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Picking a good scout
The basics of scouting
In FIFA 17, EA have introduced the ‘Total Club Management’ system. Now, instead of just league and cup objectives, you’ll get several objectives every year covering everything from good financial management to youth scouting.
And now that you’ll have goals to reach and tasks to carry out when it comes to youth scouting, it means that finding a good scout and recruiting promising young talent is more important than ever in FIFA 17.
So with that in mind, how do you choose a good scout? Is it really worth buying the most expensive, highly rated scout, or can you find talented players with the lower-rated scouts? And what’s the difference between a scout’s experience level and their judgment?
Experience vs judgment
Let’s start with that last question. Each scout has two ratings – experience and judgment – each with a rating out of five stars. Firstly, let’s look at experience.
Experience
Experience determines how likely the scout is to find the type of player that you’ve told him to look for. So if you don’t want your scout bringing back a load of defenders when you told him to find attackers, you’ll want a scout with high experience.
A scout with 1 star in experience only has a 30% chance of finding the player type you’re after, and a 70% chance of finding a different type. In contrast, a scout with 5 stars in experience has a reassuring 80% chance of finding the player type you’re after, and just a 20% chance of finding another player type. That means you'll waste less time sifting through irrelevant players with a high-end scout – definitely worth it if your board has set you some demanding youth development targets.
It also determines how many players your scout will bring back for you on each scouting report. While a scout with 1 star experience will only show you 1-2 players per report, a scout with 5 star experience will bring back 5-7 players each time, increasing your chances of finding a talented young player.
Of course, if you don't specify a player type to look for then the scout’s experience level is irrelevant. So you could save a little bit of money in this way by picking a scout with a lower experience level and telling him to look for anything.
Judgment
Judgment is different in that it determines the quality of the players scouted, so a scout with higher judgment is more likely to find top quality ('platinum') players than a scout with lower judgment (these players have potential between 75 and 95). But how big is this difference? How much more likely is it that a good scout will find those amazing platinum players?
Well, it’s pretty difficult for all scouts to find platinum players – while 1 star judgment scouts only have a 1% chance of finding platinum players, 5 star judgment scouts only have a 10% chance, which isn’t that much higher.
However, that's enough of a difference for the five star-rated scout to be worth hiring. 10% may not sound like much, but it's still ten times higher than the one star scout. And if your scout also has five stars in experience (and thus brings in 5-7 players per report), you shouldn't have to wait long before you find an amazing platinum player.
Getting better scouts
If you’re not happy with the scouts you have to choose from, there are two ways to quickly improve your options.
Firstly, save and reload. Scouts refresh every 7 days, so you just need to work out which day your scouts will change on, then save the day before. Advance one day and check the scout list and if it’s still no good, quit, reload and try again. Eventually you should find a good scout.
The second option is more expensive but a little more reliable. When you buy a scout, there’s a 25% chance they’ll be replaced by a higher-rated scout. So if you buy a scout with 4 stars in both experience and judgment, if you go to buy a second scout there’s a 25% chance the one you bought may have been replaced by a scout with 5 stars in experience and judgment, for example.
So if you have the budget, this second option takes some of the randomness out of generating new scouts. But it will cost you a fair amount of money.
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