Scouting is one of the many areas of Football Manager that many people either don’t bother with much or set up then forget about. Utilising your scouting network to its full potential will allow you to find those hidden wonderkids before they move to a big club and you have to pay a small fortune to sign them. This guide will cover how I set out my scouting network and while mainly opinion, I’ll give the reasons for my decisions based on research from the game.

The Benefits of Setting Up a Scouting Network
Scouts provide you with scout reports on players that you either specifically instruct them to scout or players they’ve found while scouring a region for its footballing talents. If you have a properly structured scouting network, you’ll pick up on the gems before anyone else does, giving you the opportunity to sign them up early and for cheaper.

When one of your scouts finishing scouting a country there will be an increase in the number players visible to you in the 'Player Search' function, this increase is based on the country that is scouted. For example, scouting Canada will see an increase in Canadian players in your player search list.

Feeder clubs will also add to your clubs scouting knowledge, so having as wide a variety of feeder clubs as you can will also be beneficial.

What to Look For in a Scout
There are many schools of thought on which attributes you should look for when signing someone up as a scout. Firstly, the ‘Judging Player Ability’ and ‘Judging Player Potential’ attributes should be your first port of call. These attributes are directly related to how accurate a scout’s report will be and pretty self explanatory. ‘Judging Player Ability’ is the attribute that determines the players current ability while ‘Judging Player Potential’ determines how good that player can potentially become.

These two primary attributes are all that I look for in a scout, there are people that suggest ‘Determination’, ‘Adaptability’ and ‘Level of Discipline’ all contribute to how good a scout is. Personally, if these attributes are there then good if they’re not I won’t ignore a scout because he lacks these attributes. But this discussion is for another day.

Signing a variety of nationalities for your scouts will improve the clubs scouting knowledge. Scouts will always have 100% knowledge of their homeland but will also have knowledge of other countries depending on their previous experiences. This knowledge will also add to the number of players available in your player search list, also dependant on the nations in question.

Let's look at the example of Christian Karembeu of Arsenal, a 16/16 scout who has a widespread knowledge of football coming from a variety of sources. His knowledge of France comes from playing for the national side and FC Nantes, England from playing for Middlesbrough and being a scout for both Portsmouth and Arsenal. His knowledge of New Caledonia comes from this country being his place of birth while his Spanish knowledge comes from playing for Real Madrid. His knowledge of Greece comes from playing for Olympiakos while the others are bordering countries to the aforementioned. As you can see, a wide variety of factors contribute to scouts knowledge outside of their actual scouting locations so trying to get a variety of scouts at your club will increase the countries covered.

Things to Consider
So now you have some scouts, how best to utilise them? It will largely depend on what type of manager or save you’re planning on playing. If for example you’re only planning to sign players of the nationality of your club, sending someone out to scout the depths of Africa wouldn’t be a good use of resources. Similarly, consider the squad restrictions that are in place for the league that you’re managing in. Italy for example has a restriction on the number of non-EU players that you can sign each season, make sure you don’t waste too many scouts on non-EU countries for example.

In a similar vein, consider the countries that you have loaded within the save game. Send scouts to these areas more often than places where you haven’t loaded the leagues from. The potential number of recruits is much higher in leagues that you’ve loaded than those that you haven’t.

Your scouting restrictions in place by the board will also determine where you can send scouts to. Clicking on the ‘Boardroom’ tab will show you under the ‘Scouting’ heading if there are any restrictions in place by the board to where you can send scouts to.

Think of real life players that might help with your decisions on where to send scouts. Managing in France? Players like Desailly, Zidane and Vieira were all born outside of France but were eligible to play for the French national team. Dual nationality players usually represent real life examples.