Recruitment is a key component of any successful sports franchise, as even the best tactics require players capable of executing them, and will be even more effective the more effective the players who are asked to carry it out are. The prioritization of recruitment focuses in Football Manager 26 gives you high levels of control over what your scouts bring you, but it can also be confusing.
This guide can help you understand how to use your recruitment focuses to most-effectively unconver worthwhile signings, whether you’re a small club trolling the free market or a club on the rise ready to find its next superstar.
Recruitment Focuses For Small Clubs On The Come-Up
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If you’re working at a smaller club, the need for recruitment is vital as you’re much less likely to find players who can hang around for extended periods if you’re making a rapid rise through the pyramid. Unfortunately, this is also the level where you will have the fewest resources to help you do all that recruiting, which makes it all the more vital to get the most out of what you have. By understanding that transfer fees should be off the table at the lower levels, you can begin focusing your recruitment on more viable options, instead:
- Free Agents: If you’re already in the market, the first thing you want to be prioritizing is the free agent market. These are players who are already available for signing right now, and while this may seem like a restrictive limit if you’re trying lower leagues for the first time, you’ll soon discover that there are plenty of free agents available with a lot to offer. Have your scouts find them so you don’t have to waste your precious resources on transfer fees.
- Expiring Contracts: This focus serves a similar purpose but is a focus on the future. If you are in an open window, you can delay this implementation until the window shuts and you are ready to start working on preparations for the next one. This keeps you aware of all the players who will be free agents the next time you can sign, so that you are in a prime position to lock them down in contracts and add fresh talent to your squad.
- Loan Listed: Another critical area to be on top of for small clubs is the loan market, where you can find players who would be otherwise too talented to be interested in a long-term deal with your club, but whose parent clubs want them to get playing time. Even better, parent clubs will often be willing to pay some or even all of the players’ wages while they are with you, allowing you to take them on at a bargain to fill your roster without killing your future spending ability.
Recruitment Focuses For Finding Future Stars Before They’re Too Expensive
As you move into the middle and upper tiers of the footballing world, you not only open the door to paid transfers but you also improve your signing power to make higher and higher levels of wonderkid viable options for your pursuit. The right wonderkid before they have the chance to balloon their transfer value can be a club-changer, providing you with a player who develops into a star and either leads your team for many years or, if you’re still not at the top quite yet and they want to move on, gets sold on for a huge profit to fund further team improvements. Here’s how to target wonderkids on the rise:
- Check Rosters At Age-Restricted World Cups: This is actually a recruitment tip you can do outside of your assigned recruitment focuses, which I picked up from popular Football Manager streamer Zealand, and is a wonderful way to identify potential future stars. Having a look at average ratings at the end of a tournament and sorting by age to find young players who are still excelling can reveal players to shortlist and further scout. A 16-year-old who posted a top-ten rating at the U-21 Euros is a potential star in the making.
- South America & Europe Focus: Although wonderkids can and will come from anywhere, if you need to prioritize your resources, you should focus on the areas most likely to produce a high number of high-potential players to add to your shortlists. For this, the best regions to scout in are South America and Europe, as they are dense with strong footballing nations and, as such, provide more opportunities to uncover a gem with your recruitment focus.
- Add Potentially Bountiful Nations: To maximize your chances of finding diamonds in the less-storied regions, you can instead shift to a national focus, choosing to highlight nations with strong pedigrees that separate them from their continental peers. Nations like Mexico, Japan, and Nigeria all have rich footballing histories and strong abilities to generate wonderkid prospects to have your eye on when in the market for a player capable of transforming your club.
How To Combine Scouting Assignments And Focuses For Optimal Scouting
While your focuses dictate the type of players you are looking for and where you’re doing so, it’s your scouts actually doing the job, so it’s critical to understand how to best use your staff to get the best results from your recruitment focuses:
- Check Their Regional Knowledge: If you’re sending a scout into a region to begin looking for players for you, it is massively important for them to have some familiarity, if you want to get the most out of your scouting. For smaller clubs, this may mean keeping things more local until you can afford larger and more varied staff. Knowledge in a region helps your scout begin generating meaningful reports for you more effectively, so sending them somewhere totally foreign to them does not set your recruitment focus up for success.
- Pay Attention To Potential Vs. Ability: When scouting for players, there are two categories of talent assessment you receive: current ability and potential ability. If you’ve not swung by your scout’s page, you may not realize they can have vastly different abilities in these skills, as they are actually a good deal different tasks. When assigning recruitment jobs to your staff, try your best to match your staff to the assignment. If you have one focus, looking for first team-ready starters, and another looking for prospects, send your scout with superior ability judgment to the first team gig and the one better at assessing potential to the wonderkid hunt.
- Use Your Best Scouts For Your Key Recruitments: Sometimes there’s no clear preference for allocating your scouts by their knowledge of the region, or you’re deciding between two scouts for two roles and one is better for both. In these situations, there’s no one universally correct option. Instead, you are best served by deciding which jobs are most important and putting your best option there and trusting the less vital responsibilities to your lesser scouts.
