Setting Up Your Scouting Network - Regions
Personally, I find utilising the ‘scout region’ instruction to give you the best spread of potential players to be scouted. Taking the previous sections advice into consideration, choosing which regions you which to scout is easy enough but when you actually look at which countries are covered by each region will actually give you some really helpful information. A list of which countries are covered under each region heading can be found here.

With this in mind, I’ve categorised the regions into two categories; useful and wasteful. Bear in mind these are based on percentages of quality youth academies within each country.

Useful
UK & Ireland
Central Europe
South Europe
Eastern Europe
North America
Central America
South America
Middle East
East Asia
North Africa
Western Africa

Fairly obvious stuff for the most part as most of the worlds most successful clubs and youth academies are located within these regions and subsequent countries. These regions should be prioritised depending on where you’re managing and ability to send scouts there.

Wasteful
Central Asia
South Asia (India)
South East Asia (Singapore & Malaysia)
Oceania (Australia & New Zealand)
Southern Africa (South Africa)
East Africa
Central Africa (Cameroon & DR Congo)
Caribbean (Jamaica, Trindad & Tobago)

Some surprising inclusions in this list you might think. The reason they’ve been placed in the ‘wasteful’ category is the number of countries vs potentially good youth academies ratio. Take Oceania for example, if you’re managing in Europe and would like some good regens from this region, save your scout the hassle of looking through Tahiti, Samoa and Tuvalu and go straight to the source. Sending a scout to look specifically at New Zealand and Australia instead of the region is a better use of your resources.

The countries in brackets are nations that should you be looking for players in these regions will probably contain the better quality regens. The Caribbean is a great example of a region not to bother with, plenty of countries that rarely produce regens of note.

Now obviously if you happen to be managing in or have loaded the leagues from any of these regions then you’ll think differently if you’re looking for that type of player. This is just a guide of which regions to avoid sending scouts to.

Setting Up Your Scouting Network - Competitions
Along with scouting regions I find that scouting competitions is also a highly beneficial and effective way of finding players with high potential. Sending a scout to a competition is easily done but must be done manually for each competition, so setting reminders for these competitions may be beneficial. You can either right click the name of the competition in an e-mail or if you're unsure which competitions are currently running, you can do it through the scouting menu. This will send your scout off to follow all of the games that are played during this tournament and (should you wish) find the players that match the requirements you've set in their scouting task.Personally, for U21 tournaments I leave the filtering blank to cover all players at the tournament/competition.

Suggested tournaments to send scouts to:
- The Olympics (every 4 years)
- U20 World Cup
- UEFA U21 Championship
- UEFA U19 Championship
- African U20's Championship
- Asian U19 Championship
- Sub-20 Championship (South America)
- Domestic U21's/U19's leagues