NOTE: This post is a short and sweet summary of scouting tips that you may find helpful. Be sure to read our full guide for a much more in depth look at youth scouting. It’s a longer read but even experienced career mode players can learn something from it.
Scouting Tips for FIFA 19
1. Ignore Nationality
When it comes to hiring a youth scout, don’t assume or believe that their nationality is relevant. Certain countries don’t produce better scouts and scouts aren’t more effective when scouting their home nation.
2. Experience vs Judgement
More Experience means more players per scouting report and ability to find a specific player type. More Judgement means higher chance of finding the highest quality players. Judgement tends to be favoured more but both are important.
3. Countries
When you’re setting up a scouting network, prioritise Central Europe, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Brazil and Argentina. These regions produce higher quality players more frequently.
4. Player Types
Player types don’t always make sense, so don’t assume that ‘Defensive Minded’ will bring you centre backs for example. Our full guide explains the differences between them.
5. What to Look For
When assessing players on a monthly scouting report, sign players that are above 60 overall or worth more than £250,000. Newer players often make the mistake of thinking every youth player will be a great prospect.
6. Position
Once you’ve signed a player to your youth academy, their position will be shown. This is useful as a guide but you don’t have to stick to it religiously. Take a good look at the player’s attributes profile and make a decision as to where they would suit playing.
7. Be Generous
When the time comes and you want to offer a player a professional contract, it’s important to be generous. Their demands are usually insignificant and failing to meet them can result in you losing the player forever.
8. Beware U16s
Because you can only offer a player a professional contract when they reach 16 years of age, any players you sign that are 15 have to wait. This can be a problem if you take up too many of your finite youth academy spots with 15 year olds. If your academy is full, you won’t be able to sign any more players and you might miss out. Of all of our scouting tips, this was was learnt the hard way.
9. Training
Maybe not what you think. It’s probably not worth training youth players while they’re still in the academy and we’ve seen that too much training can be a bad thing. However, the training menu is useful as it tells you which players are considered ‘High Growth’ with a handy green arrow symbol.
10. Save and Reload
We’ll admit it’s a grey area but save and reload can be an invaluable tool and it had to be included in our list of scouting tips. Given that you’re only going to see a maximum of 36 scouting reports in a year, the chances of finding has potential to be special players are low. Save the day before a report is due and you can always reload if you don’t like the players.