How Do You All Scout For Youth Players ?

[PODSYMAN]

Ok - really interested in the Brains Trust's thinking on this.

This is not about youth intake. Or feeder clubs. This is about scouting.

I love working my club towards a great youth intake but this is about picking up the one or two extra players that can be added to your youth system and hopefully coached to becoming first team players or sellable assets.

Setting a scout to a 'Hot Prospect' search within my scouting range rarely produces anything for me.
I'd lovesome ideas and conversation on this, please.

Maybe set a scout on an U-18 search of Brazil, Argentina, Kiribati etc?
Maybe one scout to South America West, one to Africa etc?

What has worked for you in the past?

Pods.

[Freakiie]

Hot Prospect - Region works just fine for me. Entire scout range will probably result in your scout doing more traveling than scouting (especially if you have a large scouting range) so that's probably why you had poor results. On top of that I also send a scout to every national youth side cup, but generally they're not gonna find any talent my other scouts wouldn't have already spotted.

I also used to set up scouts for U18s, but those rarely gave me results in the past. Think a hot prospect assignment in a single nation would be more efficient than scouting the U1X of that nation.

The more cheesier methods include just going through all National U-1X sides and scout all the players in them or if you want to go full cheese, check the world transfer list for youth intakes and just send your scouts to get reports on every newgen from interesting countries.

[PODSYMAN]

Brilliant info, Freakiie. Thank you.

I used to use Para 3 but it's unrealistic I feel.

Your approach in Para 1 really appeals to me. Thanks. What parameters do you set - U-18 and Good/Very Good Potential?

[larnson]

I often get quite hands on with this. I usually play lower league clubs to begin with, so I often have a lower threshold, but what I tend to do is search for players who are under 18 and then pick a number of attributes which I think make a good foundation of a player, so for instance if they have high Decisions, Determination and Technique I'll take a closer look. You can also expand that out to some of the other mental and technical stats like Passing, Finishing, Dribbling, First Touch, Anticipation, Positioning and Flair. Another way is to pick all of the attributes, set them to 15 and then slowly reduce the number that they have to match (eg. 10 out of 30, or however many you selected). I've managed to find a few gems this way. Bear in mind that this technique can take awhile to come to fruition, because (depending on your scouts) you probably won't know a players exact stat so something like 9 - 15 will still count as 15, but they could end up with a 9.

Another technique is to select under-19, add the media description column and then sort by that. Scroll down to players who are described as Wonderkid (obviously), but also some of the other descriptions like eg. Promising Striker can help guide you.

Some people also regularly check the Youth Intakes from around the world, but I've never managed to make that a manageable technique.