FIFA 15 scouting guide part 1: Choosing a scout

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Key points:

• A scout’s experience determines whether he’ll find the player type you’re looking for
• A scout’s judgment rating refers to whether he’ll find the top rated youth players
• The list of available scouts resets every Monday
• Buying a scout will generate a replacement of roughly equal quality

Welcome to the FIFA 15 scouting guide!

Your essential guide to the scouting system in FIFA 15

This year I’ve decided to split the guide up into separate parts. This means that instead of having to wait until I’ve finished everything before a big all-in-one guide comes out, you’ll be getting content much more quickly. Just head over to the FIFA 15 scouting guide hub page to find the other parts as they are released.

The other articles in this series will focus on where to send your scout, how to recognise good players on your reports, and how you can best develop your youth players. But today we’re looking at choosing the best scouts, so read on to find out how you can get started.

The basics of scouting

If you’ve played FIFA 14 before or read my FIFA 14 scouting guide then you may find scouting in FIFA 15 eerily similar. Sadly, EA seem to have done very little to update the scouting system this year, which is disappointing. However, there are a couple of changes, and if you’re new to the FIFA series or want to get the most out of scouting this year, this is the place to be.

The basic mechanics of scouting work like this: once you’ve hired a scout, you can choose to send them to a variety of nations looking for talent. They will go away for either three, six or nine months at a time and report back every month with a list of players for you to consider. If you like the look of the players they’ve found, you can sign them to your youth academy, which can hold up to 16 youth players at a time. If you think they’re ready, you can promote them to your first team.

Going back to the scout, once you’ve chosen where to send your scout and for how long, you need to choose what type of player you’re looking for. This will cover types such as ‘defensive minded’, ‘winger’, ‘playmaker’, etc. If you don’t mind what type of player your scout will bring back, choose ‘any’.

So, the first thing you’ll need to do is head over to the Office tab and click on Youth Staff. Here you will have three slots to hire available scouts, so click on one to choose a scout.

You’ll now have a list of scouts available, all from the same region as the team you manage. For example, if you’re managing FC Barcelona, all the scouts will be from Southern Europe.

They will also all be of varying abilities. A scout’s quality is measured in experience and judgment, and each relates to a different thing. Let’s have a look at that in more detail.

Judgment relates to the quality of players your scout will find. A scout with a five star judgment rating will usually find better players than a scout with one star judgement. That doesn’t mean one star rated scouts can’t find good players, but it’s much less likely.

To see exactly how likely it is that your scout will find the best players, check out the table below. The ‘stars’ column refers to how many stars your scout has for judgment. The next four columns show the chances that that scout has of finding players of different qualities, ranging from bronze to platinum. What exactly the game means by bronze or platinum players is not clear, but the latter will be the absolute top drawer. If you know exactly how the game defines each of these categories, make sure to comment below.

Stars	Bronze	Silver	Gold	Platinum
1	75%	17%	5%	3%
2	67%	22%	7%	4%
3	50%	36%	9%	5%
4	30%	52%	11%	7%
5	20%	53%	17%	10%

So as you can see, scouts with one star judgment can still find platinum players, but the vast majority of the players they bring back will be ‘bronze’, i.e. the lowest rung. If you want a better chance of finding the best youth players, it’s worth shelling out on a scout with a higher judgment rating.

As for a scout’s experience, this determines how likely the scout is to find the type of player you’re looking for. A scout with a five star experience rating is much more likely to find the type of players you want (e.g. ‘attacker’, ‘physically strong’, etc) than a lower rated scout.

However, if you just tell him to find players of any type then his experience rating is completely irrelevant – he’s not looking for specific player types, so it doesn’t matter how good his experience is. So if you’re not bothered about player types and you see a scout with five stars in judgment but only three stars in experience, it may be a good idea to hire him instead of a full double-five star scout and save yourself some money.

Costs involved in scouting

A scout’s quality will determine how much he costs. The top, double-five star scouts will cost you £7,650,000 just to hire them (never mind sending them anywhere), while the double-one star scouts will cost a measly £42,000. That makes them affordable to even the poorest teams, but that comes with a corresponding drop in quality as mentioned above.

Once you’ve hired your scout, there’s a fee involved whenever you send him on a scouting trip. As an example, here’s how much it would cost if you wanted to send scouts of varying abilities to Southern European nations:

• 5*/5* scout
  • 3 months: £102,000
  • 6 months: £204,000
  • 9 months: £306,000
• 3*/3* scout
  • 3 months: £82,000
  • 6 months: £163,000
  • 9 months: £245,000
• 1*/1* scout
  • 3 months: £61,000
  • 6 months: £122,000
  • 9 months: £184,000

As you can see, sending a double-one star scout on a nine month scouting trip would actually be pretty expensive for a team with a low budget, and he may not even bring back any good players. For richer teams, however, the cost to send out a double-five star scout is not going to be much of a problem. Considering the amount of top quality players he should find – and the prices you could sell them for if you so choose – it’s definitely worth it.

That’s a key thing to bear in mind – while you could spend several million to bring in a good real life player, spending the same amount could bring you several fantastic players, perhaps even a whole academy’s worth. Selling just one of those players once they’ve developed a bit can easily cover the cost of the scout, so don’t be put off by the costs involved.

How to quickly get lots of top quality scouts

If you take a look at the list of scouts you can hire and you don’t see any that you like, fear not. If you advance to the next Monday, the list of scouts will have changed. They will also all be from the same region as the team you’re managing.

So, there’s a chance that better scouts will be available come Monday. A good idea is to save on the Sunday, then advance to the Monday. If you don’t like the look of the new scouts, you can just quit the save, load it up again and advance to Monday again. This time, the list of scouts will be different again. You can keep reloading like this until you find good scouts.

However, there’s an even quicker way to find the best scouting staff.

If there is a high quality scout in the list, hire him. When you go to the second ‘hire scout’ box, a new scout will have appeared in his place, and this replacement will be of a similar quality. So, if you hired a scout who had four stars in experience and five stars in judgment, his replacement may well have five stars in both.

What this means is you don’t have to wait until Monday to find more top quality scouts. If you have the funds available, just hire a good one, then chances are his replacement will also be of excellent quality.

In the picture below, the highlighted Austrian scout replaced the Spanish double-five star scout in earlier photos. The Austrian scout is of fantastic quality and the best scout available, so he’s well worth hiring.

This process therefore results in less waiting around for good scouts and means you can quickly hire several good ones and send them out around the world in less time.

It’s the same sort of thing if you’re hiring lower rated scouts. In my tests, hiring a double-one star scout almost always resulted in his replacement also having one star in judgment and one star in experience.

So it’s less of a gamble; if you see a top rated scout, you know there’s a good chance that his replacement will also be very good.

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Thanks for reading part one of the FIFA 15 scouting guide. If you have any thoughts on this or the YouTube video, make sure you let me know in the comments below.

And don’t forget to connect with me on social media. I’ve just launched the FIFA Scouting Tips YouTube channel, and you can follow me on Facebook or Twitter for all the latest updates.