around the globe (with each NHL team’s prospects playing across different time zones in leagues where broadcasts are hard to find and carried in foreign languages). People like me are meant to fill in the blanks for you when you don’t have the bandwidth to keep tabs on everyone you’d like to. The audience wants to know how the available prospects play without watching them. Comparables can provide them with a mental image in an instant.

But player types are changing. And comparables fail to recognize that players are more different now than they ever have been. They also box players in. I’d rather attempt to unbox them and find where the missing pieces are needed while trying to put them back together. Every first-round pick gets tagged with all-star expectations. And we start to see the same names over and over again. How many times did we used to hear a rangy, north-south forward with speed compared to Jeff Carter or Matt Duchene , or a bulky, menacing one projected as the next Milan Lucic and then Tom Wilson ?

They don’t just box the player in, either. They box us, as fans of the game, into lazy habits. And they often serve as a veil for analysis that isn’t centered on the work required to actually describe a player, so they revert to disguises as detail. Sometimes, that’s out of necessity. Publications have word counts, radio stations and TV broadcasts have time limits. We need to find ways to condense.

But much of the jargon we most often hear or read leaves the intended audience with more questions than answers.

• Plays with urgency
• Hockey IQ/hockey sense
• The stay-at-home defender/safe player
• Grit/compete

These can be interpreted in different ways. When we hear or read those terms second-hand, we superimpose our biases onto someone else’s viewings. We try to interpret meaning. And our takeaway may not be what the person who was presenting it intended it to be. Whenever possible, detail and description should always be the focus. They mitigate against that.

Hockey IQ can be described with specifics — how the player plays within his team’s structure, whether he picks up on his man consistently, if he surveys the ice to get ahead of the play rather than always reacting and finding himself behind, a note on the decisions he makes with the puck, the reads he makes without it, or whether he plays with his head up, and so on.

A safe defender might carry a negative connotation to the author (someone who struggles with the puck, lacks ability and dumbs down his game out of necessity, relying too much on the glass-and-out play, etc.) but it may be perceived as positive by the reader (someone who picks their spots, doesn’t make mistakes, and executes the kind of smart, careful plays that reduce risk and advance play in the right direction).

When we talk about “playing with urgency” we’re often just pointing to whether or not a player played well in a given game. It’s near-impossible to infer effort or interpret feeling. In many cases, those who look like they’re working hard are also inefficient or wasting energy.

Is a gritty player someone who finishes every hit, plays through contact, extends plays by not giving up on them, stays on pucks, gets up and under on sticks, and wins inside body positioning? And if you are to say that a player is gritty, are we to assume that he does all of those things well? Why not tell us which, specifically?

If the evaluator is going to use ambiguous terms, they should, wherever possible, explain what it means to them first, too.

When I started doing player evaluations of my own, I set out to build a glossary to detail the things I value and explain my language. Through that process — the process of annually adding and subtracting skills I look for in a player — came a baseline for everything I do and the way I view the sport.

Here’s the 2024 version of what that baseline looks like:

• Skating: This includes a player’s posture (the balance and center of gravity between their shoulders, hips and knees in a variety of stances), how light or heavy a player is on their blades (some players really dig their skates into the ice before releasing into their push, while others are smoother in their glides or have the quick twitch found in sprinters), their top speed after a zone’s worth of pushes (less important these days), their first few steps and their recoveries through those hurried strides, their acceleration through to their top speed, the fluidity of their movements, their ability to maintain rather than lose speed with possession of the puck, how far they can extend/lean on their edges while skating backward in order to close gaps quickly, their ability to pivot without catching an edge, whether their feet drag (a lot of young players drag the toe of their blade because they’re rushing through their stride), if they don’t drag their toes whether they lift more than a few inches off the ice (many young players who don’t drag their blades overcompensate with a choppy stomping motion), whether they pick up their stick into a pitch fork (which wastes energy when they start to sway) or hunch over their skates to put them off balance, and their lateral edge work (including ability to go heel to heel and lean on inside edges to dodge checks and shuffle around defenders or the net on wraparounds). The two most efficient strides: long, fluid motions that give straightaway speed or tight and mobile edgework to create a rounded, agile skater. Both have their place, but I prefer a player who can move, change directions and turn feet attacking on tight angles than one who can explode down the boards with a longer stride. In today’s game, I believe changing tempo is now more important than top speed. Wherever possible, I try to avoid using the lazy “good/bad skaters” catch-alls.

• Playmaking: This includes ability to see the ice in front and on either side, see through layers of traffic to the weak side of coverage, recognize secondary and tertiary options, see lanes before they open (there’s a knack to this skill that is hard to evaluate but when a player is really talented at it, it’s impossible to miss), accurately pass (both short and long ranges, routinely failing to execute short little bump passes can speak to focus or lack thereof), timing and sharpness of passes (passing hard is not always a strength, feathering a pass through traffic is more of an asset), creativity in passing (does the player surprise defenders with the lanes he finds?), calculated confidence/pass selection (if a player is going to make a high-risk play, do they have support?), passing in motion, passing off of his backhand (a lot of junior hockey players aren’t confident enough to fake a forehand pass and cross their body to pass backhand but it can be an effective way of wrapping the puck around rangy defenders), and the overall ability to plan out plays faster than structure can react to them.

• Puckhandling and deceptiveness: This includes hand speed (loose grip is better, I want to look for players who avoid tightly controlling their stick, though it can be hard to spot, especially on tape), creativity with the puck (do they rely on the same move or can they adjust in traffic/under pressure?), ability to deke a goaltender or defenseman one-on-one (does he always go outside, does he too often cut inside, can he make defenders move laterally or, better yet, make them turn?), ability to maintain possession of the puck at high speed or playing in and out of stops and starts, core control (reflexes and instincts come into play here), ability to protect the puck against bigger defenders, skills of dexterity and first touch (catching pucks in tough spots, quickly finding pucks with reflexes off of a bobble), ability to handle the puck or pick a dead puck off the boards on a player’s backhand or in tight (the difference between getting the puck up ice and being trapped can be a brief miscarry from a dead puck), the ability to control the puck out wide or in his feet (the latter is a challenge for taller players so when they can do it well it’s a real asset), and the use of baits, delays and fakes to draw defenders in or force them into a misdirection.

• Shooting: This includes velocity and accuracy, the quickness of a player’s release, the consistency of their one-timer, whether they’re specific about shot selection or a volume shooter, a disguised release point (some players have tweaks to their releases and blades that distinguish them by, say, pushing the puck off the heel to set up a snapshot rather than just applying pressure to the shaft, or curling from the toe and releasing before the heel), how and whether a prospect finds holes for shots (I like defensemen that move a lot at the offensive-zone blue line both laterally and inward to the high slot, which makes skating an even bigger asset in today’s game because you need to be able to recover defensively from those spots or get to them before defensive schemes can front you), how a player shifts their weight through their shooting motion (a lot of young players throw themselves off balance), and the ability to tip and deflect pucks (another sign of dexterity), elevate it in tight or slide it along the ice while moving, which includes whether a player relies on finishing in one way (a lot of young players shoot high too often when the low rebound is the best available option). Shooting (particularly as it pertains to how hard a player shoots) is increasingly of less value to me for defensemen. Shot variety and a player’s ability to manipulate their shot to get it off from a variety of spots on their body (including the instep of both feet), is something I’m increasingly placing emphasis on for forwards. But a player’s movement off the puck is often a greater determining factor in their acumen as a scorer at the next level than their actual mechanics as a shooter are.

• Defensive acumen: This includes whether a player comes back in the play or counts on others to (even when it’s his job), understanding of personal defensive responsibilities, covering for a teammate’s missed assignment, reading the developing play and reacting accordingly, communicating on the ice (an underrated asset for players who understand systems), a defender’s ability to funnel and steer play to the outside (particularly in transition), a forechecker’s angles to pucks, choices on pinches, how a player uses their skating to gap up and disrupt (some players play much tighter gaps than others, gluing themselves to the hip of the opposing carrier, which if done well can allow them to swallow the play up and which if done poorly can result in a lot of glaring mistakes and compensating penalties). If they’re a passive defender in the neutral and defensive zones, do they give too much (requiring that they compensate by reacting and breaking up plays with raw instincts and reflexes) and can it be corrected? If they’re an aggressive defender in both zones, are they calculated in how far they extend on attackers (you’ll see things like a player hunching over his stick if he’s pushing too far off their center for a hit) and do they have the skating ability to make up for it? Defenders who are aggressive and  slow are the  worst.  I also hate penalties. There are good ones (compensating for a teammate to prevent a high-danger scoring chance) but they’re otherwise not   the asset many fantasy leagues teach us to believe they are (cross-checking means he wasn’t in proper position defensively, hooking normally means he wasn’t moving his feet, etc.).

• Intangibles like attitude and leadership are extremely hard to identify so I tend to use coaches and managers to find out more about them. Although body language can be evident for some players on the ice, you have to be careful not to equate being upset with not caring.

And at the end of it all, scouting hockey will always be an imperfect science. These are just the blurry outlines of it. It’s my job to cover the NHL Draft and I give it as many hours as I can in a year. I’m lucky to have the time and the flexibility to do that at The Athletic . I hope that I view player evaluation and the game in a progressive way. And I still make plenty of mistakes. The goal, here, is to be as thorough as I can be, to make this coverage as comprehensive as I can and to look back in a few years and be proud of my rankings, evaluations and projections.

Hopefully we can learn something about this sport and its players along the way.

(Photos: Daniel St. Louis / CHL)

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Scott Wheeler covers the NHL draft and prospects nationally for The Athletic. Scott has written for the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, The Toronto Sun, the National Post, SB Nation and several other outlets in the past. Follow Scott on Twitter @ scottcwheeler

Migne: Steering Haiti's World Cup ambition is an exhilarating assignment

Newly appointed Haiti coach Sebastien Migne tells FIFA that he has full belief in his team's chances of qualifying for FIFA World Cup 26.

Migne took reins of Caribbean side in March

The French tactician wants to return Les Grenadiers to first World Cup in 52 years

Haiti kick off their qualifying campaign against Saint Lucia on 6 June

Entrusted with the considerable challenge of qualifying Haiti for the FIFA World Cup 26™, 52 years after their one and only participation, Sebastien Migne feels a new lease on life. An assistant coach with Cameroon at Qatar 2022, the Frenchman was hired in March and is striving to build a success story, despite the current problems in Haiti, which have prevented him from setting foot in the Caribbean country.

Nevertheless, the 51-year-old remains positive: "I practice one of the most beautiful professions in the world, so I'm happy to be at the helm of this team, which, I believe, will show the world some wonderful things," he said.

Migne is not one to rue his situation. There is a Haitian proverb that says, 'If you want to trap a wild horse, find a tight corral'. It is a phrase that perfectly encapsulates his optimistic approach. "It's not the most attractive contract I've ever had, but it's unquestionably the most exhilarating assignment,” said Migne.

As he prepares to embark on this quest, the former Congo DR coach spoke frankly to FIFA about his ambitions, the upcoming qualifiers and the chances of seeing Haiti at the World Cup.

FIFA.com: You took charge of Haiti in March 2024. What attracted you to this project? FIFA.com: You took charge of Haiti in March 2024. What attracted you to this project?

Sebastien Migne: I was lucky enough to participate in the last World Cup with Cameroon as Rigobert Song's assistant, and the emotions I experienced in Qatar were truly unique. After such an experience, the only thing you want is to relive those moments as the head of a national team. That's what prompted me to say yes to Haiti. The sporting challenges are interesting, but I’ve studied this team well. I really think they have potential and that we can achieve something great together.

In qualifying, Haiti find themselves in Group C alongside Curacao, Aruba, Barbados and Saint Lucia. What were your impressions of the draw? In qualifying, Haiti find themselves in Group C alongside Curacao, Aruba, Barbados and Saint Lucia. What were your impressions of the draw?

We have to take this chance to get to the World Cup, because the regional giants all qualify automatically as hosts. We need to seize this opportunity. Obviously the draw was important, but when the ambition is to get Haiti back to the World Cup, we have to be one of the two teams from this group that progresses to the next round, regardless of the opposition. The main difficulty we face is that we’ll be playing abroad for security reasons because of the social problems Haiti is currently experiencing. We’ll have to play without the support of our fans, but they’ll be very much in our thoughts.

Saint Lucia and Barbados will be your first two opponents. What can we expect from those fixtures? Saint Lucia and Barbados will be your first two opponents. What can we expect from those fixtures?

We’ll have to impose ourselves from the start, deny our opponents any hope of qualifying for the next round and take as many points as possible. I tend to take into account more the strengths and weaknesses of my team rather than those of my opponents. If I had to put a number on it, I’d say I concern myself about 75 per cent with my team and 25 cent the opposition.

How are preparations going for these games? How are preparations going for these games?

In my previous roles, I always lived in the countries where I worked. Unfortunately, that’s not the case with Haiti. I can't go there at the moment for security reasons, though I hope to be able to do so in the next few months. In the meantime, I make use of digital platforms that allow us to monitor the players constantly. At the beginning of each week, my staff and I watch all the relevant games and focus on the contributions of our players. We’re also in direct contact with them and take stock of any injuries and their motivation. We also scout for dual nationals and present our project to them, explaining that we have this great opportunity to go to a World Cup.

Given the situation there, how’s your state of mind? Given the situation there, how’s your state of mind?

I’m very enthusiastic. Enthusiastic to be head coach again, to be able to influence outcomes and to have the entire staff supporting my approach. I can also count on players committed to the project. Now we have to make sure that this continues, because at some point, we’ll face difficulties. It’s at those precise moments that we’ll need to remain united.

It's been 50 years since Haiti appeared at the World Cup. Expectations must be high... It's been 50 years since Haiti appeared at the World Cup. Expectations must be high...

Yes! We’re constantly reminded of this and feel a certain impatience about this. Qualifying would do a lot of good for the country and bring happiness. I previously coached Congo DR, where Sebastien Desabre is now in charge, and I think this Haiti team has a lot in common with the Leopards. Just like the Congolese, Haiti's last appearance at the World Cup was in 1974. My dream is to bring Haiti back to the World Cup 52 years on, and for my best friend to do the same with Congo DR.

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MLB Trade Rumors

Cubs Promote Luis Vazquez

By Mark Polishuk | May 21, 2024 at 2:20pm CDT

May 21 : The Cubs have now officially promoted Vazquez, with Maddie Lee of the Chicago Sun-Times among those to relay the full slate of moves on X . Swanson was also activated off the injured list while Mastrobuoni and Pete Crow-Armstrong were optioned in corresponding moves.

May 19 : The Cubs are promoting infield prospect Luis Vazquez to the majors, according to ESPN’s Jorge Castillo (who also happens to be Vazquez’s cousin).  The 24-year-old Vazquez will be making his MLB debut whenever he appears in his first game.

Since the Cubs’ next game isn’t until Tuesday, Vazquez’s call-up seems tied to Nico Hoerner ’s health status.  Hoerner hasn’t played since last Monday due to a balky hamstring, and while the Cubs were hopeful Hoerner would be able to play Tuesday, it could be that the team decided that an official injured list stint was necessary to get Hoerner fully recovered.  Dansby Swanson is also already on the IL recovering from a knee sprain and was expected to be activated on Tuesday, so it is possible Vazquez could be joining the Cubs if there has been some unknown setback in Swanson’s recovery.

Whatever the case, the door has been opened for Vazquez to get his first shot at the big leagues.  A 14th-round pick for the Cubs in the 2017 draft, Vazquez didn’t do much at the plate until last season, when he batted a combined .271/.361/.456 with 20 home runs over 528 plate appearances almost evenly split between Double-A and Triple-A.  The hot hitting has continued into this season, as Vazquez has slashed .270/.369/.409 with three homers across his 164 PA with Triple-A Iowa.

This breakout year led the Cubs to put Vazquez on their 40-man roster last November in advance of the Rule 5 Draft, and for some extra attention from the pundits — MLB Pipeline has Vazquez ranked as the 13th-best prospect in Chicago’s farm system, while Baseball America has him 14th.  As per Pipeline’s scouting report, Vazquez was able to straighten out his swing and make better contact after learning to lower his hands at the plate, thus unlocking some extra power potential.  Between these improvements and Vazquez’s highly-touted defense, both Pipeline and BA think Vazquez now has a path to a Major League role as a versatile bench player.

Vazquez’s glovework and throwing arm each merit 60s on the 20-80 scouting scale, and as Pipeline puts it, “he’s so good at short that Chicago rarely has deployed him at other positions.”  Vazquez does have some experience at second and third base and shouldn’t have much trouble at either position given his shortstop capability, making him an interesting utility option for the Cubs on at least a temporary basis.  Miles Mastrobuoni and Nick Madrigal have been filling the middle infield roles with Swanson and Hoerner out, and if both players are indeed back on Tuesday, Mastrobuoni could find himself relegated back to Triple-A to create room for Vazquez’s promotion.

37 Comments

Trade bait for Mason Miller

No. Hell no. He provides much needed depth for the cubs. It’s gonna cost more than that to get a closer like Mason Miller. Who has a long history of injuries.

It’s going to take two of your Top 10 prospects and a flyer to pick up Miller. He will be in demand, there is a chance the Cubs could outbid other teams for him (likely not Baltimore though.)

Yeah that ain’t happening. Cubs say ………Pass.

Cubs should start w an offer of Triantos, Canario and Mervis for Mason Miller. It won’t get it done but it’s a start and will probably need to include Alcantara to get it done.

That’s a separate universe too much to offer.

Stupidest trade idea ever, What world do you live in? Cause it ain’t Earth. See this is why Street drugs are bad.

It’s going to take 3-4 top prospects

He is probably going to take Madrigal’s role of being a late inning defensive replacement for Morel at 3B. Mastrobuoni was playing SS while both Swanson and Hoerner were out, but if Swanson is back then having the better defender for the bench makes some sense.

He shouldn’t be a late inning defensive replacement. He should be starting. And if either nico or Swanson are still out 1 or both. He absolutely needs to start. He should’ve got the call the 2nd or 2rd day nico was out of the lineup.

Bote remains frozen out because he’s not on the 40 man? Maybe Jed never liked him?

At some point before that contract ends, Bote has to get an other 7-10 days in the show w/ a few starts.

I assume his 2B range prolly gone, but he’s still four corners capable. Vet bat. Seemingly team oriented.

I’ve always liked Bote. He’ll always be known for his walk odd grand slam against the Nats. He also had a walk off single where he almost immediately went to the hospital to be with his wife who just gone into labor that same day. That’s a pretty cool story to tell his kid. I won the game for my team the same day you were born.

It’s seems like this guy hasn’t been on a MLB field in 5 years or more.

Very strange regarding what happened/currently happening with Bote. I recall a time, during the Joe Maddon time frame when Bote was considered to be the next Ben Zobrist or at least a decent bench/ roll player. At one time I believed Bote may have had some issues with former Manager David Ross. Therefore, Ross may have held him off the ML team. Now with Craig Counsell as manager that’s not likely. Who knows? Bote is never mentioned as a possible call up or ever mentioned in a trade.

Why do you think he’s team oriented?

Ummmmm Jed was the guy, Or at least one of the guys who GAVE him that contract. The fact is right after he signed that deal he tore up his shoulder on a slide and it basically took him 2 years to get back. By then he was passed by. His deal ends after this year. I know why he isn’t playing for the Cubs, What I can’t figure out is why nobody else has given him a shot in the last 3 years he’s been healthy. The Cubs would give him away just to lose the 5 million and he’s pretty versatile.

“The 24-year-old Vazquez will be making his MLB debut whenever he appears in his first game.”

That’s up there in Obvious Redundancy with MLB’s “Postgame Show: After The Game.”

Dan Plesac last night…”He struck out three consecutive batters in a row”.

*eddie Murphy laughing gif here*

Bote is probably the highest paid AAA player by a long shot and good for him. Don’t think he is back in CHGO unless it’s with the White Sox. He will always be remembered for the walk off grand slam against the Nats on Sunday night baseball.

I’d rather see Happ go on the IL for some sort of injury and PCA stay with the team. At least he can provide some help Happ is absolutely awful. Madrigal is another I wouldn’t mind seeing moved on from.

I agree! If not PCA, then the red hot Brennen Davis.

I good week out of 3 years and you’re all in huh?

PCA is all hype.

Still mad you lost your 3rd best prospect and then Javier Baez 2 and a half months later?

Maybe you’re still angry about the Alonso play at the plate. A few weeks ago.

I’m giving you sh!* sorry.

Can he pitch in relief?

I saw nothing in Pete Crow-Armstrong that said he’s major league ready. Even his lauded defense was bad at times. Good idea to have him work on things away from Chicago..

Then I wonder what you were watching. Couldn’t have been the Cubs.

Mike, he was watching Cardinals games.

PCA had/has the 6th highest team WAR on the Cubs and was their second highest position player (behind Bellinger) in pretty limited playing time. Obviously, the Cubs need more out of him at the plate but his defense is phenomenal! Defensively, he is the total package, great reads/routes/jumps and his plus speed just makes everything look so effortless for him.

Yep, only on pace for 56 DRS, pathetic

I want to see Owen Caissie get a chance. I’d rather see him than PCA.

Caissie will get his chance. He’s definitely on the short list of untouchables for the Cubs. ONKC and Alcantara should both be on that list.

18 hours ago

I’m curious to see if at some point the Cubs move Bellinger to LF and recall PCA if Happ doesn’t get it going. Happy just doesn’t look right after injuring his hamstring several weeks ago. On the Happ topic, the guy needs to give up trying to be a switch hitter (IMO). Typically, guys who switch hit are pull happy, they switch sides so they can cheat. Happ however, isn’t a pull hitter from the left side and isn’t very impressive while batting from the right, to me it would make more sense to just bat lefty and go the other way against same hand pitching.

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This PBS doc on a 1920s-era Eagle Scout is must-see TV

Paul Siple just might be one of the most significant Eagle Scouts from the early decades of the organization.

The producers of Chronicles , a PBS docuseries from WQLN in Erie, Pennsylvania, apparently agree.

Their 28-minute show on Siple (embedded below) documents his six Antarctic expeditions, including the first in 1928, when at the age of 19 he was chosen to represent the Boy Scouts of America and accompany famed explorer Admiral Richard Byrd to the South Pole.

In all, Siple (pronounced SIGH-pull) accompanied Byrd on five expeditions. The Sea Scout, Silver Buffalo Award recipient and Vigil Honor member of the Order of the Arrow went on to write four books and coin the term “wind chill.”

In fact, it was one of those books that inspired Glenn Adams , then the president of the National Eagle Scout Association, to start a program that would get more Scouts out into the world as explorers. That program became the NESA World Explorers.

It’s not a stretch to argue that Siple’s legacy paved the way for the Exploration merit badge , launched in 2017.

Minus 100 degrees

The PBS show opens with some remarkable footage from one of Siple’s later expeditions to Antarctica.

“We’re proud of having been able to carry out the program because temperatures went down below minus 100,” says a bearded Siple on location on the Antarctic ice. “In fact, for the last 160 days the temperature has never once been above minus 40 degrees.”

The documentary pays a lot of attention to Siple’s time as a youth in Scouting, noting that he joined Troop 24 in Erie and earned the rank of Eagle Scout at age 15, “achievements that would have a profound impact on his life,” the narrator says.

The show also includes an interview with Dan Ste. Marie, a current volunteer from the French Creek Council.

“Paul Siple … had a thirst for knowledge of the natural world,” says Ste. Marie. “He went out and earned all of these merit badges, discovering the world around himself. He had a thirst for adventure.”

An OA DSA recipient

In 1958, the Order of the Arrow awarded Siple its Distinguished Service Award. The certificate read in part:

Explorer, Geographer, Eagle Scout, Vigil Honor member of the Order of the Arrow, member of Alpha Phi Omega Scouting Fraternity, member of the National Committee on Camping and member of the National Court of Honor. Accompanied Admiral Richard Byrd on the first Antarctic Expedition, after selection as the outstanding Scout among 600,000 then enrolled. This being the first of many exploits and assignments as a civilian and commissioned officer in the United States Army. He was the first President of the American Polar Society, and more recently served as scientific leader of the United States participation in the Geophysical Year. Presently he is Director of the Army’s office of Polar Affairs. Through his achievements and personal life he has brought distinction to the organization with which he has affiliated and captured the imagination and admiration of youth throughout the land.

Click here to learn more about Siple , and watch the PBS show below.

Thanks to reader Michael Malone ( who knows a thing or two about Eagle Scouts himself) for the story tip.

Scouting America photo

Support the Eagle Scout Scholarship Fund

Contribute to the National Eagle Scout Association (NESA) Scholarship Fund. Donations to this fund go directly to providing scholarships to deserving Eagle Scouts, allowing them to pursue their dreams and make a positive impact on the world.

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Timberwolves Hold 'Rough' Film Session; Dallas Mavericks Not Satisfied After Game 1

Grant afseth | 11 hours ago.

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• Minnesota Timberwolves

MINNEAPOLIS — The Dallas Mavericks won Game 1 108-105 against the Minnesota Timberwolves on Wednesday, marking their first series-opener win during this year's postseason. Both teams see significant room for improvement before Friday's matchup.

After Thursday's practice, Timberwolves coach Chris Finch called out the team's effort in the series-opening loss against the Mavericks. He felt they failed to rise to the occasion but expects a greater collective focus in Friday's Game 2 matchup.

"Yeah, it was a rough film session," Finch told reporters at practice in Minneapolis on Thursday. "I told the guys, ‘It’s been a long time since I’ve been this disappointed in your effort. Your performance, your attitude, your application and attention to detail just wasn’t there.’ The Western Conference finals started. Not sure if they got the memo. But they got it this afternoon.”

Considering the Timberwolves were coming off a hard-fought seven-game series against the Denver Nuggets before advancing past the Western Conference semifinals, Anthony Edwards felt the team was probably "a little tired." After putting a target on his back by name-dropping Kyrie Irving as his assignment after that Game 7 victory over the Nuggets, Edwards was held to 19 points while Irving scored 24 of his 30 points in the first half to set the tone for Dallas.

"You guys could see it, we were just a step behind everybody," Edwards said Wednesday night. "Especially myself... Everything was on us today. I didn't get downhill as much. We just were a little tired, probably."

The Mavericks' game-planning emphasis is clearly to shrink the floor, making it challenging for Edwards or Karl-Anthony Towns to make plays in the paint while daring players like Jaden McDaniels or Kyle Anderson to take and make 3-pointers. Minnesota took 49 attempts from beyond the arc on the night with early success by shooting 11-25 (44%) in the first half but regressed to shoot just 7-24 (29.2%) for the remainder of the game. Edwards and Towns combined to shoot 12-36 (33.3%) overall.

"Yeah, I think for us, it's a matter of showing as many bodies again, making it tough," Mavericks coach Jason Kidd said. "[Anthony Edwards] is one of the best players in the world. You're not gonna stop him. You can just make it tough on him and hope that he misses."

During Game 2, the Mavericks expect the Timberwolves to take a high volume of 3-point attempts again. Coach Kidd emphasized the importance of continuing to protect the paint but acknowledged how challenging it can be given how many threats Minnesota has to account for.

"We expect him in Game 2 to attack early and often. We gotta try to protect the paint," Kidd said. "They shot a lot of threes. They were hot early. I thought for us to stay together in that second half, protect the paint again—it's tough when you've got [Karl-Anthony Towns] and those guys who can put it on the floor and get to the rim...

"We believe that [Edwards] is going to come," Kidd explained. "[Mike Conley] is going to come and that they're going to be better in Game 2. We have to expect that."

While the Timberwolves are challenging themselves to be better in Game 2, the Mavericks see a significant opportunity to improve, beginning with how they handle contesting Minnesota's 3-point attempts. Jaden McDaniels matched Dallas in 3-point makes by shooting 6-9 (66.7%), while Edwards had five makes, and Naz Reid and Towns combined for another five.

"Some of them we got. We have to be better. When you shoot over 40, you're not going to be able to contest all of them," Kidd said. "But I thought, again, we have to be better. We gave a couple that we knew that we have to be better. So we got to protect the three-point line.... They're saying that they had got good looks. They believe that they can make some of those, and then the game will be different. So we have to be better at guarding the three-point line."

Dallas won Game 1 despite shooting 6-25 (24.0%) from the perimeter as a team. Luka Doncic, who finished with 33 points and eight assists, acknowledged that Minnesota's defense—anchored by Rudy Gobert and McDaniels—holds a reputation for collapsing the paint, making it essential for 3-point shooting to improve.

"They're known for collapsing the paint, so I think we can do a way better job of shooting the three, getting open looks," Doncic said Wednesday. "I think me and [P.J. Washington] had some open looks, couldn't knock him down, but we made the important ones... I see we shot 24 percent from three. We just got to get more open shots and keep shooting. There's a great shot, and keep moving the ball". "

Dereck Lively II, 20, has proven to be wise beyond his years throughout the Mavericks' postseason run and has emerged as a clear X-factor in the paint on both ends as this run has progressed. He acknowledged the expectation of adjustments from each team before Game 2, emphasizing how Dallas must be prepared to adjust on the fly.

"It's really trying to adapt... We're trying to cover in the paint," Lively said. "But at the same time, we knew it was an inside-outside game to try to be able to contest shots. They were making shots today. We're going to adapt. We're going to be able to just go back, scout, learn, figure out who the shooters, figure out what makes them feel comfortable, where they're shooting from, and try to eliminate that. We're trying to make him trying to make each player uncomfortable on the court."

After facing two previous opponents in the playoffs in series that lasted six games, Dallas understands that Minnesota could throw out different schemes in Game 2. Being able to adapt on the fly in a game is important to avoid having any particular adjustment becomes a series-changing one.

"You've got to be able to adapt. There's always going to they're going to change their schemes going to change the coverage is going to change your place," Lively said. You can't be a robot out there. It's gonna be a lot of things going at you at the fly, but you can't you can't be stuck in the mud. You got to be able to move your feet. You got to be able to move your eyes and just adapt."

While rebounding remains a focus, the Mavericks understand the importance of reducing unforced errors, particularly live ball turnovers, to avoid allowing Minnesota to attack the open floor and find a rhythm. Irving conveyed the importance of taking pride in doing the little things.

"I mean, they got guys that can cover up a lot of space and do a lot of the little things that don't show up in the stat sheet," Irving said. "They contest a lot of shots, and their rotations are pretty quick. So we know we're going against a high-powered offense but also a high-powered defense. That's what leads to a lot of their run-outs: a lot of turnovers, a lot of live ball turnovers, and getting an opportunity to score on us before we set our defense. That's what leads to a lot of their runouts... a lot of live ball turnovers and getting an opportunity to score on us before we set our defense."

"We're a good defensive team as well, so seeing a lot of chess matches out there and as long as the team that gets the most stops, gets the offensive rebounds, gets a lot of 50-50 basketballs, does those things, then they'll win," Irving explained.

The stakes are high for both teams entering Game 2. It would be a major advantage for the Mavericks to return to Dallas holding a 2-0 series lead while attempting to protect homcourt at American Airlines Center for two consecutive games. Minnesota would have as thin of a margin for error as it gets in such a situation.

READ MORE: Kyrie Irving Admits Anthony Edwards' Comment Motivated Game 1 Performance

Stick with  MavericksGameday  for more coverage of the Dallas Mavericks throughout the NBA Playoffs.

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GRANT AFSETH

Grant Afseth is a Dallas Mavericks reporter for DallasBasketball.com and an NBA reporter for NBA Analysis Network. He previously covered the Indiana Pacers and NBA for CNHI's Kokomo Tribune and various NBA teams for USA TODAY Sports Media Group. Follow him on Twitter (@grantafseth), Facebook (@grantgafseth), and YouTube (@grantafseth). You can reach Grant at [email protected].

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