How to Sign the Best Players from a Monthly Scouting Report
After you’ve dispatched your scout following the advice in the previous section, wait a month and a monthly scouting report will appear. On this report you have several pieces of information, using these properly will help you to evaluate prospective youth players. If you’re in a rush, feel free to check the TL;DR at the bottom of the page.
Monthly Scouting Report Basics
First of all I want to cover off something fairly simple as it will help the rest of this section make more sense. It’s important to understand the way that scouting assignments work. When you dispatch a scout, they’ll send you a report every month until the assignment ends, based on whether you selected three, six or nine months.
As an example, if you set up a scouting network on January 1st for a three month assignment, you’ll receive reports on February 1st, March 1st and April 1st. The youth staff page does show you the end date of each assignment, helpfully.
Each report will show you new players, you can choose how to act on each one:
- Reject
- Wait
- Sign
Reject is the obvious option for a poor player, if their starting stats or potential are poor, or maybe they’re just not the type of player you’re looking for. Keep in mind that this is irreversible. Sign is the desired outcome for a good player, they’ll be instantly added to your youth academy. Waiting requires a little more thought. When a player first appears on the scouting report, some pieces of information will be missing or vague. This information will appear or become more accurate on a future scouting report. The flip side of this is that another team can poach a player in between scouting reports.
If it’s not too much of an ethical grey area for you, you can of course use the save and reload method of refreshing your monthly scouting report in case you didn’t get any good players or their stats dropped from previous reports.
Position
In the first scouting report, a player’s position will be unclear without some guesswork. The pitch graphic on the report will show a few positions (usually three) that the player might be suited to, unless they’re a goalkeeper. Luckily, the positions are usually similar, you might see a player that is either a left midfielder, a left winger or a striker. This means it’s not as much of a risk signing a player without being sure of his position. It would be much harder if the potential positions were for example striker, left back, defensive midfielder. If you’re looking for particular positions, it’s usually best to wait and see what changes in further scouting reports.
Overall Rating
This is a really simple one because its the measure of how good a player currently is in every game mode in FIFA 19. The complication on a scouting report is that a player’s overall rating is displayed as a range, with a minimum and maximum. For example, a player would show up as having an overall of 50-66. It gives you a rough idea but that’s still quite a large range (typically around 16 points), a 66 rated youth player is usually very good, but if he is as low as 50 you would be disappointed. If you’re unsure, you can wait until the next month. Providing the player hasn’t been signed by another club, the range will be smaller. Following the previous example, their overall rating might now be shown as 54-66. The range will shorten with each report, but a definitive value won’t be shown until you actually sign the player.
Potential
Just like with overall rating, you’ll be shown a minimum-maximum range. This is the number that gets most people excited about youth players, after all it decides how much the players can grow over time. Potential is a little harder to read that the overall rating, because the ranges tend to be larger. Most times you’ll see a difference of between 20-25 points on a newly scouted player’s potential range. Using our previous example again, the player with 50-66 overall might have a potential of 70-92 to start with. This shows why it is more tricky than overall rating. One more similarity to overall rating is that the range will decrease if you’re happy to leave the player on the scouting report for another month. However, a difference is that you’ll never see a definitive number for potential, even once you sign them.
Value
How much is a player worth? This is a monetary value, given to a player by FIFA based on their current rating and future potential. For that reason, I find that player value is really useful when evaluating youth players. Most top tier sides should really be focusing on youth players that are rated 60 or above, and will be worth at least £250k. Because the value is definitive, I often find that it helps me predict the overall and potential ratings more accurately.
Attributes
While it requires a little more thought, looking at a youth player’s attributes is the best way to understand if he is really what you’re looking for. Be warned though, at this stage of the scouting process many of the attributes will not be displayed, the ones that are will once again be shown as ranges for current and potential values. There doesn’t seem to be a clear pattern for which stats are actually displayed, so it’s down to luck as to what you’ll see. Of course, you are able to improve any attributes once you’ve signed a player (even some physical stats in FIFA 19) but it’s better to have good starting stats anyway and it’s debatable whether you should even train youth players.
Player Types
This topic was discussed in more detail in the previous section, but it’s worth a quick mention here. Usually players will appear to be ‘unknown’ player type in their first scouting report, even if your scout has a 5* rating. As with the other pieces of information, you can always wait a month or two for it to become available. The alternative is to try and make an informed guess from their position(s) and stats.
TL;DR
- Monthly scouting reports become more accurate over time, but you run the risk of players being poached by other academies.
- Outfield players will initially appear to have a few similar potential positions on the monthly scouting report.
- A player’s overall rating, potential and individual attributes will all be displayed as ranges or even obscured.
- Be sure to look at all the available information when assessing a youth prospect, potential alone won’t tell the full story.
- The best players tend to have a combination of the following criteria: 65+ overall rating, 85-95 potential and valued at £250k or more.