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Youth Academy: Scouting made easy

Written by kingmiha

Making the right scouting decisions is crucial for a successful youth academy. But it requires quite a lot of experience and many new users just don't know how to decide whether a player is worth accepting or not. This guide is aimed to help newbies to understand the basics of scouting, making better decisions and create the basis for a profitable youth academy.

Number of Scouts:
First, I suggest you to hire two more scouts right at the beginning to have the maximum of 3 scouts. You will easily cover these expenses with youth player sales and even make quite a lot of profit in the long run. You can still dismiss one or two scouts later, when you think that you have already enough promising talents to train. The advantage of having several scouts is that you can decline the first scout offer if it is a bad one and ask for another offer from your second (and if necessary from your third) scout. That way, you get more chances to pick up a good talent. Take care: if you have declined an offer you will never be able to reverse that decision. If you have accepted the offer from one of your scouts, you cannot ask your other scouts any more in the same week. You can only accept one new player per week.

Search Settings:
Each region has an own youth player pool where all the scouts that are situated in that region randomly pick out players and offer them to the managers. These player pools are refilled with new players on a daily basis. Send your scouts to different regions, preferably such with many users, as these regions have bigger youth player pools and your scouts will more likely find some players. The best regions would be such with many users and few scouts searching in it. But in bigger countries it is almost impossible to find out these ratios. I also suggest you to let your scouts search for any type of player as this all in all increases the chance to find an useable player. I personally made the experience that searching for specific player types is not very efficient, as my scouts rarely presented players that really fitted the expected skill scheme.

Time to call the Scouts:
You can call the scouts once per week (the new week always starts at the economic update) and they will most often offer you a fresh youth talent. As most users tend to call their scouts right on the first day after the economic update, I suggest you not to call your scouts at that day, as the chances are high that many of the good talents are already fished out of the pool by other users. So better just wait some more days until you call your scouts. But in the end it is all about luck. You can always get good or bad offers.

The Scout Offer:
When you call your scout, he will give you a short comment on the talent he has found this week. All the players differ in age, current skills and their skill potentials (=caps).

I try to outline here some of my personal rules of the thumb on scouting decisions:

a) Age: It is always better to get offered young (15 or 16 year old) players, than older players (17 years old). The younger the player is at the moment of scouting, the better! The reason is simple: You can train younger players longer in your YA. You will be able to promote them already with young 17 years to the senior team, which brings you much more money. But a 15 year old player with really bad skills won't help you either. Unfortunately you do not see the exact age, so it is always a matter of luck if you catch one with few or many days.

b) Current Skill: Decline players that have a current skill indicated lower than inadequate if there is no mention of a good potential in another skill or a good overall skill. The scout will always tell you the current level of one of the player's best three skill potentials. This is called the "top three rule". This might help you to make a guess of the other skills and potentials of the player. If the scout reveals a really low skill, you can reason that the potential in this skill is not very good, too. And there can at best be two better potentials around.

c) Potential: The scout will also always tell you one skill potential. Potentials are important, as youth players cannot be trained as far as you like - they always have specific skill caps, different for every skill. Always accept offers from players that can reach an excellent skill level, whatever age they have. Excellent is the best potential possible in the YA. Also solid potentials are fine and sometimes even passable potentials are worth training and you should consider accepting the player if he fits to your training plan and you do not have any better talents there. Decline players that have potentials lower than passable, unless the scout tells you that they have other good skills or allrounder capabilities. The top three rule applies also to the potentials. The scout always tells you one of the top three potentials of the player, so he can at best have two better skill potentials than the one mentioned.

d) Overall Skills: Sometimes the scout gives you an overall skill information. The scout will talk about "overall abilities", or "allrounders" then. If the scout does not mention any goalkeeper skill besides this, decline all offers from players with lower than "inadequate" overall skills. You can accept inadequate allrounders if they are very young and/or the scout mentioned a good skill or potential. If you get a "passable allrounder" or even better offer, always accept, regardless of his age or other skills mentioned, as he is a top player! If the scout tells you about a good keeper skill or keeper potential, the overall skill might be weak or poor, that's no problem.

e) Specialities: Sometimes, the scout might also reveal that a player has a certain speciality. This is of course always a plus, but not as important as the skills. The right speciality can enhance a player's value significantly. But if the skills are bad, a speciality does not make a good player out of a bad one.

As I said, these are only some rough guidelines. You should always take all factors into consideration: age - skills - potentials - speciality. Of course there is always some uncertainty involved. The scout maybe revealed you the best skill already, but it's also possible that it was just the skill with the third-best potential. Overall skill indications can help you in such cases to estimate whether there are other high skills besides the revealed one. If the scout reveals a really low skill, but the player is an inadequate or passable allrounder, you can reason that there must still be some unrevealed higher skills around.

When you already have several good talents in your team, you should also consider if the newly offered player fits to your training plans or if it is even worth to adjust your training plans for this new player. If you already have some really good talents to train, you can surely be more restrictive and accept only top players. You can also be a bit more restrictive at accepting players from your first scout if you still have the other scouts available.

You can always ask other experienced users when you are not sure whether to accept or decline a scout offer. There is no time limit to accept, you can even log out meanwhile, and when you come back the scout offer will still be there. Always accept the offer from your last scout, as the player might still be a good player and the scout just didn't mention his best skill.