I’ve been meaning to write a scouting piece for a while, and with me about to rebuild my scouting team at Lyon and assign them to duties and responsibilities, this is a perfect time to do it. Scouts are less utilised in my opinion on FM11 compared to FM10, due to the introduction of Agents touting players. However with a lot of FM11 players at a stage where they are trying something different, such as playing with fake names, or some who are well into the future and as such there are no “real” players left, scouts are very important, and I’m going to give an overview of what the team should include and how they are best to be assigned.

The scouting team

In most instances, variety is key. There is one big part of FM that might almost “decide” where your scouts are from however. If the board are restricting you to scouting certain regions, likely when you are in a lower league, then it is almost pointless to sign a scout from a nation outside of these, as while they give you different knowledge, the likelihood is that their knowledge of the nations you can scout is limited. There are of course then limits to this, for example, West African scouts may have good knowledge of France.

What is generally crucial for a good club though is to cover all the scouting regions that FM assigns.

These 20 regions are:

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Some of these will be understandably more difficult to find scouts for, especially the Asian countries, and you will do well to get strong scouts there. However as I am about to explain, certain attributes make for good scouts, and as part of a long term strategy you could send a scout with good attributes to Asia to build the knowledge.

Finding the best scouts and what attributes to look for

I’m sure many of us know of Roberto Bettega and Romeo Jozak, and their fantastic attributes for scouting. There has been much discussion over what actually constitutes the best attributes to scout, but through using the method I am going to show you for setting up assignments, there are several key attributes:

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Several other attributes could be considered important, such as Tactical Knowledge and Discipline, however this method does not require these in all but one of the scouting team.

So this is what I would suggest in a scouting team: Choose 8 regions you wish to scout thoroughly for players, and sign a scout from each of these, regions, generally from the biggest nation so from South America sign a Brazilian, or an Argentinian with good Brazilian knowledge. This is because it will take him less time to scout Brazil as he already has part knowledge.

Then in addition to these 8 scouts, I suggest 3 others. Firstly you want one for scouting your next opponents. This scout will usually be of your home nationality, and doesn’t need high Adaptability, replace that with high Tactical Knowledge.

The second “extra” that I suggest is one to back up your use of screenflow. I’m sure many of you use screenflow to find players doing well in youth international competitions taking place over the usual four year cycle, following Jad’s guide about the underused feature of FM. Screenflow only gets you so far however, and you need a scout to check the players you have potentially found through it. It is worthwhile having the extra scout otherwise it detracts from the time of another scout who is already assigned.

The third “extra” scout I suggest is to follow up players you find, through agent touts or the use of player search, and also to get a second opinion on players scouts around the world find. It is always useful to get a second opinion as I will go into later. This scout should potentially be your best scout. His knowledge doesn’t need to be great, he should have high Adaptability, Discipline, Motivation, JPA and JPP, and good tactical knowledge.

How best to assign scouts

One of the key features of scouting is assigning scouts to competitions or regions. I will go through where I feel is best and the filters I suggest are used below, screenshots are the best method to use here. It should be noted that it is possible for a scout to be assigned to both regions and a competition at the same time, even if they are thousands of miles apart. This is useful for when it is a longer competition such as World Cup Qualifiers.

Scouts 1-8: Regions with the following instructions



The age filter also ensures that any old players with the stats are not returned, limiting your filter to the potentially best available players. I then add all players found to a shortlist and filter in the following way:



Note: The 1 out of 2 on the attributes. These are two of the key 3 features of finding good youngsters.

Scout 9: Next Opposition

I generally leave the next opposition scout free to do as he wishes, because that way you get unconstrained feedback, and there aren’t really any filters that you could put in place to aid him. Of course if you have your eye on a player on the team you’re about to play, he may provide a scout report on that player for you.

Scout 10: Screenflow

It is vitally important that you backup your use of screenflow with scouting. Your scout assigned to backup your screenflow should have the following filters set up. Age filters are not so necessary unless you are scouting the big international championships such as the World Cup. It is crucial that you check the competition is on when the scout is assigned to scout it as he can only be assigned to scout one competition at a time. Therefore you should utilise the notes feature otherwise the scout will be doing very little for much of a four year period.



Scout 11: Second Opinion and your finds

Some people use purely scouting and agent touting to find players, and won’t use player search. However others do, and as such with attribute masking turned on, there is the need to scout these players to view their whole attributes and other aspects about them. With that in mind, you don’t want to be scouting these with a scout already assigned, you should have a scout who is unassigned to scout them. He should also be used to provide second scout reports on players that your other scout reports find. It is important for you to get more than 1 scout report on a player for many different reasons which leads nicely onto the next section.

What you gain by doing more than one scout report on a player

Let’s use two screenshots for this. Willy Sagnol is a good scout for his country and knowledge and has been at Lyon for some seasons so has knowledge of the clubs tactics. Rodrigo has just signed a week ago and as such is not as knowledgeable. In this instance Sagnol plays the role of the second opinion scout after Rodrigo has done the initial report on a young Brazilian he found while scouting South America. As can be seen here both scouts pick out the same positives and weaknesses to the player, in fact both reports are identical except for the financial information.




However this is just a report. A 3 match scouting report may generate differing results, but the initial thought here is to follow up my interest in the player. 3 match scouting reports usually will cover at least 1 game against a big team, where these initial reports get tested due to him supposedly relishing the big matches. In some instances personality may change from one report to another, and some scouts will pick up many more strengths and weaknesses.

The benefits of feeder clubs to scouting

Feeder clubs have scouting knowledge, which is going to be of a great benefit to you, as it means that you can see more attributes prior to scouting, so you can narrow down the field in which to scout. Due to this, you do not want more than 1 feeder from the same nation, as the knowledge is likely to be similar. If you don’t use attribute masking, then the benefits of a feeder club to your scouting is almost non-existent.

What to look for in a scout report

This is best covered in lots of detail by Jenko, and I will therefore not go into it. His guide is here


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