Every now and again you’ll get a message through saying that a scouted player that you are watching (but haven’t signed yet) has been poached by another club. This can be really frustrating if the playing looked very promising.
The easy way to remedy this situation is to simply reload the save. These messages are like the “Youth player wants out” in that they’re randomly generated, so after a couple of tries the message should not appear, whereupon you can save your game and continue. However, if like me you forget your player has been poached and proceed to save over your game (thereby seemingly losing him forever), there is another way that I’ve just discovered.
Once your player has been poached his name will appear at the bottom of subsequent scouting reports (until that trip finishes). His name will be greyed-out and it will say which club has stolen him. If you look for this player whilst the scouting trip is still ongoing, you won’t find him. However, once the trip has finished and your scout has returned, go and have a look in the free agents (searching for the poached player’s position and nationality, for example).
What’s this? There is now a 16 year old with all the strengths of your poached player, just with a different name. That’s right, just as when you release a player from your youth academy, FIFA places them in the free agents! The downside is that if your scouted player was 14 or 15 when he was poached he will now be 16, meaning 1 or 2 years worth of growth have been lost. However, as far as I’m aware this player will have the same potential as before he was stolen, meaning you have a second chance to sign him!
Just make sure you sign him before the end of the season (if possible), as sometimes players randomly disappear from the free agents, and you wouldn’t want to get your hopes up just to see him disappear.
I hope this brings a little bit of hope to those players who thought they had lost a potentially great young player!