FIFA 15 scouting guide part 3: Where to send your scout

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Key points:

• With a good enough scout, you can now find top class players in pretty much any country
• Though regions probably do specialise in player types, in practice you’re not likely to notice it
• As in FIFA 14, there doesn’t seem to be any noticeable bonus from sending your scout to his home nation
• Reloading your reports may get you better results than scouting in ‘top rated’ regions

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.

Today’s article will focus on whether it is best to send your scouts to certain regions, and if so, where. I want to answer three questions: where are the best places to scout? Do regions specialise in producing certain player types? And finally, does your scout find better players if he scouts in his home nation?

Contents

• Where should you scout?
• Do nations specialise in player types?
• The effect of looking in a scout’s home nation
• Why reloading your reports is best

Where should you scout?

If you’ve read my FIFA 14 scouting guide, you’ll know that the nations you could send your scout to were ranked according to how likely they were to produce top talent. Quoting from the game code from FIFA 12 (which was also in use in FIFA 14), user MTGowns told me the following:

And about the country output, you can access the file that dictates the chances of finding certain tiers of players – there are four: Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum. Naturally, Platinum are the best youngsters out there. Each set of regions have different probabilities for each kind of player. As found in youth_scout.ini the odds are:

YOUTH_PLAYER_PLATINUM_0=15
YOUTH_PLAYER_PLATINUM_1=5
YOUTH_PLAYER_PLATINUM_2=2
YOUTH_PLAYER_PLATINUM_3=6
YOUTH_PLAYER_PLATINUM_4=14
YOUTH_PLAYER_PLATINUM_5=8
YOUTH_PLAYER_PLATINUM_6=13
YOUTH_PLAYER_PLATINUM_7=7
YOUTH_PLAYER_PLATINUM_8=3
YOUTH_PLAYER_PLATINUM_9=1
YOUTH_PLAYER_PLATINUM_10=1
YOUTH_PLAYER_PLATINUM_11=6

Where each number is:

// 0 = SUBREGION_ARGENTINA_BRAZIL,
// 1 = SUBREGION_REST_OF_SOUTH_AMERICA,
// 2 = SUBREGION_NORTH_AMERICA,
// 3 = SUBREGION_NORTHERN_EUROPE,
// 4 = SUBREGION_ITALY_SPAIN_PORTUGAL,
// 5 = SUBREGION_REST_OF_SOUTHERN_EUROPE,
// 6 = SUBREGION_CENTRAL_EUROPE,
// 7 = SUBREGION_REST_OF_EUROPE,
// 8 = SUBREGION_JAPAN_CHINA,
// 9 = SUBREGION_REST_OF_ASIA,
// 10 = SUBREGION_AUSTRALIA,
// 11 = SUBREGION_AFRICA,

So it can be seen that Argentina, Brazil, Italy, Spain, Portugal and every Central European country (including Switzerland and Austria!) is where you’re the most likely to find elite youngsters. On the other hand, it’s quite unlikely you’ll find an EPL star in Australia, Asia or North America and you’ll be better off looking elsewhere!

So the higher the number after the = sign, the better chance you had of finding high quality players in that region

Now I wanted to know whether this was still the case in FIFA 15, so I did some testing.

In FIFA 14, Brazil and Argentina were the best places to send your scouts. Meanwhile, New Zealand (being in ‘subregion Australia’) was one of the worst. And it seemed that would still be the case this year, as a six month trip to Brazil costs a 5*/5* scout £204,000, while exactly the same trip to New Zealand costs only £34,000. If cost is anything to go by, Brazil looked like it’d be more worthwhile. I sent a 5*/5* scout to each region and waiting for the results.

However, a funny thing happened once the scouting trips ended. I actually ended up with an exactly equal number of high quality players from Brazil and New Zealand.

I wasn’t just taking any old players, I was taking the best players I could find – players where the top end of the potential range (e.g. the 91 in 67-91) was either in the high 80s or low 90s when they first appeared on my reports. I didn’t do any reloading either, just a straightforward test to see which area produced the best talent.

So to find an equal number of players from two regions supposedly ranked the best and worst in the game was surprising to say the least. The best player in my academy was a Brazilian player, but the second highest was a goalkeeper from New Zealand, so it’s not like the Brazilian players were way higher either.

I decided to do another test to see if I got similar results, and this time sent a 5*/5* scout to Argentina and one to Saudi Arabia. Argentina was meant to be the joint best nation in FIFA 14, while Saudi Arabia, being from the ‘subregion rest of Asia’ area, was meant to be one of the worst.

But again I had similar results to my first test. After the trips ended I trimmed my academy of any player whose top potential range (e.g. the 91 in 67-91) was less than 80, and once again I had an exactly equal number of players from Argentina and from Saudi Arabia.

What made it even more strange was that the highest potential players left were actually from Saudi Arabia, not Argentina!

This year scouting is not hugely different from FIFA 14, so my assumption is that the code is probably left largely unchanged and that that table is still in the game. But my tests showed that you can get just as many fantastic players from the lowest ranked nations as you can from the best nations. What’s going on?

My suspicion is that the quality of the scout is more important than the region he goes to. I believe a top rated scout will find talented players wherever he goes. If you did 1,000 scouting trips and recorded the results, you may notice you get a greater number of top players from Argentina and Brazil, so for that reason it’s a good idea to take note of the above table.

But the key point is that you can find talent anywhere. With a good enough scout, it may not matter where you send him, so you may want to save yourself some money on a scouting trip and send him to a low ranked nation.

Do nations specialise in player types?

In previous scouting guides I was always adamant that nations and regions did not ‘specialise’ in certain player types, e.g. Italy didn’t produce the best defenders, etc. I took this position because in all the hundreds of scouting reports I’d looked through in various FIFA games, I’d never noticed a pattern emerging when I sent scouts to any country.

However, it was later pointed out to me by user Lelouch that in actual fact they did specialise. For example, according to the game code the best place to find fast wingers was anywhere in Asia.

So, time for another test. Was this true in FIFA 15?

To find out, I sent three excellent scouts to three different countries. I told them to look for ‘Any’ player type because I reasoned that if certain places did specialise in player types, this would be obvious at the end of the scouting trips. So, I sent one scout to Spain, one to Italy and one to Cameroon.

What I found was a complete mixed bag of player types. For example, of the six players I found in Spain I had two physically strong players, one technically gifted player, one winger, one playmaker and one attacker. Italy produced two physically strong players, one goalkeeper, one defensive minded player and one attacker. Finally, in Cameroon I found three defensive minded players, one physically strong player and one technically gifted players.

According to the game code, Spain and Italy (along with a couple of other nations) have the joint lowest chances of finding physically strong players, yet in both cases that was the most common player type I found there.

The same trend (or lack thereof) was true when I went to Argentina and Saudi Arabia. The code states that Argentina are most likely to produce attackers, wingers and technically gifted players, but actually by far the most common player I ended up with from there were physically strong players. Saudi Arabia, being from the Asia region, was meant to get me lots of wingers, but in fact I found none at all.

So once again, it seems that what appears to be true in the game code may note come to fruition when you play the game. As I said before, it may well be true that Saudi Arabia produces the most wingers if you do 1,000 scouting trips, but in your everyday scouting you are probably not likely to notice this sort of thing. My guess is that while different places do have higher or lower chances of finding certain player types, the difference is so small that you won’t notice it when playing.

Therefore if you’re looking for a certain player type, just specify that before you send your scout out. I wouldn’t recommend choosing a nation based on its supposed chances of ‘specialising’ in player types, as I certainly have never noticed anything of the sort.

The effect of looking in a scout’s home nation

A few years ago, sending your scout to his home nation gave your chances of finding good players a small boost. When choosing where to send him, a little star would appear next to his name when your hovered over his home country, but that no longer happens. Do you get a boost in FIFA 15?

I used the Spain/Italy/Cameroon example to probe this question as well. I sent a Spanish scout to Spain, while I sent a Belgian scout to Cameroon and a Czech scout to Italy. If the home nation boost does exist in FIFA 15, I should have got better players (or a higher number of top players) from my Spanish scout looking in Spain.

The highest potential player I found was indeed from Spain, with 88-94 potential. However, the player with the highest OVR range was actually found by my Czech scout looking in Italy.

There didn’t seem to be any other signs of the Spanish scout getting better players. He did find one more player than the scout in Italy and two more than the scout in Cameroon, but the actual quality of the players each scout brought back actually very similar.

And as a further sign that scouting away from the scout’s home nation can still get good players, my Belgian scout in Cameroon found a player whose initial potential range was 78-94. That hadn’t narrowed down at all, and is one of the highest potential ranges you’re ever likely to find the very first time you see a player (for example, the highest range I’ve ever seen on a player on the first report he appeared on was 81-94).

So this one seemed pretty clear. Going to the scout’s home country does not produce any noticeable difference. If there is any effect from it, it will be so small that you almost certainly will not notice it.

Why reloading your reports is best

Now, there’s one more thing I wanted to say on this topic. As we’ve seen, it appears that as long as you have a good enough scout, you can find good players in any nation. In fact, you could even get just as much luck in a tiny country as in a football powerhouse. In any case, any difference in ranking can easily be made irrelevant by one thing: reloading your reports.

I will explain reloading in more detail another time, but what it entails is saving the day before your scout is due back, then advancing to see his report. If you don’t like any of the players on the report, you can quit the save, load it up again, advance until you get the report and then look at the players. This time, the players on the report will be completely different, with different names, OVRs and potentials.

In practice, this means that if you go to a nation like Australia and don’t get any good players, you can just reload the report and may end up with a report full of good players the second time around. Any difference in nation rank can therefore be overcome.

It may take more reloading if your scout is in China than if he is in Argentina, but as we saw earlier, in my tests the small nations produced just as much talent as the good countries.

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Strangely enough, it seems that all the things we took for granted in previous FIFA games – that Brazil and Argentina produce the best talent, etc – may not be correct any more!

But as I said, it could very well be that the code is still unchanged from previous years and that with a ton of scouting reports you will start to notice a pattern emerging. However, in terms of your everyday scouting, it seems that by far the most important thing is using a good scout, not the country that you send him to.

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Thanks for reading part three 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.