Note: I’ve compiled the key findings from this section at the bottom of the page in a handy TL;DR.
Where to Begin
Veterans of career mode won’t need much help here but for newbies or those of you that might have missed a few years, I’ll start right at the beginning. Once you’ve started or loaded your desired career mode save, switch to the Office tab. Once here, you should see a tile called Youth Staff, this is what you’re looking for.
It’s worth mentioning here that youth staff and youth scouts are one and the same. EA haven’t always been wonderfully consistent with the terminology they’ve used throughout editions of FIFA.
Once you’ve done this, you should see three tiles all marked ‘Hire Scout’ with stock photos of men in suits. First thing to notice here is that its only three slots – you’re only able to have a maximum of three youth scouts in your employ at any time.
Hire a Youth Scout
Hit on any of these tiles if you’re still set on hiring a youth scout. Next you’ll see a list of five scouts that you can hire. For each one, you’ll be able to view their name, nationality, experience rating, judgement rating and cost.
Youth Staff Nationality
We’ll start on the very left. Allow me to answer a frequently asked question: “When hiring a youth scout, does their nationality affect anything?“. The assumptions tend to be that maybe scouts from certain countries are better at identifying players of a certain position or style. The answer is a resounding no. Testing this doesn’t seem to show any differences with scouts of different nationalities, nor is anything hidden in the game code.
Strangely, youth scouts are no more effective when scouting in their home country. I’ve heard lots of people suggest the opposite, but its always based on very tenuous and anecdotal evidence. However, I do think that it should work that way. While it might be a bit mean to fire scouts regularly, it would at least be a bit more challenging financially if it was expensive to continually hire new ones.
Star Ratings: Experience vs Judgement
We’ll now skip to the star ratings. Names are entirely unimportant, generally repetitive and only occasionally throw up a funny name worthy of a reddit post.
For two attributes (Experience and Judgement), each scout will have a five star rating. A quick glance will tell you that scouts with higher ratings will cost you more, but more on that later. First of all, what do these ratings mean and how should that affect your decision when hiring a youth scout?
Understanding Experience
We’ve already covered how a scout’s experience is vaguely rated with between one and five stars. It sounds important, “More experienced scouts must be better?”, well that depends.
Experience determines two key variables for a scout, one of which is definitely important, the other may or may not be important to you. They are:
- How many players will be scouted per month/report?
- How effective is the scout at finding youngsters that fit your ‘player type‘ requirements?
Players Scouted per Report
This is the part of ‘experience’ that I think is really important when hiring a youth scout. My reasoning for this is simple. You’re trying to find high potential players, but they’ll only appear a fraction of the time. If you want to find more of them, and more quickly, then you want as many players as possible on your scouting reports.
Taking it one step further, check out the table below.
[table id=3 /]
This table shows you precisely how a scout’s experience rating is going to affect your scouting reports. As a guideline, each star of experience means your scout will report on that many new players as a minimum each month. With a 1* scout you’re only guaranteed to see one new player every month, but a 5* experience scout will serve up at least five new names each month.
The ranges aren’t very big (slightly larger for 3* and above) and not significantly different. However, don’t forget that this number is per month. Once you realise that scouting assignments are a minimum of three months and can be up to nine months long, the differences are more noticeable.
As an example, let’s compare 4* and 5* experience scouts. Bigger differences will be more obvious to you but sometimes you’ll wonder if the extra expense if worth it. Over a 12 month period, a 4* scout will return a minimum of 48 players and a maximum of 72, whereas a 5* scout will return a minimum of 60 players and a maximum of 84. While there is some overlap, don’t forget that these are minimum and maximum figures. Average returns for that time period would be 60 players for a 4* scout and 72 for a 5* scout.
Ability to Find Player Type
Explaining this part of experience means we have to jump ahead of ourselves a little bit, but bear with me. When you come to sending your scout out on assignment later, you have the option of choosing a type of player. This won’t give you complete control over which positions your scout finds (unless you choose goalkeeper), but it’s certainly a useful feature.
If you specify a player type, this is how likely it is that your scout will be able to match that, based on his level of experience.
- 1* Experience – 30% chance
- 2* Experience – 45% chance
- 3* Experience – 58% chance
- 4* Experience – 65% chance
- 5* Experience – 80% chance
While scouts will always find some players that don’t match the type you specified, the higher level scouts will at least find similar player types.
Understanding Judgement
When hiring a youth scout, the term ‘judgement’ makes a bit more sense. You can probably guess, but it is a scout’s ability to find higher potential players. Understandably, this is why most people tend to prioritise judgement when hiring a youth scout. The table below gives you a handy breakdown of how often different scouts will bring you high potential players. I’ll explain the details later in the guide but for clarity, platinum players are the best and bronze players are the worst.
[table id=4 /]
The first thing I would draw your attention to is the rarity of platinum players. Even a 5* judgement scout will only return platinum players 10% of the time. This might not seem a lot (especially with the lower rated scouts), but trust me its very easy to find a lot of good talent if you know what you’re doing. At the other end of the spectrum, bad-average players are very common. Even a 5* scout is going to bring you these players (bronze and silver) 78% of the time.
One thing I should point out here is that there is a bit of a skew towards the very best players, platinum youngsters that will be marked as ‘has potential to be special’. While these are of course the holy grail of youth scouting, it’s easy to forget that if you’re playing as a lower level team, lesser quality youth prospects are still worthwhile.
Scouting Network Cost
Again I have to pick holes in EA’s terminology again here, as ‘Scouting Network Cost’ is a little misleading. When hiring a youth scout, the figure you see on the right is a one off fee you pay to hire that scout. If you’re managing a very wealthy club, a few million here and there isn’t going to make much of a difference, but for sides with tighter purse strings, this information is important.
[table id=1 /]
No real surprises here, higher rated scouts are going to be more expensive. Going back to my earlier point about judgement being slightly more important, this appears to be true, as it affects price slightly more than experience does.
Firing a Scout
Firing? We’ve not even hired a scout yet! I know, but it made sense to include this now as it doesn’t really fit anywhere else. Sometimes you’ll want to fire your scout, most of the time because you’ll accumulate enough funds to upgrade (assuming you started the game with low level scouts). Just like when you hire a youth scout, you’ll have to pay a one off fee – think of it like compensation.
[table id=2 /]
As you can see, the figures don’t come close to what it will cost you to hire a youth scout. Firing one will never set you back more than £42,000.
Finding Better Quality Youth Scouts
Whenever you look to hire youth staff, the list of available scouts is random. This means you might be hoping for a 5*/5* scout but there are none available, in this case what are your options?
- Option 1 – Wait seven days and the list of available scouts will refresh
- Option 2 – Save and reload the game, making sure to save the day before the scouts refresh.
- Option 3 – If you’ve already got the maximum number of scouts, you’ll have to fire one to be able to see which new ones are available.
- Option 4 – Hire a cheap scout and fire him instantly, a new one will replace him on the list. Riskier and not as quick, but feels like less of a cheat than reloading.
TL;DR
- Hiring a youth scout is the first step in youth scouting and plays a big role in determining your success.
- Ignore a scout’s nationality – it won’t affect their scouting ability!
- A scout with high experience will find you more players, and has a better chance of finding specific player types.
- Judgement is marginally more important and decides how likely a scout will find high potential players.
- Scouts can be as cheap as £16,000 but can cost as much as £3,400,000.