Responsibilities
The responsibilities of your scouts include:
- Helping you to find potential new players or assess opposition teams by performing scouting assignments.
- Helping you to assess the abilities of players outside your club by providing scout reports on the players who they find on their assignments and on specific players who you ask them to scout. A scout may also provide reports on players he already has knowledge about when he joins your club or when you join a club.
The Scouting Assignments guide discusses how to manage the assignments of your scouting team and how to ask for a specific player to be scouted.
- Providing match reports on players who have been loaned out to other clubs, if requested.
These reports can be managed on the Players on Loan tab of the Squad screen. You can ask for match reports on a player by selecting Get Match Reports from his Reports drop-down.
Your chief scout, if you employ one, takes on these responsibilities along with any additional responsibilities that you assign to him on the Staff Responsibilities screen, as detailed in the Staff Roles guide. You can also ask him to choose a scout to carry out a scouting assignment when you are setting up the assignment, rather than choosing the scout yourself.
Required Qualities
- Judging Player Ability & Potential – These are the most important attributes for scouts. They affect the accuracy of the current and potential ability star ratings a scout gives to scouted players in his scout reports, as explained in the Player Ability guide. Scouts that you use to find and report on potential new players for your senior squad or assess opposition teams require good Judging Player Ability so that you can get more accurate reports on current ability. Scouts that you use to find and report on younger, developing players require good Judging Player Potential so that you can get more accurate reports on potential ability, although you should bear in mind that it is the difference between reported potential ability and reported current ability that is important in assessing how much a scout believes a player can improve.
The other attributes that are used by scouts and the effects of these attributes are largely unclear. However, you can gain an idea of the probable important attributes for scouts by searching for high reputation scouts on the Staff Search screen and assessing their attributes.
Attributes that may be useful for scouts include:
- Tactical Knowledge – This may be a useful attribute for the scout you use to assess your next opposition, along with Judging Player Ability.
- Man Management – This may be a useful attribute for your chief scout for managing the scouting team.
- Determination – This may be useful for a scout for motivating himself to find more players.
- Adaptability – As with coaches, this presumably affects how well a scout settles at your club. It may also affect how well he scouts a region for which he lacks scouting knowledge. It is particularly important for foreign scouts who have not previously worked in your club’s nation, especially if they do not speak the local language.
You can check a scout’s nationality and languages spoken on the Nationalities tab on the Information section of his Overview tab.
Scouting Knowledge
A scout’s knowledge of the nation or nations he is required to scout is also important and it is particularly advantageous to employ scouts with knowledge of a wide variety of nations. A scout’s scouting knowledge can be viewed in the Scouting Knowledge panel on his profile.
Scouting Knowledge is discussed in more detail in the Scouting Knowledge guide.