Scouting delegated - high costs - what to do

[danej]

IF you have, for some reason, delegated all scouting like I have (I like extreme and realistic save restrictions to avoid the game being too easy and boring, this is one of many restrictions for me):

 

What would you do when the Chief Scout at time spend a sh*t load of money because he decides to scout a lot of players outside your scouting range? You know, the stuff where you have to pay around 3k per scouting mission.

 

This is mostly a lower league problem I think. In my current save, this a bigger problem than ever before. I manage Arendal. We started in the third Norwegian tier, just got promoted to the second tier in the first season (by the skin of our teeth btw, winning a thrilling playoff final 3-2 after being 2-0 down at half time, 2-1 down at the 87th minute, and being given a soft penalty in the 90th minute).

 

About to start season 2. We are still semi-proffesional. The standard of Norwegian football is not the best, their second tier is like League One level.

 

Anyway - the Chief Scout has probably spent at least 150k on scouting during the recent main transfer window January - March 2024. He just keeps scouting a vast amount of old South Americans etc. in spite if our scouting range only being our own league.

 

Of course this has a big negative impact on our tiny club. Originally after the promotion I had an 18-19k p/w wage budget. Now the wage budget is down to around 14k because I have had to transfer a lot of money to the scouting budget in order to cover the huge deficits in that budget.

 

I was thinking that a solution could be to take notice and evaluate early when this stuff happens. It is probably better and less expensive to expand the scouting range during part or most a transfer window if you notice that the Chief Scout goes crazy with his scouting.

[nugatti]

Switch to control scouting and make sure scouts only travel to players based within your region. Sett all scouts to each their own ongoing assignments in a certain country.

[danej]

16 hours ago, nugatti said:

Switch to control scouting and make sure scouts only travel to players based within your region. Sett all scouts to each their own ongoing assignments in a certain country.

As mentioned in the OP I do wish to delegated scouting as much as possible. As one of my many save restrictions, in order to avoid almost certain massive succes and thus the game becoming boring.

 

But... I see that I need to do something. See the picture. Fascinating. Scouting costs have skyrocketed, up x20 or so from last season (this season is only 2/3 underway).

 

Currently, I delegated everything. And I click yes to all recommended changes in scouting related focused. More on that in the next post..

[danej]

I looked into it, and the main problem seems to be the recruiment focuses. The ones to the left in this picture. As mentioned, I just click confirm to all recommendations regarding this in the recruitment meetings. Normally, this isn't a problem. But it sure seems to be in lower level management. When your scouting ressources and thus your scouting scope is very limited, AI seems to mess up and eventually recommend "any" area for many of the recruitment focuses. Which effectively means that your scouts start scouting a lot of South Americans etc. And as we all know it is expensive to scout outside your scouting scope which in my case is my own league and that's it (not even the entire country of Norway or at least more than one league).

 

This makes me wonder - how is scouting done by AI managed clubs? They can't be messing things up like this, then all lower league clubs would end up bankrupt. I imagine that the don't do the stupid scouting outside the scouting scope that AI recommends to me.

 

 

[danej]

Example of one of the recruitment focuses. "Areas" - "Any" it a problem I think.

  

[danej]

Still looking into this, updating in case anybody else is also interested. If you want to do like me, delegating as much as possible regarding scouting in order to make the game more challenging.

 

I notice that if you leave everything to staff (the Chief Scout), but just manually tweak some of his scout assignments, you probably need a national scouting scope no matter what. It seems like you can get away with chaning those scout assignments that have a global focus (Areas - Any). But you can't get away with having a more narrow scouting scout than your home nation. For example, if I manually change all the set scout assignments to just my own league, the Chief Scout will invariably create at least one new scout assignment with a national scouting scope (Area - Norway in my case, the country I manage in).

I can live with that. A national scouting scope doesn't cost a lot. Seems like an OK practical solution where I maintain the pretty bad scouting that I want. And not least, I maintain the interesting signing lottery, let's see what the scouts and DoF come up with. The DoF probably still comes up with a few foreigners to sign from time to time in any case (one of my other save restrictions is almost like the Head Coach challenge - I can't sign any players other than those whom the DoF wants to sign - I can only veto/block the DoF's deals in or out, nothing apart from that; so I usually don't sign many players).