Scouting, the 50 NxGen list and competition for good players

[Broetchenholer]

This might seem extremely counter intuitive, but the way the NxGens and scouting works, something currently feels currently off. I am not experienced with FM, or football, or the transfer market as a whole, i am essentially playing a economy sim right now. I am playing a 3 1/2 star reputation team that recently settled into the Bundesliga, just finished 9th in my second year. My team is basically unknown outside of my country i am not exactly drawing talent from anywhere. Despite this, i am currently having 7 og the top 50 NxGn players in my team or joining me in the future, and i was able to do so with almost no competition. And that kinda ruins the fun, thinking about it.

What i did, was wait until the 50 NxGn list was released, check whcih players at that time were not at a club in a better/similar league, and then bid for them. I had to briefly scout them and then, make an offer for a 10th the value they would get for being in my team, and then give them star player and important player contracts and woosh, they were in my collection of wonderkids. Some of course would not bite, having no interest, but getting so many ridiculously good players to join me for absolute peanuts was...strange. It feels like, some young players are just hard coded to be for the player if he is looking, and this seems especially problematic with the NxGn list, as the AI does not seem to know these players after the list has dropped. I would prefer, if everyone on that list was basically known as a target for every club. If my scouting would be so good, that i would find one of these guys at 15 or 16, before they make it on the NxGn 50, then i have earned getting a "free" wonderkid. If i find him from the list, i will have to fight to get him against the competition of the premier league. If i get him, i probably payed well for him.

 

What's even stranger is, that nobody is coming for them. From my current 8 players with value above 10 million, only 2 are interesting to the big clubs and i will definetely lose them. Everyone below the age of 22 seems to not draw any attention. So, i can just keep them until they are good enough, sell them for ridiculous profits and buy the next, better wonderkid. I know that this kind of play is highly encouraged by streamers and guides because it is so lucrative, but i really do not understand why the game is so timid on those younger players. I mean, they have zero problem unsettling anyone else in my club, but that guy:

Yeah, nobody is interested in him i guess. I fully expect to lose him in 2 years at the latest, but until then, i guess he is just not fast enough for an offer I get that it might make sense to these really big clubs  to allow a player to get experience in a midtable club of the Bundesliga and then take the "finished" product, and he is kinda expensive for a club between Bayern and me, but it looks like the game is again intentionally looking away, so that the gamer can feel he has that special young talent.

 

[Broetchenholer]

Again, why is this guy joing me without any competition? The pricetag seems to be somewhat realistic, they are just operating with lower budgets, but for that money, why was no one from tghe top5 leagues in europe bidding against me?

This guy does not want to join me right now, because he got his contract 4 months ago, but in august, i will get him for 4.1 million without competition. And without having found him using scouting. I can obviously chose not to snatch him from the list, but i think it would make more sense to have every club have access to that list and get competition for a bidding war.

Edited May 10, 2022 by Broetchenholer

[toolkit68]

The way things work  with young players is actually pretty simple: The main factor to join any club is the youth facilities of a club. As far as i recall Magdeburg is one of the German clubs with pretty good ones compared to the average. Important to note the very important difference to youth recruiting here. The youth recruiting is your own ability to create 'newgens' yourself but it is simulated in the background without you being able to see it. So there is a pool of players below 15/16 that are invisible to us players basically. The youth facilities on the other hand are what controls if another club can poach any of your youth players for example. The same is true for attracting outside youngsters to sign up for you. If your facilities are better than the ones at their current club chances are high they will move to you. Reputation has less value for youngsters actually - this is only for adult players. I have to dig for it but there is a post here in the forums that explains how recruitment and facilities actually work by a developer - basically the same as i wrote but from the source.

[Kyle Brown]

Another thing to consider is that a typical FM manages transfers differently to how a real world club operates. 

While we might go and scout 10 of the best wonderkids and sign them all in one window for 5m a piece, it doesn't typically work that way. 

Sure, there will be some South American or Eastern European prospects plucked at a young age and thrown into one of the Big 6's academies, but typically speaking a lot of these players will have to make a name for themselves in the first team, and often in the early stages of a European competition before a bigger club comes in for them. And on a lot of occasions, their first big move will be to the 'big' club of their own nation, before finding their way across the continent.

I think with these sort of examples, you may be better off raising them as bugs on our Bug Tracker - if there are players of clear quality not garnering any interest whatsoever, our testing team would definitely look to find out why that is: https://community.sigames.com/bugtracker/football-manager-2022-bugs-forum/transfers-contracts-scouting-recruitment-meetings-and-staff-responsibilities/