Scout Report: The Scouting System, Part 1
Posted in Guides | On November 30th, 2007 | By Kazzy
About the new-improved scouting system of Football Manager 2008. What was changed since the last Football Manager version? How the new stars system work? How to improve your club scouting knowledge and what should you consider while creating a massive scouts network? Read on to discover the answers.
Ronaldo, Jefferson Farfan, Kaka, Javier Saviola and now Alexander Pato. You're all familiar with the first four, and six months from now you all will also know the latter. What is their similarity? The answer is, they were all discovered by highly rated scouts that were sent to South America to discover the next big star. Scouting plays major part of club' success and the big clubs are already know that, this is why you watch on the newspapers or television from time to time about Liverpool signing a 14 year old Finnish talent, or about Arsenal's Mexican kid getting loads of goals in Spanish lower-side. Even Chelsea know that; "Mr Abramovich is fed up that he has to keep paying millions and millions for big star players. He had to pay an absolute fortune to get players like Didier Drogba and Michael Essien. This is why he has asked me as a private scout to look out for top class young players who will be the Chelsea stars in three years time." Words of wisdom from Chelsea's Dutch scout, Piet de Visser.
Professional clubs have their own scouting system, assembled by former footballers and retired managers that attend pre-scheduled football matches most of their time. However, you and I have our very personal scouting network; It is the biggest, most extensive network on the planet and it's totally free-cost. This is the Football Manager database, created by dozens of hard-working personnel from all over the world. Its quality can be rather questionable, but it won't be very surprising to hear actual football-staff studying it and maybe even attending real-matches because of it. This is major part of what differs our beloved FM to then-rubbish now-better CM.
The scouting system of our Football Manager was experiencing few minor changes through the transition from 07' to 08. First and foremost, individual scout reports can be deleted. There are two ways to delete them: (1) In the player screen, there would be an option of "remove scout reports", click on it and poof! (2) You can do so more conveniently and massively by 'selecting all' combination (CTRL+A), right clicking on the selected players list and then clicking the above-mentioned option. Secondly, once the scout will finish a given assignment there will be a news notice about it where you can see his top list and get quick access to his reports. Thirdly, on the scout reports headlines there would be one-two words summaries and stars icons to help those of you who just flick on quickly on reports without too much of attention. In addition, the star system has changes and from now on the stars will indicate how good a player considering the club standard (that is the average standard of first team/key players).
You can send your scouts in three different methods;
(1) Individually. You've navigated to a very interesting youngster profile screen and you want to know more about him, or more importantly to see his attributes. Click on 'Get Scout Report' and you'll receive your staff list with scouts on top and other backroom staff at the bottom, if you hover any personnel you'll receive four different scouting options a) Report Card; b) View 1 Match c) View 2 Matches d) View 3 Matches.
(2) Group assignments. In your 'squad' screen tree, there is 'scouting', which has two options: 'knowledge' and 'assignments'. If you click on assignments you'll receive a screen with the list of your staff (with the exception of physiotherapists), when marking a scout the option of 'Add New Assignment' at the bottom will be available. When clicking on that option a new screen will pop up, at the top right near 'Assign To…' there would be a drop down menu with all your scouting options (Next Opposition, Competitions, Nations and Regions) and beneath it you can specify conditions such as Age, Position and Value that your scout must follow.
(3) Very similar to the second method, while being on a scout screen there is an option of viewing his 'scout assignments' at the tree-menu, click on it and you'll see all his current tasks, and at the bottom you can add him new ones.
Scouts like any backroom staff and playing-personnel in the game (with the exception of very few like chairman, fans spokesman etc.) have sets of coaching and mental attributes. The most important attributes for a scout, as your probably have guessed already, are the mental attributes of judging player ability and judging player potential. There would be absolutely no difference in the tactical reports of scouts with high tactical knowledge attribute and low one, which is a bit of shame in terms of game-realism.
As already been mentioned, there are two main screens concerning scouting in this game;
Assignments
On the left top-side of the screen there is a list of your backroom staff, with the exception of physiotherapists. You can mark each one of them by clicking on the tiny-triangular next to a certain personnel name; Once marked, the right top screen will show you that individual knowledge nation-wise with the best-known countries at the top and the least-known countries at the bottom. On the bottom screen you can see the marked-personnel current and future assignments, their status (in progress, pending, on going and scouting x/y matches), the assignment start date, resume date, duration (in days) and how many reports they managed to compile so far. You can see reports of assignment in progress by marking it, and then clicking on 'Reports' at the bottom. Alternatively, if the reports don't satisfy you, you can restart finished assignment by clicking on 'Restart'. At last, if you want to abort current assignment you can click on 'Remove'.
Knowledge
In this screen you get to see your club scouting knowledge regionally and nationally. At the top of the screen you can see your world knowledge, this will always be at the top. Then, the regions will be sorted from best-known region to least-known region with different types of knowledge description including: Outstanding, Exceptional, Extensive, Very Good, Good, Average, Decent, Sporadic, Little and more. At the bottom area, you can see your knowledge by nations, a graphic row such as in the top area that basically gives you the idea of how well your club is familiar with this nation, and right next to it – the source. The source can be you, the manager, your staff - from assistant managers, coaches to obviously scouts, and feeder/parent clubs. Each individual knowledge is based many factors such as his nationality, pre-coded knowledge, his favourite team, the nations that involve within it and with the club, acquired knowledge etc.
The benefits of having greater scouting knowledge come to expression with having much extensive list in your 'player search' function, and you'll be able to watch more players attributes without having to scout them.
You can expand your club scouting knowledge in many ways: (1) Signing a playing or non-playing staff from a nationality which isn't available in your knowledge screen. (2) Sending your scouts to unlisted countries or less familiar ones. (3) Getting a feeder/parent club (this will give you its scouting knowledge).
There are few external options that you should keep in mind before you assign your scouts to different locations. The first thing is your database; Your database (small, medium, large) size will determine how many players will be available in your game, which means that sending your English scouts to a region such as The Caribbean won't be very beneficial. The database size will also determine your clubs scouting options, meaning on small database you'll be able to scout very few nations with high reputation and with large database more extensive list of nations will be available. The second thing you have to consider is the leagues and competitions you've loaded; The more nations you load, the more nations you'll be able to scout and your scouting of foreign countries will more effective. Competitions you've loaded will be available for scouting as well, through the 'Competitions' option.
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