Scouting South America

[Kelt]

Good day,

I'm having a problem scouting the South American countries in FM15, my scouts cannot find ANY players from those countries.

I normally go Celtic so I just put it down to :

A) Not having a Worldwide reputation.

B) No scouts with good South American knowledge to start with

C) My scouts don't think any South Americans are worth signing (highly unlikely i'll admit).

In order to try and solve this I signed a Brazilian scout with 17 JPA and 18 JCA, but this solved nothing.

I then thought maybe the problem is that I send my scouts to regions instead of specific countries so I sent my Brazilian scout to Brazil and over a couple of seasons tried both the 'Until Finished' & 'Ongoing' options but this didn't work either.

As a test I started a new game as Barcelona, sent a Brazilian scout to Brazil, an Argentinian scout to Argentina (you get the jist) but after 1 full season only 1 player was recommended and this turned out to be some naff Nigerian lad plying his trade in Brazil.

Again, I thought maybe my scouts simply couldn't recommend anyone from those countries so I did a bit of 'manual' scouting. So I went Santos > Gabriel Barbosa > Get Scout Report and a day later I get a report back saying he's potentially World Class. So why wasn't he picked up by my Brazilian scout?

On both occasions I had the Brazil leagues selected with a large database.

My scouts have no problem finding naff 17yr olds from Vanuatu but can't recommend at least 1 South American willing to don the famous Green & White hoops? Surely there something a miss here...

Does anyone have any ideas / solutions on how to solve this problem?

[Guest]

How are you setting up the scouting assignments?

What criteria are you setting when creating the assignments?

[Cougar2010]

From what you've said I suspect its the settings you use for the scouting assignments.

In general though I also find scouting countries better than scouting regions.

The main setting that springs to mind that might be causing a problem is the value. If you don't change it it defaults to your current transfer budget which could well be quite low with Celtic whereas Barcelona have a block on transfers at the start of the game.

[Guest]

Forgot about the Barcelona transfer embargo, that will be the likely cause as scouts will not report on players if you cannot sign them.

This also got me thinking about Celtic & the issue will be the nation transfer preferences. Looking at the nation data in the editor South America is set at a value of -1, this means that players based in South America will not be interested in moving to Scotland & is why your scouts are unable to find any suitable targets to provide reports on.

[Cougar2010]

From an English club or Scottish club perspective it is virtually a waste of time scouting South America for several reasons:

A) They can't leave until they are 18yo which blocks your home grown status.

B) They need an English/Scottish second nationality to make the transfer easy which virtually never happens.

C) An EU second nationality helps but tends to mean they go to Italy, Spain, Portugal first.

D) They need a work permit which means they need to be a star youngster or lots of regular caps which limits you to being a top club that can afford a big transfer fee.

All in all scouting is of more value in the likes of Eastern Europe or Scandinavia.

[Kelt]

Thanks for your responses guys.

I think i'll just focus on scouting Europe and Africa (ridiculous amounts of wonderkid Tunisians it would seem)

[Torminator]

I play as Man Utd and get a lot of good talent, so as a top club it really pays off scouting in Brasil. I agree that it might be a lot more difficult for a scottish club.