Hello everyone, to reply to your recent comments I wanted to say a few things.
First off, to reiterate we do not think that Scouting is ‘Broken’. We have done substantial testing and have not found, nor believe there is any ‘Bugs’ to fix. That’s why we said we ‘tweaked’ the current scouting system in our latest update instead of ‘fixed’.
The current system is working as intended, as it was in FM23 when scouting was revamped and recruitment focuses were introduced. The intention of the revamp was to make scouting less speculative and more streamlined towards players that are of the required standard to make an impact on your first team either now or in the future.
The recent update we put out increased the average the number of recommendations and near matches.
As I mentioned before you really need to factor in what team you are playing as.
To go through some recent examples, @garndogg
Arsenal is a very big club with an excellent first team squad. The Recruitment Focuses you’ve setup have you looking for under 22s with 2.5 star minimum PA in Scandinavia and South America.
Given you are Arsenal that's basically a player of the same standard as someone like Emile Smith-Rowe or Eddie Nketiah that is interested/available to move. So, it’s not surprising that results are limited. The 1 Star CA ability rating is compared to your current squad so if you’re Arsenal that will be elite players.
In your Brighton example you say you got 8 recommendations when searching in Brazil. We feel that is a good amount of recommendations for a club like Brighton.
@StatboySpurs in your example, searching for just Norway is quite narrow, switching ‘Norway’ to ‘Northen Europe’ gave me much more recommendations.
Another important thing to note is that Scouts won’t give every player available right away, it will be a gradual process, otherwise the game would be too easy.
So, in conclusion, our main advice would be:
1. Factor in what team you’re playing and current ability of your squad.
2. Make sure your focus is broad and don't overwork your scouts.
3. Ensure the scouts who are assigned to your focuses have an extensive knowledge of the area you’re sending them to.
4. Have ‘include results found in other recruitment focuses’ tick box selected.
5. When creating recruitment focuses for high potential players ensure the CA criteria is set very low and that you are setting them too ongoing. (You shouldn’t anticipate a huge number of recommendations to be returned for these focuses as only a select few players in the whole database will ever match this criteria when playing as an elite club.)