FM Tip #1: Why You Shouldn’t Trust Your Scouts

2:40 pm Chappers

by Chappers  19/06/2013 | 2:400 Posted in Best Stuff, Football Manager 13, Opinion, Possible Features 

Top-flight signings in the Premier league tell you all you need to know about real life scouts, need I say Eric Djemba Djemba, Bebe, Chamakh or Andy Carrol but in the realms of Football Management games where scouts are working off a database with actual numbers, you would assume they couldn’t possibly get it wrong? Right? You couldn’t be further from the truth.

I’m not one for following tactics, signings or managing ‘tips’ that I see online, I like to have my own managerial personality and although I learn from most of the stuff I read I like to think I’m my own man.

That said this is the first in a new series of ‘tips’ related articles, they will be massively different from everything else you read online and that’s the only reason I am doing it, I think there is a big void that needs to be addressed.

Most of the stuff you see around is ‘samey’ and ‘yeh, obviously’ type stuff, and I think I can help, if you want me.

We can all go searching and find a list of sixteen million wonder kids that are worth signing but how many of them are ever relevant  within our budgets, good enough or would dream of coming to our club? Not many.

This series will focus on real, actionable tips that every single football manager player can use in his daily gaming rituals.

The first in the series is focusing on scouts, the one thing that stands between many players and us deciding whether to sign them or not.

Scouts are for noddies

If you’re like me you scout wholesale groups of players at vital times of the year, pre-season, the whole of December (because you’re excited about the coming transfer window), a few days into and at the end of Jan then scouring the transfer and contract expiry lists on a regular basis ‘keeping you’re eye out’.

This is, I think, common-place amongst FM players who have their eye on the lists constantly but one mistake many make is entrusting the judgment on the hundreds of players they look at each year on their scouts.

Yes, they can give you a good handle on the players current and potential ability if that individual scout is 20 and 20 in the ‘judging current’ and ‘potential’ ability areas and has 100% knowledge of the country and league the player is located in, only then can you trust more than 50% of what you are being told.

Football Manager 2013 makes it even harder for you to trust your scouts, with the one touch ‘scout player’ option 99% of the reports you get will be inaccurate as the chances are slim that a scout with the right knowledge and skill is on your pay-role, let alone being the one that is randomly assigned to gathering the vital information on your chosen player.

The best way to evaluate a player is to scout a player to the best of your staffs’ abilities then give the players’ star rating a 1.5 star margin of error, evaluate him on the key attributes needed for the position you desire, then his previous year or two’s form, whether he is injured a lot, wages and general personality traits. If all those suit and he is half a star lower than you want, don’t be put off by this.

The general mis-conception with scouting is accuracy, the ‘sway’ of current ability is much smaller than potential but it still exists, I have seen players with anticipated 3-star potential hit 4.5 stars for a top prem team. Case in point, Will Hughes.

At the start of the game scout reports of Will vary between 2.5-5 star potential ability depending on what club and what scout you use, yet he is the best future English midfielder on the game, bar none, well maybe Nick Powell, but for me he has never performed. Lets see what my scout said about him off the bat:

My scout, with stats that should make him one of the best in the world, tells me that Will Hughes will be a 2.5 star player at best, this is first season, what a disgrace this man is, you’re fired my son.

Now, take a look at these pictures, this is Will after a handful of seasons, in a game that I owned him and a game that someone else did, bastard City with all there well-earned (sarcastic voice) dollars.

Look at the difference there, Will is playing at 4.5 stars on both games, that’s not potential, that’s current. He also is an unbelievable assist-maker, 20 or even 30 assists a season is par for the course. So why on earth did my scout rate him at 2.5 stars at the start of the game?

In all honesty, I don’t know the technicalities of why but my assumption is your scouts are ‘programmed’ to give a representation of what the player is currently playing towards, not what he could reach if he was playing in your club, week in week out and being trained under the wing of the best players on the game.

Again its just a guess, but surely that should be the way the game works, how difficult can it be to get something as simple as that right? After all, the players do have a rating of up to 200 (which you can see on the dreaded RTE’s of this earth) so surely the scouts are working on that figure right? Guess not.

The same cannot be said completely for current ability though, it is mostly correct so bear that in mind, there is probably only a sway of about half a star in some occasions, but most are spot on.

So if you’re not paying attention to scouts, whats the process for finding a player?

Although I am completely against using scouts knowledge as ‘read’, they do have a purpose in the game apart from special assignments, and that’s your initial evaluation of experienced players.

I rarely sign a young player based on my scouts’ report, simply because the ‘sway’ is too risky, I judge them on raw talent, mental attributes and whether or not they have the vital stats for the position they play. For example if you’re looking for a target man then jumping, heading, strength and first touch have to be high on your list. Remember though that a young 17-year-old could have a 10 point stat rise over a few years, maybe more.

On the flip-side I rarely I rarely sign an older, experienced player with my eye alone, stats can be deceiving when a player gets old and there are thousands of players on the game that perform far better than their stats would tell you (One of our authors is putting a guide to these together as we speak). For example, Hatem Ben Arfa is a world-beater, he is pure class and is always one of my first signings for ANY club but his stats say ‘average player’. Marek Hamsik on the other hand is a pile of poop, stats coming out his ears and bright blues all over the positions you would want to see them, never turns up for me, on several games over decades of seasons.

Now, if you compare these guys you see a few vital things that should be screaming at you when you look back having spent £40m on Marek with tears in your eyes:

Now tell me that you would sign Hatem over Hamsik if you had a free choice judging on just first appearances?

I guarantee if you sign Ben Arfa and save yourself over £20m that you will not be disappointed, this is the problem though, surely a scout should be able to tell the difference.

I suppose in fairness to FM, the scouts do say that Hamsik isn’t a big game player and that Ben Arfa is the opposite, but that isn’t enough in my book and one that lets the scouts’ down massively.

Some of these guys are paid over £10,000 a week out of your budgets, yet they can’t tell you that you’re spending £40m on a player who wouldn’t perform, fit in, get pissed off and fell homesick or that there is a player just down the road who would do a better job.

SI need to sort out scouts, they need to be reliable, I can understand that there is a need to match a scout and a players nationality and current league blah blah blah, but there really isn’t any excuse for players to be ranked much higher than others who perform far better.

Maybe there is a need for a ‘perfect fit’ rating, a star rating that gives you an indication of how the player suits your playing style, the rest of your players and how well they will ‘hit the ground running’ or not.

The moral of this story is simple, don’t trust what you scouts tell you no matter how much they are paid or how good at their job is supposed to be, use them only as reliable sources of current ability of older players, not for recruiting youth.