How to become a good U20/NT scout....

This guide could be really interesting if you want to become a good U20/NT scout.

It's written by El_Gigios-Fights (5797550), former NT Norge headscout and Italy U20 playmaker headscout. Translated by Ghigno (10735102).

Few people know that in a lot of U20/NT staffs is needed help, and one of the most difficult thing is to teach the new scouts how to do their job. This process takes some time and it isn't easy.

The guide will be divided into three parts. In the first we'll analyze what a scouting staff is. In the second and third part we'll talk about what you have to do to be a good scout!

First part: INTRO

Any U20/NT is obviously depending on his elected coach, who's the only manager that can enroll/release players and send lineup orders. Any coach can create a scouting staff, which helps him to manage his job. The staff members can be a lot of or few people. The number usually depends on how big the country is. Obviously Italy or Deutschland will need more staff members than Kuwayt or Cuba.

Usually, a staff can have:
- U20/NT coach
- Assistant coach
- Head scout(s)
- Tactical helpers
- Scouts
- Apprentice scouts

The scouting staff is usually divided into five groups, one for each position. Any group can have: head scout, scouts and apprentice scouts (depending on how many players you need to check in U20/NT). At the moment the staff of Kuwayt is divided in u20/NT-coach, postition-scouts and tactical helpers.

I would like to spend some words about the "apprentice scouts", because it should be the first job for any new scout. They should be managers who're available to work, but they should learn what they have to do and how they should do it. They help scouts in various ways, for example by checking the transfer list for transfer-listed players, checking (already known) players in the tracker and looking at the Best Players statistics (/World/Players/TopPlayers.aspx). This work isn't so easy but with some time and being interested to learn, it's a job that any manager can do.

Any scout is important in his staff, but he has to remember that he has to follow U20/NT coach ideas and he should do everything that the boss asks him to do. In any doubt, he has to ask him what to do, because at the end it's just the boss who is criticized and who wants to put his ideas to work (he's voted to do that). Any wrong decision could be bad for U20/NT, and a U20/NT coach has surely more experience than anyone else. So, a common mistake is thinking to be able to take decisions by yourself, and this is something you can't do.

There's no minimum time required to be a scout. It is more important to connect regularly to Hattrick and to be ready to reply to ht-mails. It's better to spend 30 minutes daily than 5 hours just on a weekend. One of the most important things is to know, that as scout you don't have to do too much in the first days. If you've been just hired, you have not enough experience and you have to learn and gain experience by following instructions. Don't forget that Rome wasn't built in a day.

Second part: SEARCHES

Research is the basis of scouting. Each national team, that you see was created after a thorough research work by the scouts. If we receive the scouting role in an emerging national team or in a nation where there isn't a history of past scouting and you have to start from zero, the research becomes even more important than in a bigger country.

In any case, even in a national team where scouting is already well started, the research must be done well and consistently; neglect does not affect the immediate but may create a kind of “generational gap", that will cause problems in the future.

For example: if you have to search 23 years old wings for our NT and you will loose a potential future star, nobody (unless there will be the chance to find him out on the market or to receive a report by the owner) will ever notice him ... This will mean that the player could not be trained well or it could become a BOT, in both cases he will be lost for the NT.

Searches are themselves divided into 3 types, all are very important and necessary for proper scouting work:
- Searches on the tracker (ht-world.org)
- Searches on on Alltid.org (before, now the "Top players" page in Hattrick)
- Searches on the transfer list

Third part: TRACKER (http://www.ht-world.org)

The tracker combines all information for potential NT and U20 members. The national managers set minimum requirements for the players that could be added; this to avoid having, for example, 80.000 17 year olds with primary skill inadequate or weak.

There are two ways for a player to enter the tracker: the first, the most common, is when an owner logs in and the site automatically adds all players who meet the minimum requirements in the tracker. From this time on those players will be in the tracker and scouts can see the whole data about them. The second way is to insert the player manually, which can only be done by the scouts or the actual coach.

If you find an interesting player, you can manually add him into the tracker, but you will not see his skills until the owner decides to log in the tracker. When a scout manually adds a player on sale, skills are automatically added into the tracker without the need to wait for the log in of the owner.
What you see in the tracker, of a player whose owner has logged in, is almost everything:
- All skills
- Of course, public data like personality, stamina, form, TSI
- The coach of the owner
- Training intensity and stamina %
- Number of assistant coaches
- Player position in games played.

Access to the tracker is given only by the national coaches or chief scouts; to enter, once registered, just go to the restricted area and enter id and password. Once entered, you'll find a lot of functions, I will explain the main ones:

Search:
Clicking on "Player-Pool", you will enter a page with the search form. It's very simple and intuitive, based on what you're looking for, select the age range and min. and max. skill (I suggest to always set divine as max). By clicking on "search", you will be shown a list of all players with these requirements.

Creating scouting list:
If you find an interesting player, you can add him in a list of favorites called scouting list. The inclusion of a player is very simple, you open the player page and select "Add this player to my Scouting List." From that moment on, the player is added in the first scouting list (by default named A, but you can customize at your will).
A Scouting List (SL from now on) is very useful, because it keeps monitored certain players and allows you to follow their progress every time when owners update the data. It also allows you to see, when they are on sale, because they will be marked with a dollar-sign.
When a player is highlighted in orange and then red, it could have two meanings. Either the owner forget to log in for few weeks to the tracker or his team is going to become a bot and then the player could get lost. In this case you have to alert the national coach immediately.

Adding a player manually:
Click on "Add Player", write again your password, the username and the id of the player. It also appears a drop down menu where you can set what kind of player is; then clicking on "Log in" and you will add manually the player. At this point you'll find out the player directly in your SL but, of course, without skills. You will see them only if the owner will log in to the tracker. Even for this, one of the essential qualities for a good scout is the ability to interact with the owners.

---

The tracker is the fundamental tool for scouting. A good scout constantly connects to the tracker to check the status of players in his SL, to research and see who has updated data and who has not. I want to clarify that reading this HP will not make you scout and you won't automatically be added into a national staff. If you feel ready for a try to enter a staff, you must directly ask the chief scout or the coach of the national team, in which you want to work. Notwithstanding that, the scouting methods of other nations could be slightly different to those used in this manual.

I therefore recommend always starting from the lowest step and observe the more experienced, because only on the field you can become a true scout.

---

Editor's note (artod): I'm writing this note both as an editor and as Al Kuwayt current NT coach. This article has been originally written with bigger countries in mind, where there are many users involved with U20/NT teams and there are many players to follow. In smaller countries, fewer players means that fewer users are needed to do the job effectively and one of the main tasks of the scouts is the ability to find buyers for potential U20/NT players. This can be done by having lots of friends, by checking appropriate threads on the national forums where buyers declare their interest in purchasing U20/NT candidates etc. It's a very, very important job, because no matter his initial skills, a player that won't be trained will be superseded by other players.
In all the tasks of a scout, I just can't stress enough what is, for me, the key part of the article:

One of the essential qualities for a good scout is the ability to interact with the owners.

Without dedicated owners, there would be no U20/NT team worth mentioning. This is worth remembering at all times.
If you're interested in helping Al Kuwayt's national team, please join us in our national forum: (13711578.1)

Link directly to this article (HT-ML, for the forum): [ArticleID=17319]