How to Scout Wonderkids & Newgens in Football Manager 26 | Ultimate Guide To Youth Recruitment

Scout smarter in Football Manager 26 with our step-by-step guide to Scouting for the best wonderkids & newgens on Football Manager 26. Explore our proven tips to elevate the Task of finding Wonderkids on FM26.

If you want to build a dynasty in Football Manager 26, there’s no shortcut more powerful than identifying and recruiting wonderkids & newgens early. Whether you simply wish to beat your rivals of securing those young players with elite potential, or wish to incorporate wonderkids scouting as a youth recruitment philosophy, mastering the art of scouting for wonderkids on Football Manager is a skill, built on understanding FM26’s scouting system, everyone should have at their fingertips.

In Football Manager, scouting young talents isn’t just a bonus, it’s the foundation for long-term success.

With the right system and strategies, you’ll discover future superstars hidden in South America’s youth academies or Eastern Europe’s youth setups – turning your club into one of the game’s leading clubs in youth recruitment. But being able to separate quality talents – those players with significant potential – from the noise, is probably easier said than done!

Welcome to Passion4FM’s guide on how to scout wonderkids & newgens on Football Manager 26!

Today we will be revealing the secrets on how to scout for the best wonderkids and newgens in Football Manager, so you can find all those cheap top talents and hidden gems that are popping up in Football Manager as you advance in the game. Our approach to scouting for wonderkids has been used for creating all those wonderkids recommendations you find on the website and gives you a better insight into the art of scouting for wonderkids.

By sharing our wonderkids scouting tips and tricks, we give you all the tools at hand to easily identify the best young players with world-class potential and the next generation of talents coming through, as you advance in your save! With these FM26 scouting tips you can more easily improve your squad into a title challenger, whilst also making huge profit from developing talents into wonderkids before putting them up for sale.

Master the art of scouting for wonderkids on Football Manager with our proven strategies – turn youth recruitment into a weapon by following our step-by-step guide.

PS. If you wish to skip the introduction part and background information on what to focus on for your scouting team before you start searching for wonderkids, then jump directly into our scouting tips, jump directly into section 3 for our six quick scouting methods.

Scouting for Wonderkids & Newgens 101

Finding wonderkids in Football Manager 26 is not about randomly scrolling through regens on youth intake day or hoarding every 16-year-old with green attributes. It’s about structure, patience, and abusing the scouting mechanics the way its intended – the way elite FM managers actually do!

Whether you’re managing a top-flight powerhouse, a mid-table club fighting for survival, or a lower-league underdog with a shoestring budget, mastering wonderkid scouting will help you build consistently competitive squads that stay ahead of the competition.

You need to know how to configure your scouting assignments, which regions and leagues yield the best youth prospects, interpreting scout reports with an eye for potential rather than current ability, and last but not least, understand how to link your recruitment strategy with your club’s tactical identity and youth development plan.

Scouting for wonderkids on Football Manager is an art that needs to be harnessed. It requires effort and patience to scour the world for the best wonderkids and newgens.

However, there are a few tips and tricks that you can take advantage of to find the best Football Manager 2026 wonderkids and newgens. By understanding what to look for and how to set up your scouting network, you can easily spot the best wonderkids and newgens in Football Manager, and let your scouting centre be filled with highly recommended players that will be classed as an excellent signing, high priority signing or a terrific signing for the future!

Sounds marvellous, right?!

In this essential guide to scouting for wonderkids and newgens we will give you several strategies to level up your youth recruitment – turning scouting into a weapon which helps you to either build dynasties, dominate your long-term save or generate obscene profit through player trading.

This ultimate Football Manager scouting for wonderkids guides in Football Manager combines quick tips with a methodically approach to wonderkids scouting. Explore our strategies to find ‘all’ those young talents who can develop into superstars in the future. Learn how to:

• setting up the foundation to scout wonderkids through creating ‘appropriate’ scouting assignments
• use recruitment focuses to find the best young talents
• take advantage of player search and filters to find the ‘next big thing’
• + much more

It will be a rather extensive guide covering all the topics of scouting, so make sure you find your notebook and pen!

1. The foundation for Finding Wonderkids on Football Manager:

1.1 Your Database Size

Before you hunt wonderkids, you need a scouting infrastructure that produces results.

For anyone who wish to track down future wonderkids and newgens, the foundation for a prosperous youth recruitment plan starts with your database size and what playable nations you load across the world. Rather than going willy-nilly of how you set up your first save, you want to select continents and leagues intelligently – you want a lot of players in your game world, without killing game speed.

Instead, keep in mind that your database size will have a huge impact on the number of players within your save – not only for the amount of wonderkids at day one but also the number of potential generational talents which may be generated by the game as you advance into the future.

The selected nations and playable leagues will have a huge impact on the accuracy and detail within statistics and information about players due to the nation’s reputation and how the game process matches.

When embarking on a challenge where youth recruitment plays a significant part, it’s a matter of increasing the player count by using a custom database setup to enable you to track down the best wonderkids and newgens from across the world!

Whilst restricting yourself to fewer playable nations and leagues, perhaps only neighbouring countries, might be favorable for a lower league save, journeyman save, or when rebuilding a club with homegrown talents, you should open up your game world to help you find the best wonderkids & newgens on Football Manager by increasing the player count without drastically limiting your game speed.

How to Customize the Database Size?

Since we’ve written an extensive guide on how to customize the database size previously, we will keep it short here.

In Football Manager you can easily customize the database size within your Game World through the ‘Advanced Setup‘. The ability to customize the database size enables you to spot more players without dramatically affect game speed!

Rather than selecting 20+ nations with every division loaded, you can determine the database size to increase the number of players and staff available in your save by carefully selecting nations and regions known for their abilities to produce wonderkids and world-class potential newgens.

This gives you the ability to extend the default database size by increasing the total player count within your new career – enabling players that otherwise might not be visible for your club due to its location or reputation.

By customizing the ‘Total Player Count’ in Football Manager you can choose between a Small, Medium, Large or Custom Database size – enabling you to see players within a region, nation or continent that you may have less knowledge of, at the managing club.

When customizing the database size for tracking down wonderkids and future young talents with significant potential you should consider customizing the database size by selecting:

A) Add Continents of your preference. Personally, I only pick Europe, South America and Africa but which continents you pick will be determined by where you manage, or which corners of the world you wish to recruit wonderkids and quality newgens from.

B) Select ‘Players from top division clubs‘ AND ‘Players from top Clubs’

C) Select ‘Players with National Reputation’

NB! Selecting a huge database size may dramatically reduce the game speed, unless you have a brand new high-end computer with one of the newest processor powers.

Follow this method and you can quickly bump up the total player count to ~150K players without reducing the speed of Football Manager – enabling you to find more hidden wonderkids, bargains and cheap gems from these selected continents.

Regardless of which area of the world you favour to scout wonderkids in, carefully picking your game world by choosing the database size and playable nations is one of the few secrets that differs success from failure.

With a broader game world, you’d be able to expand the pool of players your scouts can eventually report on – increasing the chance of identifying generational talents, the next big thing, or young talents with incredible potential, which you can develop into a future first-team starter.

2. Identifying the Quality of Your Scouting Team

2.1 Take Control of Assigning Scouts

For anyone desiring to find the best wonderkids and newgens on Football Manager, it’s required to be more hands-on in the management of your scouting team and how you approach scouting in Football Manager compared to Training or Tactics.

When starting a new save, assigning scouts is often delegated to your club’s Chief Scout or Director of Football.

The person in charge will automatically handle the job of setting up scouting assignments and decide on which scouts shall travel where. The Chief Scout will often prioritize nations, divisions or competitions he believes will be of value to the club according to their reputation. That may not fit your recruitment plan.

By taking charge of scouting yourself, you will have more control of extending and improving your club’s scouting network. In many ways, you’ll be able to set up a recruitment vision that fits your transfer policy and interests when recruiting players.

To take control of scouting, you must edit the staff responsibilities.

• Click the drop-down menu at Club > Responsibilities > Scouting Responsibilities > Take Control of Assigning Scouts

The main idea by taking full control of scouting is to enable you to set the recruitment focuses and scout the nation’s of your preferance. You’ll be able to be more hands-on and assign scouts to areas of the world that’s most valuable to scout, for instance in terms of nations that has an higher likeliness of producing quality newgens.

2.2 Sign Quality Scouts & Build Your Recruitment Team

Before we can even begin hunting for wonderkids, the size and quality of the scouting team, or recruitment team including analysts, can’t be underestimated. Eventhough it might sound simple, you would need a quality setup of scouts and recruitment analysts to identify wonderkids around the world.

Regardless of who you manage, the number of scouts at your disposal will determine how you’re able to set up your scouting network and which areas of the world you’re able to hunt for wonderkids in.

Once in control of scouting and you’re able to setting up scouting assignments, it’s important to get an overview of the scouts at your disposal and send the appropriate staff to attend assignments suited to his skills.

Getting an overview of your recruitment team and their capabilities is one of the most crucial day one tasks on Football Manager.

To assess your recruitment team, you should check the quality of your Staff.

• Go to: Club – Staff – Staff Reports & head into the Recruitment Team

Here you’re able to see the size of your scouting team and what you may improve to build a sustainable youth recruitment project.

In order to find the best wonderkids and newgens, you should put an extra effort improving your scouting team. You want a scouting team that can actually find talents and a sizeable recruitment team who can find wonderkids quickly and efficiently.

A limited number of scouts means you’ll need to be more creative whilst hunting for wonderkids, as you’re not able to set up the amount of recuitment focuses you need to scour the world for the best talents. Then, keep it mind it will take a longer time that may result in a lesser ability at finding wonderkids, cheap hidden gems or obscure talents with huge potential – becoming a huge obstacle to your ambitions.

2.2.1 What Attributes to Target for Scouts?

In FM26, you should acquire the best scouts and recruitment analysts as possible and fire the bad ones. This is a continious process, especially for anyone starting out in the lower leagues. Once the opportunity to increase the number of allowed staff opens up, do it!

You should target scouts with high level of:

• Judging Player Potential (JPP): determines how accurately a scout can assess a player’s long-term ceiling, revealing how much room there is for development and the highest level of football the player is realistically capable of reaching.
  Their level of JPP is not only a factor how well they are able to accurately assess a player’s potential ability, but how accurate they evalute his growth potential.
  Recommended JPP: +15
• Adaptability: determines how quickly the scout is able to adapt to foreign cultures and more effectively provide scout reports of players within a foreign nation or a region. It will affect how fast he will settle in within a country, as well as how fast he can acquire knowledge of nations and regions.
  Recommended ADA: +15
• Judging Player Ability (JPA) a good scout also requires the abilities to more accurately assess a players’ current ability level. Eventhough this is less important for anyone simply recruiting youngsters, it’s important to evalute how far he’s from maximizing his full potential, and which level of football he’s capable of playing on.
  Recommended JPA: +12

Learn more about the key attribues for your recruitment team in our guide to scouting on Football Manager.

Building a worldwide scouting network is a continious projects which never ends (until you’ve maxed out the maximum allowed). You must remember to target scouts and recruitment analysts with knowledge of new nations your club doesn’t already got knowledge of.

Pro Tip!

A wonderful tip is to try to recruit the best scouts with knowledge of multiple nations – enabling you to assign him onto several different scouting assignments without affecting the quality of the reports, or how fast he’s able to produce them. At the same time, the scout is better suited to regional scouting than if he had knowledge of simply one nation.

For instance, you could target scouts with knowledge of both Spain, Portugal, France and Italy. Or, Argentina, Brazil and Colombia.

This will be the quickest method at increasing the club’s overall scouting knowledge.

Our list of the best Football Manager 2026 scouts can be of great value and give a better insight to who you need to sign in order to set up an extensive and efficiently scouting team. Since we have written about how to build and set up your scouting network in this guide, we won’t go deeper into this matter in this guide.

2.3 Increasing your Club’s World Knowledge: Assigning Scouts

The next step in the process is to assign scouts to assignments that both fits their profile and abilities, as well as improving the Club’s Scouting Knowledge – the club’s knowledge of regions and nations.

The Club’s World Knowledge will be visible once you got a Recruitment Focus active.

Cliking on Assignments within the Recruitment Focus page gives you a list of all the scouts within your recruitment team and what assignments they are assigned to. On this screen, you’ll also discover the Club’s World Knowledge which provides you with a list of regions and nations, along with the level of knowledge for each of them ranging from Awkward to Exceptional.

This knowledge can be used to plan your future scouting project – building your recruitment network, one country and region at a time.

Increasing the knowledge of a nation, or a region, is a time-consuming matter but it starts by sending scouts to a particular nation.

By sending scouts to nations they already got full knowledge of, it ensures that the scout can start the process of gathering and delivering player reports immediately, as the scout does not need to get accustomed to the nation and its culture. However, it’s equally important to build up knowledge of other areas of the world who may generate world-class wonderkids in the future.

Then, in the matter of scouting for wonderkids, you want to send out the best scouts in terms of judging player potential out on assignments to identify the best Under-21/Under-23 players. Once you have control of your scouting team and knows their best abilities, then, the fun begins!

READ MORE | How to build an extensive scouting network

2.4 How to setup your scouting network?

As mentioned in our guide to building an extensive scouting network, you need certain types of scouts with their specific expertize. Personally, I favor to have one head scout for each major region – for instance a scout with +15 in Judging Player Ability and Potential for South America (South), one for Central Europe and one for Western Europe. And the more scouts I got, the more corners of the world I will be able to cover.

This means that you want to sign scouts with extensive knowledge of different nations across the world – ideally with the highest JPA and JPP as possible. Then, you might want some roaming scouts that might not have the best JPA and JPP but has top notch Adaptability and hopefully Extensive Knowledge, or Very Good knowledge of multiple nations.

2.5 The Importance of the Scouting Range

In a youth recruitment save, what will dramatically affect your opportunity to scout for wonderkids is the size of your player database. Besides the amount of players available within your save, is the limit your scouting range has on how far you can scout and what players available the scouting range covers.

A lower league club with a limited scouting range and a limited recruitment team will naturally experience less ‘Players Found’ in the Player Database than an Elite team with a World scouting range.

By increasing the scouting range, you will naturally see more players in the advanced player search, improving your likeliness to spot more wonderkids and talents.

In Football Manager, there are 7 tiers of scouting ranges – each coming at a cost, which are paid for via monthly deductions from the club’s overall scouting budget.

The cost of the scouting range will be deducted from the scouting budget at the end of the month, so enabling a higher scouting package a month or two before the transfer window opens up could be highly beneficial before using the minimal scouting package when you’re not in search of new players.

As you see from the above illustration, increasing the scouting range can be a costly affair. The question is whether your club got the finances to increase it. If the club isn’t able to pay the monthly cost of the scouting range, then you will be limited to only player’s and staff known to the club’s staff.

But there are ways to work around this.

If you’re managing a club with a limited scouting range, you can switch between scouting ranges for a short time to increase the number of players within the player database. Just make sure you don’t advance in your save by clicking ‘Continue’ and remember to revert back to an affordable scouting range immediately after conducting a manual player search.

If you click Continue, the club will need to pay the monthly cost of that Scouting Range package. The result, may likely be that you’ll have to work with No Scouting Range for the rest of the season, or until your club has generated enough funds to pay for a higher tier scouting package.

Remember that you can adjust your scouting budget by reducing the transfer or wage budget but for a club with limited funds, it’s limited options to increase the pool of available players within the advanced search.

Keep in mind that your scouting budget shall also cover the cost of individual scouting trips, so you need take that into account and not splash all your budget on the scouting range package.

To save money, you can always reduce the scouting range when you are not in need for new signings… but who wouldn’t want to continue scouting for new wonderkids for the entire season?!

#3 Know How to Differentiate Talents From Wonderkids!

Before you even assign scouts to track down the best young players in Football Manager, you need to define what a wonderkid really is!

As mentioned in the list of best FM24 Wonderkids, players are only labelled as Wonderkids by the Media when their current ability is either above 135, or got an home reputation of more than 5750, regardless of their potential ability.

But for me, a wonderkid is not a high-CA teenager. A wonderkid is a player with elite potential ability relative to age and position. Sometimes, even relative to the quality of your squad.

When scouting for wonderkids, you are not searching for first-team starters, you are scouting for future assets – players who can develop tremendously over the next few years.

Rather than scouting for players round the age of 20, you should turn the focus onto those young players between the age of 15-18! Here, attributes aren’t the most important as they can grow. Star ratings may lie, and screw the picture even more!

Instead, what matters are:

• Age (15–18)
• Hidden PA range
• Personality & media handling
• Development curve (physical + mental growth potential)

This shift of mindset is crucial if you really wish to understand the art of scouting for wonderkids in Football Manager. If you scout like a DoF, you’ll miss them! Scout like a long-term hoarder of talent, and the game will reward you!

When searching for wonderkids, you can create certain search filters to identify players who got an higher likeliness to reach their maximum potential, either by developing quicker and better, or who will simply perform better in matches and thereby be of more value to your squad’s performances and future success.

Whether you look for players who are more able to withstand more intensive training, or perform better in matches, it’s in reality two sides of the same coin, as both will aid their development to become better players. These matters comes in additional to the potential ability score – that will be hidden unless we cheat and use the in-game editor.

This means that you need to pay attention and carefully read their scout report – meaning you must acquire knowledge of the players. Only then, when you got extensive knowledge about the player, you’ll learn about his personality and hidden attributes, such as consistency, high or low injury proneness, versatility, and so on, which may all aid his future growth.

Beneath I’ll just quickly list some of the filters and additional conditions you might want to use to track down wonderkids and talents on Football Manager:

3.1 How to Search For Wonderkids? Filter by ‘Wonderkids Attributes’

One idea is to focus on certain favorable player attributes, as well as hidden attributes, that will influence on their training and match performance and will aid the player throughout their career, whether it is reducing the risk of jadedness or injuries, or impacting how well they play.

It’s a reason why you shouldn’t only pay attention to the star ratings when judging a players potential.

In fact, most often those players who develop into World-Class players combines great Personality with positive hidden attributes.

In Football Manager there are certain player attributes, hidden attributes and personality traits you should pay attention to when scouting for wonderkids and quality newgens.

it will be beneficial to look at the player’s level of:

• Determination
• Natural Fitness
• Work Rate
• Professionalism
• Consistency
• Versatility
• Adaptability
• Injury susceptibility

Pay attention to these matters ahead of simply judging the player by his star rating.

All these factors affects how well they will develop and how much effort they will put into training.

A more professional and determined player will be able to undergo a harder training regime and thereby wish to improve himself into a better player – meaning he will have better chances to close into his maximum potential by making better progress, perhaps far quicker, despite there are players that might become ‘late bloomers’ in Football Manager.

SI has stated that both Determination, Ambition and Professionalism are all important factors for how well players will develop¹ as they will contribute to the progression calculation score. Even though there’s a whole range of other factors including a chance factor that may hinder* or aid their development, we can limit the search for wonderkids by certain attributes that improves the player’s chances to develop to a greater degree, along with their personality.

For a research about how important Professionalism, Determination and Ambition is for player’s development I can recommend this wonderful experiment by FMStats.com².

* A players’ development ratio will depend on hidden attributes such as injury susceptibility, your club’s training facilities, the quality of the coaching team and other factors that may affect their happiness, morale and training and match performances.

In this matter, from most important to the least, we can create a search filter that looks for players with:

Determination – “Reflects a players commitment to succeed and do his very best on and off the pitch”.

Determination is one of the factors that is included into the game’s pogression calculation and will impact how well the players will train each month. Players with high Determination will naturally have a more positive personality which is one important element when searching for wonderkids. Determination can not be improved via training but only through Mentoring.

• You can set the criteria to search for players above 14 to identify the most determined players, or lower the value to all players above 11 to increase the pool of talents that you can develop through mentoring.

Natural Fitness – “Reflects how well players stays fit when injured or not in training. It is also used to determine how well they maintain their physical attributes past their peak and maintain fitness between matches”.

These players is more likely to withstand an higher match load as their physical attributes will be less likely to reduce between matches or if getting serious injuries.

• You can set the criteria to search for players with Natural Fitness of above 12

Work Rate – “Reflects the player’s willingness to work at his full capacity, going above and beyond the call of duty”.

Work rate is one of the most important attributes within the match engine. It’s a useful attribute for all players and determines their positioning and ability to cover more grounds on the pitch, and use more physical efforts to help his team in both non-pressing and pressing situations.

• You can set the criteria to search for players with Work Rate of above 10

When creating a search filter that only looks at attributes, you could also include Acceleration and Pace – two important attributes within the FM26 Match Engine.

i) How to filter by attributes in Player Search?

To customize an advanced search for players with specific attributes, click Edit Search and select Pick Attributes.

Pick the most important player attributes for wonderkids; Determination, Work Rate and Natural Fitness. Click the Search Criteria header and adjust the threshold to something similar to the illustration beneath. Or, adjust it according to your own preferences to spot less/more players. Perhaps you’ll even include Acceleration and Pace.

3.2 Filter by Personality

One of the biggest mistakes you could make when searching for wonderkids is get blinded by their star ratings. Every elite managers know’s that Personality is the hidden multiplier for a player’s development.

What type of personality your players got will directly affect:

• training consistency
• development speed
• long-term attribute growth
• reaction to set-backs

As you might remember, Determination is already a factor that influences on a player’s personality. So apart from filtering for player’s with an high Determination, you should relentlessly target players with a positive personality because if its major effect on development and future CA ability increase.

By searching for wonderkids with a positive personality you increase the probability to identify players who has an higher likeliness to reach their maximum potential.

Ignoring players’ personalities is taking a gamble. If you’ve ever wondered why you’re players won’t develop, their personality may be one of the reasons why!

Players with high Professionalism will most likely develop into world-class players, both quicker and better, as their attitude to training and playing matches, work ethic and dedication to improve is better than a player who is more likely to slack off. (Slack Personality, which is the contrary to Model Professional).

Personalities to target on Football Manager:

• Model Citizen
• Born Leader, Charismatic Leader
• Iron willed, Driven
• Perfectionist
• Model Professional, Professional,
• Resolute
• Determined, Fairly Determined,
• Ambitious, Very / Fairly Ambitious

Personalities to avoid:

• Slack
• Spineless
• Fickle
• Unambitious
• Temperamental
• Also avoid players with low Determination within their profile

Keep in mind that newgens may have unique personality traits that differs to what’s available for original players within the database. Although newgens with Spineless, Slack, Unambitious or Fickle personality can be encouraged to develop their personality through mentoring, the time it takes to turn his personality to Balanced or a more positive personality is time you could have spent on developing improving a player closer to his max potential.

i) How to filter by Personality in Player Search?

In Football Manager, you can limit the number of players by customizing the player search to show only players with a specific personality. Simply click ‘Add Condition’, find Personality under General and pick the desired personalities.

If you select more than one Personality, make sure you switch the green toggle so it shows any players between the age of 15 and 21, and personality is Professional, OR anyone with personality of Perfectionist, to take an example.

With the foundation set, it’s time to look at some actionable tips on how to find the best wonderkids and newgens on Football Manager.

So without further ado, let us take a closer look at some scouting methods to take. We start off by giving you 6 quick methods before looking closer at how to use player search as a way to scout for wonderkids and newgens.

4. Six Quick Methods to Find Wonderkids & Newgens in Football Manager

#1 Filter by Media Description in Player Search

One of the quickest methods to identify wonderkids on Football Manager is to filter players by their Media Description. This is possible when you customize the view within the Player Database and add the Media Description coloumn.

Then, browse by alphabetical order to spot the players labelled by ‘Wonderkids’ by the media, by clicking on the Media Description coloumn so Winger are on top. Scroll down until you find those players labelled as Wonderkids.

For a quicker progress, edit the search filter by only showing players between the age of 15 and 21.

However, scouting only those young plaeyrs labelled as ‘Wonderkids’ will likely see you miss out of those young players with significant potential. Since the media takes into account their Current Ability, all those players under the age of 18 will be missed – as their current ability is often far below the minimum threshold.

Therefore they will not be described as wonderkids for several seasons, or until they gain an higher reputation – for instance by signing for a top club, gain matches in continental competitions or perform well in matches which results in awards.

In Football Manager, the media description of young players will change from Wonderkids to e.g. Explosive Striker, Attacking Fullback or Hard-working Midfielder players once they turn 21. This doesn’t mean that they will suddenly have their potential ability reduced, but that due to their age the media will classify them differently.

#2 Track Youth Intakes Religiously for Quality Newgens!

The annual youth intakes are arguably the richest source of wonderkids. Rather than setting up recruitment focuses, you could monitor the youth intake lists in your search for future wonderkids.

Browsing through the list of newgens arriving at the annual youth intake helps you to view newly generated youngsters within your game world.

The annual youth intake which creates new players within your save, will normally happen between December and September – all depending on the nation. As revealed in our list of Football Manager 26 youth intake dates you should pay particular attention around March/April as that’s when the biggest European nation generates newgens.

Although browsing the list of newly generated players requires a bit of effort and time, it’s a rather easy method to scout newgens in Football Manager.

To find newgens arriving at youth intakes, here’s a step-by-step guide;

1. Select the world icon located to the top right corner.
2. Click ‘World’ in the top menu
3. Select ‘Transfers’
4. Click on the drop-down menu under All Transfers and select ‘Youth Intake’
5. Browse the list of ‘Youth Intake’
6. or check the ‘Youth Departures’

These two options will provide you with a monthly list of clubs who have had their youth intake, either the players are moved from the junior team to the youth sides (U18/U17) or are released as they did not get a professional contract.

You can further minimize the result by filtering and removing specific nations. Simply click ‘Filter’, which gives you a list of all nations in the world (or in a particular region) and untick the ones you’re not interested in.

NB! You can even look for youth intake players by a specific region or nation by selecting Europe or South America, instead of ‘World’, and select the nations you’re most interesting in, or that’s most beneficial to scout, according to the Nation’s level of Youth Rating.

For instance, I would go through the players arriving at Youth intakes in Argentina, Brazil, France, Spain and other useful nations close to my club’s location to identify useful prospects. Selecting Colombia, Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Croatia and Serbia could reveal lots of cheap gems coming through at some of the many hidden wonderkids factories in Football Manager.

You can either hover over the little player profile icon to the left of the player’s names to check out their player profile and single out interesting players that you like to take further actions on.

Or, use the next tip to select multiple players at once and right click on the player’s names to either:

OPTION 1: Select Report - 'Scout players for one week' to gain further knowledge of the players

This method can be a costly affair as travel cost will be taken out of the club’s scouting budget. Scouting, let’s say, 100 players this way, can quickly see you spend the entire scouting budget, as scouting one player can cost anywhere from 1K to 5K per player depending on their location, and your club’s allowed scouting range.

NB! The Youth departures list all players that have been released on a free transfer. Here you might pick up on some bargains (especially if you’re playing on a lower level than the club that released the player).

OPTION 2: Create a shortlist called ‘Newgens’ or ‘U17 Players’. Add the most interesting youth players into that shortlist so you can use a custom view and other filters to gain more knowledge about the players, and monitor their progress over the next 6-24 months.

Browsing through the players coming through at Youth Intakes will be a time consuming job as you will need to methological go through nation by nation, club by club and player by player to single out interesting candidates.

If you have ‘Attribute masking’ turned on, attributes will be displayed as no knowledge (e.g ‘-‘) or in ranges (e.g ‘5-15’), meaning you can’t make a particular judgement of the player until you have gained more knowledge.

Below is a Colombian youngster coming through the youth academy of Barranquilla which I found by scouring the list of players coming through at youth intake in South America. At the moment, I don’t know how good he is, or will be, but standing out with Work Rate 12-20, Determination 6 to 14 (this value should ideally be 12-20…) and 11-17 in acceleration alerted my attention.

#2.1 | How To Select Multiple Players At Once

When browsing through the list of players found within the Player Database, or when browsing the list of youth intakes / youth departures, a handy tip may be to select multiple players at once. With a quick shortcut you can select hundreds of players at once and make an action.

Here’s how to proceed:

• Click on the first row or tick box
• Hold in Shift
• Tick a row further down
• Voila! Suddenly all rows between is selected

With X amount of players selected you can decide whether to scout them all, put them into a new shortlist, make an enquiry or follow them to monitore their progress.

NB! This will save you time, especially in terms of getting scout reports of them.
However, do remember that due to the scouting cost, this type of multi-scouting can cost your club a lot of money and totally ruin your scouting budget. It’s better to be more strategic in your scouting, especially if you got a limited recruitment team.

We don’t recommend to use this method on more than 20 players at once.

#2.2 | Offer on Trial

One of the problems a minor club faces is the lack of funds to travel across the world, generate scout reports for any player they desire, or use a higher tier scouting package that enables them to gain knowledge of all the best wonderkids within Football Manager.

Perhaps they doesn’t even got an extensive world knowledge – meaning they are left behind. However, fear not!

To build knowledge of an interesting prospect or increase the likeliness of a young player to sign a contract with you down the line, you can try to get players on trial to further assess their strengths and weaknesses.

When browsing through the list of newly generated players, such as the youth intake list, or browsing the list of players in range, Offer a Trial is a quick way to increase the knowledge of players.

By getting the player on a trial you can get a sneak peak of their level of attributes and approximate current and potential ability at no extra cost. Although these players can’t be registered to play in a competitive match, you can learn more about the player without spending money from your scouting budget.

The problem is that the best wonderkids and talents, who have just signed a new contract, will probably not be allowed to go on a trial, or doesn’t want to, since they are happy with their new contract, or aren’t interested in joining a club with worse training facilities or lower reputation.

#3. Scout Youth National Teams to Identify Talents

Monitoring which players who gets called up to represent their National team can be a quick way to discover new talents and amazing wonderkids. The old tried and tested method that I have used for the past 10 years is to browse through the Under-21 to Under-18 National teams to identify players who may have high potential.

It’s a very methodical job where you browse all international players called up to represent the youth teams of e.g Brazil, Argentina, England, Germany, France and so on.

Now, I have to remind you that the AI Manager won’t necessary call up the best newgens or talents for every tournament or qualifiers. Most often they will prioritize calling up players with high CA rather than the highest PA.

However, who gets called up to represent the Under-18 National team can be a source to identify some future gems. Put them into a shortlist, scout the players with the highest transfer value (as it seems transfer value often correlates to their potential), or individual scout the most interesting players.

For instance, scouting the Under-18s National Teams has let me discover highly potential players such as Joshua Nga Kana (Anderlecht), Miguel Agámez (Junior) or Jona Benkotic (Dinamoz Zagreb), in additional to other future newgens that will appear as season progresses.

For a lower league team, scouting the youth national teams can be a real gold mine as there are players with the ability to play at League 1 or Championship level being called-up to represent their country. Some are even available on a free, or got an asking price below €2Million. Just don’t expect these players to have the potential to become leading players within the world five to ten years into the future.

NB! Our opposition team squad view for FM24 enables you to get more information about the players and let you track players with great form or see how much knowledge you got over the players. You’ll get the opposition squad view by downloading our custom views megapack.

#4. Browse the NXGN Awards

The NxGN Awards list is a yearly list celebrating the top 50 best young talents in world football. The NxGN list was initially created by Goal.com in 2016 but has later become the household way of ranking the best wonderkids in world football that year. This has been picked up by Sports Interactive and included in Football Manager.

Every year on March 31st, you will receive an inbox message where your press officer hands you the list of the 50 best wonderkids in the game that year.

As you process through the seasons, it may be a valueable source to get to know some amazing wonderkids popping up through the game. Perhaps, there are also some new names, you’ve never heard of, which can represent a good signing.

#5. Scout Specific Clubs Famous For Their Youth Academy

Sometimes you don’t need to be a genius to find players, you just need to know where to look.

No matter whether you’re on a restricted scouting budget, or wish to work more strategically, one way to find wonderkids and quality newgens is by browsing through the youth ranks of all the best youth academies across the world.

Whether they are famed for their historical achievements for producing world-class players back in the days, or got great training and youth facilities, which increases the likelihood of generating future generational talents, these wonderkids factories in Football Manager got the foundation to become a goldmine for wonderkids and promising talents, especially for minor clubs.

Most likely, these clubs with great youth facilities got a considerable better chance of producing quality newgens at the annual youth intake, time and time again, compared to a club with worse youth facilities.

By browsing the best youth academies in Football Manager, you’ll be in a better position to unearth some hidden gems or potential wonderkids with world-class potential situated in the Under-17 squad of a state-of-the-art youth facility club. Or, unravel a hot prospect at a club with superb youth recruitment.

Although it’s a time-consuming matter if browsing and generating scout reports of every individual, and requires a lot of work, it’s a clever tip for anyone on a restricted scouting budget, or wish to work more strategically.

However, when you find a future star in the Under-18s of one of the hidden wonderkids factories, it’s well worth the job.

Some clubs famed for their youth production are:

• Chelsea, Man Utd, Man City, Tottenham and Arsenal (England)
• Ajax, PSV and Feyenoord (Holland)
• Paris SG, Lyon and Stade Rennais (France)
• KRC Genk, Club Brugge and Anderlecht (Belgium)
• Sporting Lisbon and Benfica (Portugal)
• Barcelona and Real Madrid (Spain)
• Palmeiras, Flamengo, Santos (Brazil)
• Dinamo Zagreb, Hajduk Split (Croatia)
• Partizan and Crvena Zvezda (Serbia)

*NOTE! Clubs can both upgrade and downgrade their youth facilities in Football Manager as you advance years into the future,resulting in that there are new clubs who got similar training facility standards 10 or 20 years into the future.

How to scout the youth academies? Mass Scout Players

One of the best methods when scouting for wonderkids at the best youth academies is to visit the Under-18s squad of Manchester City, Sporting CP, Benfica, Ajax, PSV, River Plate, Palmeiras, PSG, Chelsea, and so on and gain knowledge of their best prospects. However, as we saw it’s a very time-consuming job.

At a club with an extensive scouting budget, there will be no big issues to mass scout talents at the best youth academies but simply browsing through the squads for interesting prospects takes a lot of time.

For anyone impatient, there is a quicker method that helps you to mass scout players – using the Get Team Report Feature!

The best way to find wonderkids apart from just asking a scout in that nation/region to generate a scout report of the players with the highest transfer value and/or reputation, is to get a team report of a club’s youth squad.

In FM26, you’ll simply need to head to the preferred squad, go to the Club Site and click the Actions button – clicking the Get Team Report and select the desired squad.

Choose the scout with the highest Judging Player Ability & Judging Player Potential.

After a few days, up to a week, the scout will forward you the scouting report about the club.

• preferred tactics (IP & OPP formation)
• notable players (goals, assists and highest average rating)
• players’ CA & PA star ratings
• individual overview of players’ strengths and weaknesses of skills incl. hidden attributes
• information about transfer value, playing time & transfer/loan interest

In general, everything you desire when scouting a player individually.

Overall, getting team reports represents a quick way to mass scout players, and can be used not only to scout wonderkids but also about your next opposition, or finding potential first team signings. It enables you to learn about their potential for growth, current abilities, hidden attributes and transfer interest.

You can then decide whether you wish to track certain players for a longer time by putting them onto a shortlist, watch them in a watch, or scout the player until extensive knowledge.

As long as you keep yourself within your allowed scouting range, it won’t represent a huge financial cost either!

For a closer look at the clubs we recommend to visit, please check out our ranking of the best youth academy clubs in Football Manager, or find hidden gems and cheap wonderkids talents by browsing the youth squads of the hidden wonderkids factories on Football Manager.

#6. Scout Youth Tournaments & Under-21 Competitions

Another beneficial approach to find the best wonderkids and talents is to scout specific youth tournaments, such as the UEFA Youth League, Torneo di Viareggio or the Maurice Revello Tournament. In fact, there are many international competitions for under-21 players across the world that may be beneficial to scout.

Quick List of major Under-21 Competitions;

• FIFA U20 World Cup (every second year)
• UEFA Euro Under-19 and UEFA Euro Under-21 (every second year)
• TotalEnergies U-20 Africa Cup of Nations (equivalent to the UEFA Euro)
• Maurice Revello Tournament (formerly known as Toulon tournament) – an annual Under-20 tournament for National teams – great source to international players from across the world e.g South Korea, Australia, Algeria and Croatia to name a few nations apart from top 10 footballing nations
• UEFA Youth League (annual club tournament equivalent to the Champions League)
• CONMEBOL Libertadores sub-20 (annual under-20 tournament featuring South American clubs)
  Source to identify Argentinian, Colombian, Uruguayan, Paraguayan and Chilean talents
• Torneo di Viareggio (annual regional tournament held in the commune of Viareggio)
  Source to find Italian, Hungarian and Turkish players, amongst other

To find the different youth competitions in Football Manager, go to;

Method 1:

• Search for the specific competition or tournament

Method 2:

• Select World Icon > Click Competitions > Browse by Region > Choose the desired competition
• Select World Icon > Nations > Select Nation > Browse Competitions (Men's or Women's)

Then click the competition of choice and click ‘Overview’ and ‘Follow’ it. This will let you get information about what’s happening in the tournament delivered to you in your inbox.

Method 3:

• Select Recruitment > Click Recruitment Focus > Create New Recruitment Focus - Select a specific Competition* as scouting area

* This method will be fairly restrictive compared to scouting a region. You will most likely end up with a lower amount of players within the search result than if you scouted the entire nation.

In the next part of our guide to scouting for wonderkids, we’ll delve deeper into the matter by looking at the opportunities you as the manager can take advantage of, if you take control of scouting, by setting up specific recruitment focuses to find wonderkids and hidden gems.

#6.1 Utilize the Screen Flow Interface Option [FM24]

The screen flow is probably one of the most hidden and underused tools in Football Manager. Unfortunately, the feature has been removed for FM26 but for anyone still playing FM24 it’s a useful tip.

Some would deem it to be an awesome tool to get information about a specific tournament or competition that’s taking place, perhaps outside any of the selected playable leagues. Whilst others may not have heard about it at all!

The screen flow option can be found by heading to:

Click the FM drop down menu > Click Preferences > select Advanced > Screen Flow

From here, you can ask Football Manager to provide you with both basic and more detailed information about a specific tournament of your choice, delivered straight to your news inbox as soon as the tournament is taking place, either you want the news to appear on match days or at the end of the competition.

Below we’ve provided with just an example of major competitions and youth tournaments that may be proficient to scout. Even though this illustration is from a previous version of FM, the interface and how you go about setting it up, is identical.

Once set up, you can get an overview of the competition before it begins, gain information about statistics and performances about players or teams whilst it is ongoing or get notified by who are the award winners at completion.

Then, you can simply scout the players that looks the most intriguing to get more knowledge of the player’s potential and likeliness to be a great fit to your squad.

5. Scouting Wonderkids in Football Manager by Utilizing the Player Search

Since we have setup a custom database size of over 140,000 players, we should be able to find a great amount of young players and wonderkids from across the world in the player search. This is something we need to take advantage of!

Although we will take a closer look at more advanced methods to scout for wonderkids and newgens later on, one of the easiest methods is to utilize the player search filters within the Player Database.

The number of players within the Player Database will be affected by several factors, such as:

• The Database size & number of active nations and leagues
• The Club’s Allowed Scouting Range
• Club’s Scouting Knowledge

#5.1 | Manually Search for Players by Filtering by Reputation & Age

Let us take into account you have enabled the highest possible scouting range package, are working with a greater database size, and got the funds to search for players across the world, or within a greater region.

Manually searching for players through filters can be a great way to spot promising talents with high potential ability.

In Football Manager, using the advanced player search alongside setting up specific Recruitment Focuses that covers regions and nations can be a wonderful way to find wonderkids and talents.

One of the basic methods is to Edit the Player Search by setting up specific filters and add conditions that enables us to track down the best young players.

Then, if you have downloaded our custom views megapack, our ‘Player Search View – Detailed’ view has everything you need to identify wonderkids, such as Media Description and World Reputation.

Method 1. Filter by Reputation & Age

A quick method when scouting for wonderkids is to browse the list of players by their age and reputation.

In this instance, we could search for players between the age of 15 and 18 (or 21, if you want to find players who are close to First Team level). This lets us restrict the number of players and provides a great foundation to add more criterias to limit the search even further. For instance, by filtering for players under the age of 21 based in a specific country.

You can then sort by the players with highest reputation, or even browse by the player’s with highest transfer value for their age group, to quickly identify the best wonderkids and talents in an age group, or from a specific nation.

For instance, limiting the search to those at the age of 16 or 17 – enabling you to track down newly generated players at the end of the season to identify the best newgens produced at the yearly youth intake.

Through this method, I’ve quickly discovered some of the best newgens coming through in the game, as those with higher CA and PA will be more highly rated by the club.

Method 2: Monitor Players Wanted by Other Clubs

Another quick tip whilst browsing the player database for wonderkids and talents is to keep an eye out for any players wanted by other clubs. Couple his ‘WNT’ status with either transfer value or reputation, and hover over the wanted status to see which clubs are interested in his services.

Pay attention to which clubs at your level, or around your level at which players they are interested in. Keep a note of players who are attracting interest from major clubs.

By monitoring players wanted by bigger clubs, we take advantage of their likely greater knowledge of the player, and his potential. The ‘Wnt’ status becomes an early indicator for you that the player may be worth to scout, or even poach before the others are ready to make a bid, if you got good financial resources. If not, add them to a shortlist and track their development. Perhaps an opportunity for a loan move or a transfer move opens up later on in your career.

#5.2 | Filter By Transfer Value to Find Cheap Wonderkids: Buy cheap, Sell High!

Hunting for the best wonderkids on Football Manager is all well and good but if you’re managing in the lower leagues or at a club with limited financial resources, chances are that you will never afford signing any of the best wonderkids and talents.

In this instance, you must search for wonderkids and talents with a lower transfer value – meaning you are scouting for cheap wonderkids and hidden gems.

Rather than using the parameter ‘Any’ Transfer Value, you should customize your search by listing only those players with a transfer value at most €5Mill or €2.5Mill, all depending on your budet.

To help you find cheap wonderkids and hidden gems, you can combine filtering by maximum transfer value with world reputation – taking into account their player attributes and personality to track down interesting youth prospects.

Personally, there is nothing more satisfying than finding a young player with significant potential in the corner of the world. Finding gold in a mix of 60,000 players under the age of 21 within the player database is as much hit and miss than strategy, unless you know where to look. Perhaps you’ve heard about a player because of cheap wonderkids gems recommendations, like Selton.

Simply set up a search filter like this:

• Edit Search > Add Condition < Transfer Value < 'Is At Most' < Pick preferred maximum transfer value

#6 Scout Early, Buy Early, Loan Smart

If you look at how real football clubs run their player recruitment these days, most of the biggest clubs focuses as much attention at expanding and discovering young talents early on as possible. You might have noticed how Chelsea, Manchester City or FC København not only scout talents early but does everything in their power to attract the best talents within their scope as early on as possible!

This will be highly beneficial in Football Manager, too!

Rather than signing wonderkids at a high cost, you should move early, even if the player is not ready for first team football. Make it as your quest to know about the best young players within your career before they are 18!

Spend effort at scouting for wonderkids between the age of 15 and 18 and act fast to try to seal a deal if the player looks promising. Keep tabs of player’s contract length, release clauses and asking prices.

Even though there’s a risk attached at signing players at such a young age in that the player will never develop into a world-class player 10 years into the future will the cost over the player outweight the cons. In Football Manager, it’s important to take charge of wonderkids’ development rather than leaving him to rot under an AI manager’s supervision. For the last couple of FM-editions, it’s proven to be the fact, that the AI managers aren’t that good at taking care of their best wonderkids.

Once you’ve identified a target, there are several methods to take to succeed with youth recruitment with a buy low, sell high philosophy.

Method 1: Look for Players With Contract Expiring in 6 months

Every manager with a transfer vision revolving youth recruitment shouldn’t underestimate the power of scouting for young players on an expiring contract – trying to poach cheap talents ‘for free’.

Once a player reaches 6 months left of their contract, they will be available for an ‘Approach to Sign’ – meaning they can be signed as a free agent at the end of the season. For players under the age of 21, all you have to pay is a compensation fee. This can be a great method to sign bargain wonderkids.

Most often, the fee is far below their actual transfer value – helping you to sign young players at a bargain price!

In Football Manager, you can easily filter by players with a specific contract status.

There are 6 different contract statuses which may be beneficial to select in your advanced search:

• Expiring (1 year)
• Expiring (6 months)
• Expiring (3 Months)
• Expiring (1 Month)
• Expired / Unattached
• Youth

In reality the quest to find potential wonderkids available for an ‘Approach to Sign’ starts already a year before their contract expires.

Filtering by players on an expiring contract in 1 year can also be useful. If you declare interest in the player and unsettle him, he might be more unlikely to sign a new deal and wants to join your club instead!

You can add the condition to spy on player’s contract expiry date, put them onto a shortlist and track their form and development. If they haven’t signed a contract, try to unsettle those players who you are the most interested in. Or, even better, move quickly and try to get him before he renews his contract, and his transfer value increases dramatically!

READ MORE | Football Manager 26 Best Free Agents

Method 2: Poach Players From Youth Intakes

Although I’ve previously mentioned how valuable it is to spy on those newly generated players between March and July by browsing the list of newgens arriving at the yearly Youth Intakes for each nation, I feel it’s valuable to mention the little tip of filtering player’s age at, or under, the age of 16.

Simply, limit the player database to those players between the age of 15 and 16. You can then, filter by players based in a specific country, sort by transfer value or reputation to identify the best ones. Scout the most interesting players and put them onto a shortlist to track their form; performance and development.

Method 3: Scout for Approach to Sign Wonderkids & Talents

Using filters to scout for wonderkids and talents isn’t only limited to reputation or transfer value. Another quick method is to filter by the players’ contract status. This method works best if you only scout for players between the age of 15 and 17.

Whilst customzing the search for any players under the age of 17, pay attention to anyone with a Youth contract. These players will have a ‘Yth’ information label next to their name. This means they are available on an ‘Approach to Sign’.

Try to agree on a pre-contract before they have their professional contract signed and fill your Under-18 squad with promising players who can develop into potential first-team starters 5 years onwards.

To find these wonderkids available one an approach to sign, edit the search criteria and change Contract Status from ‘Any’ to players with a Youth Contract to find these young players available on an ‘Approach to Sign‘.

This will limit the search to show only those players who yet to sign a professional contract. This way, you will try to identify talents with great potential that you can pick up for a reduced fee. All you need is to pay a compensation fee.

If you prioritize to include only players in range who are very interested in joining your club, either by transfer or loan, you can spot the players who you can come to an agreement with more easily.

Locate the ‘Transfer & Loan button‘ in the upper corner of the ‘Players Found’ section and limit the search result to only show those players who are interested in joining your club either on Transfer or Loan.

As always, it’s recommended to get in touch with the players’ agent and make it a habit to click the ‘Ask Agent about his availability‘ or scout the player for a few weeks before clicking the ‘Approach to Sign’ button.

Chances are that the player will be less likely to join your team, especially if you’re inexperienced or newly started your save, if you enter contract talks without monitoring the actual interest.

Then, you must take into account the club’s current level compared to the level of the player’s current club. A player based in one of the top teams with high PA will never want to join a team in a minor league that has a lower reputation than their own, unless we are speaking of a loan move.

Method 5: Using TransferRoom To Find Wonderkids on FM26

In Football Manager 26, how we recruit players have been made more realistic by partnering up with TransferRoom – a company that empowers football clubs, agents and players by providing a global network where they get help to empower in the transfer market by giving all parties a platform to signal what type of players they are seeking, or potential opportunities that exist within the transfer market. With the aim to make transfers easier for all parties, by giving them instant access to transfer market information through its global network and database that limits the distance between the selling and buying clubs.

As revealed in the video by BenDoesFM, we can take advantage of the TransferRoom In to find wonderkids on Football Manager.

You’ll find the TransferRoom In within the Recruitment section.

Here you can create certain requirements that fits your club – giving other clubs around you a notification about what you’re seeking, whether you are searching for under-21 players on loan or young talents who is struggling for game time, and may not be highest in the pecking order at his current club, or a potential first team starter.

Just like setting up a recruitment focus you’ll determine which position (and player role), the age range and transfer status you’re seeking, Transfers, Loans or Transfers/Loans.

Check the video below to see how you can take full advantage of the TransferRoom Requirements feature on Football Manager.

Method 5.1: Look for Loans or Use Loans for Development & Progress

Loans can be a strategic way to both acquire wonderkids and talents to your squad but also to help the development of your most promising youngsters.

Whether you enjoy hoarding wonderkids or simply lacks the financial muscles to compete for the best young players and thereby needs to be a club who can promise a pathway to first- team football, loans are an developmental accelerator.

For a manager who hoards wonderkids, you’ll be punished if you can’t promise them game time and experience. If you can’t promise them a clear pathway to first-team football, loan them out to clubs with good training facilities. The same applies if your best young prospects aren’t good enough for first team football but is starting to reach the level where they are too good for the Under-18s squad, or won’t get the necessary competitive environment by playing for the Reserves.

You can either loan list the preferred players, or use the TransferRoom Out (Opportunities) to offer players out on loan. Similarly, you can take advantage of the TransferRoom In (Requirements) to signal that you wish to loan players.

When loaning players out you should ensure they receive regularly game time at an appropriate level of football according to his abilities.

Make sure that the player receives minutes by setting minimum demands about their playing time. You can easily set specific minimum conditions for players you either offer out via TransferRoom out, or make available for loan. the offer will then be automatically accepted or denied depending on whether the other club meets your demands, or not.

To customize the conditions and demands for any offers for players at Development Loan, go to:

• Responsibilites > Customise Advices > Offering via TransferRoom

You can determine the club they are allowed to play for, their required playing time, minimum facilities and minimum accepted playing wage percentage.

As this illustration reveals, you can offer the player out to only 2nd Teams / Reserves, or accept only loan bids from Senior Clubs.

Mapping Playing Time & Happiness Out on Loan

A wonderkid with zero minutes rarely becomes a star. The only thing that helps to guarantee progression is playing time – at the appropriate level, as mentioned in our guide on how to use loans to improve youth development.

If you’re constantly sending out your players on loans, you’ll profit from a Loan Manager. His task is to track player’s development at loan, and alert you about any unhappiness or stagnation.

Even though the Loan Manager will do a good job providing feedback about the players out on loan, you should monitor their progress.

Keep track of outgoing loan’s match minutes, average ratings and happiness at a monthly basis and talk to them regularly about the loan and development. When mapping a players’ progress, you should ensure he receives between 1000-1600 minutes per season, so try to find loan moves that can promise the player a Squad Status player.

If the loan doesn’t work out, make sure you recall the player ASAP and find another loan move if you can’t promise him regular game time.

Below we’ll take a closer look at other actionable steps to find the best wonderkids and newgens in Football Manager through setting up appropriate recruitment focuses. But first, we’ll take a closer look at the best countries to scout for wonderkids in Football Manager 24.

#7 Search Wonderkids With Clear Intent

7.1 Plan For the Future: Scout per Position

Smart managers don’t just sign any youth with high potential. They search for wonderkids with a clear intent, looking for players with a clear pathway to first team football.

Even though hoarding wonderkids may help you to increase the chance of seeing one out of three players turn out to become great players, it’s difficult to give each individual equal chance to progress towards their maximum potential if you got a double squad of elite talents.

Planning and preparing recruitment focuses that search for talents who fits your tactic is a must.

In Football Manager, the information you gather from the squad planner will alert you about potential arising issues in squad depth per position.

If you notice that you might lack depth at the DM position three season forward, you should set up a search looking for high-potential talents under the age of 19 which can become a first-team candidate in the future.

Rather than searching for any players under the age of 21, customize a recruitment focus which prioritize a position will be beneficial. You could even tailor your search for players that fits your tactic by tailoring the recruitment focus to the specific in-possession player role of your tactics.

Even adding conditions like key attributes for the position may help you to find potential wonderkids with similar abilities as what’s required of the player in that particular position you are looking for.

If you’re going to replace an aging playmaker, look for players in either DM or MC position with key attributes for theor role. In this event, you could add attributes like vision, technique, passing and balance – set with a minimum level of 11.

Scouting wonderkids per position is a wonderful opportunity both when you discover that you’re missing depth for your first team in the future, or you got poor coverage in your Under-23s or Under-18 squad.

Keep tabs of positions you lack depth in within the Squad Planner before the new season starts and plan accordingly.

7.2 Prioritize Best Attributes Per Positions over Star Ratings

Any experienced Football Manager gamer knows how inaccurate star ratings may be, as it’s highly dependent on the scout’s abilities and the quality of your squad. Since star ratings may vary, increase or decrease depending on form or how your squad progress, scouting by attributes will be more accurate way to determine the skills of a player.

One way to think about youth recruitment is to ignore star ratings overall and instead prioritize attributes, for instance by filtering by the top 5 attributes per positions in Football Manager.

In fact, you can combine key player attributes tied to the positional demands with certain universal physical and mental growth indicators – enabling you to better identify players who can develop into good players early on!

Now, you might wonder why we should suddenly shift our focus from star ratings to player’s attributes.

In Football Manager, a players’ ability is a weighted sum of their attributes tied to their position. A player with 11 in all attributes will get around 100 CA points, where 200 is the highest available.

Then, there are certain attributes which is higher rated by the match engine compared to others according to experiments and studies done by for instance FM-Arena and Zealand.

This knowledge is something you can take advantage of when scouting for wonderkids who can develop into world-class players.

In fact, there are three categories of attributes to look at:

i) Mental Growth Indicators:

• Determination
• Work Rate
• Decisions
• Professionalism (see Scout Report / Hidden Attribute)

ii) Physical Growth Indicators:

• Natural Fitness
• Agility
• Acceleration & Pace

iii) Attributes per Position (see chapter 7.2.1)

7.2.1. Filter by Recommended Attributes

One great way to scout for wonderkids in Football Manager is to set up a search filter where you pick the most important player attributes in Football Manager for out-field players, regardless of their position or player role.

Whether you wish to pick 10 or 15 key attributes for any players, or split it up by attributes attacking or defensive players require is up to you. However, there are at least 5 physical attributes any player require in modern football, aside 5 mental attributes and three technical attributes.

Truth be told, in terms of youth development, you got to keep in mind that it’s easier to develop technical abilities ahead of physical attributes, as these will develop as they get older and through match experience.

If we consider a player will most likely improve their attributes by maximum 7 throughout their career, we can add a condition where we handpick 16 useful attributes for any position, except the goalkeeper.

Set the attribute to a minimum of 11 with a match of 10 out of 15.

However, scouting by notable attributes represents a chance to find those young talents with a foundation to play at a good level relative to your squad’s abilities. You can easily filter the search by increasing or decreasing their lowest attributes, or find any players who match 10, 12 or 15 attributes out of 15.

7.2.2. Scouting by Key Attributes per Position

In Football Manager, top-performing players rely on certain key attributes for their role and position that aids their performance due to how the match engine factors these attributes. For anyone scouting for wonderkids, paying attention to their current level of key attributes per position can be a valuable tip to identify future top-performering players.

Rather than selecting 15 to 20 player attributes that may not be required for a player’s position or role, you can be more strategic by simply picking the top 5-6 attributes for their position + the most important attributes for development and growth, or most important match engine attributes, e.g. Acceleration, Pace, Stamina and Agility.

You can then filter the search by position, select the 5-6 attributes you rate the highest, or choose the recommended ones below:

• Goalkeeper (GK): Reflexes, Handling, Decisions, Communication, Positioning, Agility
• Central Defender (CD): Tackling, Marking, Heading, Anticipation, Positioning (+ Strength)
• Full-Back/Wing-Back (FB/WB): Acceleration, Decisions, Stamina, Work Rate, Crossing (+ Acceleration and Pace)
• Defensive Midfielder (DM): Tackling, Anticipation, Decisions, Positioning, Work Rate (+ Strength and Stamina)
• Central Midfielder (CM): Passing, Technique, First Touch, Vision, Decisions, Teamwork (+ Stamina)
• Attacking Midfielder (AM): Passing, Vision, Off the Ball, Flair, First Touch, Technique (+ Acceleration, Pace and Agility)
• Wingers (W): Dribbling, Technique, Anticipation, Off the Ball, Acceleration, Agility, Pace
• Striker (ST): Finishing, Off the Ball, Work Rate, Composure, First Touch (+Acceleration and Pace)

#8 Scout Wonderkids More Strategically! Prioritise The Right Nations (and regions)

If you want to succeed at scouting wonderkids in Football Manager, it’s better to work more strategically in your hunt in the best young players with significant potential.

Although your overall objective should be to cover all the corners of the world to track down the next big thing, everyone who has played Football Manager for some time knows how uneven youth production may be across continents and regions.

To create the appropriate foundation for scouting wonderkids, you need to combine the wizdom of where the best wonderkids and newgens are located, or may erupt in the future, as well as which areas of the world known for their abilities to produce wonderkids.

In terms of scouting for wonderkids on Football Manager, you should prioritize your focus around specific regions, nations and clubs known for their abilities to produce wonderkids and quality newgens. This will help you to find those young players with elite potential in the future.

With a limited scouting budget or funds available to identify elite wonderkids and newgens, you don’t need to scout the entire world for top talents.

Rather than roam the world willy-nilly for the best young talents, it’s better to prioritize certain nations, or regions, known for their ability to produce world-class players more often than others.

The smartest managers first and foremost prioritize manually searching for youngsters, or which scouting assignments they set up, by selecting nations known for producing talents.

Then, as the desire to build an extensive scouting network opens up as both the size and quality of the recruitment team increases, you can try to expand the club’s world knowledge by creating more scouting assignments.

#8.2 What are the Best Countries to Scout for Wonderkids in Football Manager?

When searching for wonderkids, we want to send our scouts out to nations (and regions) across the world that is brilliant at generating quality newgens in the future.

To be even more strategical, you could target specific nations, or regions, that are more proficient to scout for wonderkids and talents compared to others.

In this event, you should avoid scouting competitions. Instead, it’s more proficient to utilize a region-based scouting where you set up recruitment focuses that run continously in regions, with high probability of young players with significant potential.

An ongoing focus ensures the scouting assignment has no end date – resulting that the scout’s are roaming around the region, or nations, for young players.

Region-based scouting is particular useful as it increases the discovery rate. Take note of and target countries with higher number of active football players, better economic stature or higher likeliness to generate more newgens with a current or potential ability level which separates countries quality at wonderkids generation.

We can use this knowledge of nation’s youth ratings in Football Manager to determine which areas of the world to prioritize when setting up recruitment focuses.

The top 12 nations’ youth ratings according to FM26 are;

NYR = Nation’s Youth Rating according to FM26 26.1 DB.

These are just a few countries within the world that will be as likely to produce world-class players in the future. There are many other nations that has the potential to generate wonderkids and future hidden cheap gems.

Just think about the rise of all those talents coming through at Independiente del Valle in Ecuador, or how Envigado in Colombia has managed to produce world-class players. Then, Japan is a rising country in terms of generating international stars.

Focusing your attention around Brazil, Argentina and the rest of South American contintent is also purposeful considering the historical impact these nations have had on football the past 50 years due to their incredible abilities to develop their young talents.

Whilst these talents is often bagged with flair and technical abilities, Eastern Europe is a goldmine for cheaper talents. Likewise for Scandinavia and Africa.

What you will discover as you progress through the Football Manager game world is that each nation and region will generate new generations with a specific archetype – just like in real life. Scandinavians may often have higher teamwork and work rate, while Brazilians may have higher natural flair and dribbling skills.

At Passion4FM, we have spend a lot of effort throughout the years sharing the knowledge about clubs and nations known for their abilities to produce or develop wonderkids. Here’s a quick list of useful resources:

• comprehensive list of best youth academies in Football Manager, and where they are located
• overview of the different scouting regions and nations with the highest youth ratings – providing you with an overview of countries who has an higher chance of producing high-quality newgens in the future
• understanding how club’s produce newgens at the annual youth intake along with our list of youth intake dates.

This knowledge is as vital to setting up your game world and customizing the database size, as when the topic is scouting assignments.

#9. How to set up Recruitment Focuses to Scout for Wonderkids?

If you want to suceed with wonderkids scouting in Football Manager, manually searching and filtering for the best young players isn’t enough.

Recruitment Focuses are the backbone of FM26’s scouting system – they allow your scouts to automatically search the world for players that meet the criteria you define.

These scouting assignments shall help you to gain knowledge of more players and young talents across the world but how you set up recruitment focuses will vary depending on the size of your recruitment team and the funds available to acquire scout reports.

To track down the best wonderkids and newgens coming through in the game, there are several essential assignments to set up. Let us take a closer look!

#9.1 The Correct Assignment for Wonderkids Scouting in Football Manager

If you take youth recruitment seriously, it is important that the most basic recruitment focus is set up correctly.

Whether you are looking for players you can develop, or are looking for the best young talents who may quickly reach first team level within a season or two, you can set up a rather broad recruitment focus that helps you to find those young players, under the age of 21, with good potential.

This recruitment focus for wonderkids on Football Manager can look like this:

• Age: 15–21
• Minimum Current Ability: 4 silver stars
• Minimum Potential Ability: 3 gold stars *
• Recruitment Focus Priority: Ongoing (no end date)
• Scouting Areas: Any **
• Assign Scouts: Prioritize scouts with higher Judging Player Potential, Good Average Judging Player Ability and Adaptability (particular important if they are roaming regions).

This helps you set up a rather broad but kind of basic wonderkids search, identify the best Under-21 players within your allowed scouting region (relating to your scouting range). This general Wonderkids recruitment focus can be used in all sorts of save, at clubs with limited finances to those with an extensive recruitment team and less financial restrictions.

It can be used regardless of the size of your recruitment team and playing level. Frankly, it’s a very decent recruitment focus that works efficiently regardless of the standards of your club.

It can be used within the first few months to quickly get to know the best wonderkids and talents around you by changing the priority to Standard, or keep it as a general ongoing scout assignments that could be considered an all-in-one recruitment focus.

Useful Information

A) Number of Scouts: I would recommend to select a minimum of two scouts if they should roam a region. This will ease the work load on the scouts and thereby help to generate more scout reports quicker.

B) Generate More Results: You should also make sure to keep ‘Include results found in other Recruitment Focuses’ enabled in order to gain more reports and recommendations.

C) Consider your squad’s average ability when setting minimum PA ratings: * What you set as minimum potential ability is a matter of your club’s overall quality and level of football. At an elite club, like Barcelona, it might be difficult to find wonderkids with a higher PA star rating than 3.5.

At a lower league club, you could easily bump up the star ratings to 4 or 4.5 gold stars and you’ll easily find a significant higher number of players in the result of the recruitment focus.

To summarize, this type of recruitment focus for wonderkids may look like this:

NB! If you create an additional recruitment focus, or edit the current one from players between the age of 15-18, to aged between 15-21, you can identify those breakthrough players who are closer to first team football. This will be a wonderful all-round wonderkids recruitment focus that fits any club.

Use it in the first six months as a Standard recruitment focus to build basic knowledge about wonderkids and talents around you, or use it as an ongoing focus that helps you to find both players who you can develop, or provide depth to the first team.

For an Elite club, having one Recruitment Focus to find wonderkids in Football Manager is not enough. You want to expand your network of scouts to reach ‘all the corners within the world’, or simply send them out to regions you find preferable to look for potential signings. Let us take a closer look at some additional recruitment focuses, revolving around how to find newgens, or cheap hidden gems.

#9.2 How to scout for the best newgens?

Scouting for newgens is a bit different than when scouting for wonderkids. Rather than setting up a rather basic recruitment focus revolving around the best Under-21 players, you should lower the age threshold – meaning you are only asking your scouts to acquire knowledge of the best talents within your scope that are 17 or under. Resulting in that you’re tracking down those newgens that has just arrived at the annual youth intake.

In this event we are scouting for players who can develop tremendously – meaning you can easily reduce the attention around current ability star ratings and basically prioritize scouting for players with high potential ability.

For a club with more financial muscles, setting up a U17 recruitment focus will be essential, ALONGSIDE the default U21 Wonderkids mission.

Since we are hunting for growth curves, and not immediate first-team contributors, our recruitment focus for best newgens on Football Manager can look like this:

• Age: 15–17
• Minimum Current Ability: Any (2-3 silver stars)
• Minimum Potential Ability: 3 – 3.5 gold stars *
• Recruitment Focus Priority: Ongoing (no end date)
• Scouting Areas: Any **
• Assign Scouts: Prioritize scouts with the highest Judging Player Potential and Adaptability (particular important if they are roaming regions).

Yet again, we’ll set up an ongoing scouting assignment – meaning it will get the lowest priority, but which will run forever. This means that if you set up a Top Priority recruitment focus, it may take longer time to get recommendations from the mission, as the Scouts must priority another scouting trip of higher priority for the next few weeks.

Whilst this is a rather generic recruitment focus that aims to identify the best Under-17 talents within any areas of your allowed scouting range, it gives you a quick way to find young players that you can develop and sell for profit.

Did you know?!
When scouts are on assignments their judging player ability and judging player potential will improve the longer they are out on that specific assignment, just like players will improve their player attributes when playing matches in a specific position.

#9.3 Scouting Nations for Wonderkids & Hidden Gems

A major project within my recruitment team is to unearth wonderkids and hidden gems across the world through setting up multiple recruitment focuses that targets nations and regions. How many depends on the funds available, the size of your recruitment team and your playing level, or the my transfer policy.

As mentioned above, I favor to set up multiple scouting assignments that looks to identify the best under-21 players within some of the most strategic regions, and key nations known for their abilities to produce high-potential players, to scout wonderkids in Football Manager. How many recruitment focuses I set up and whether I target specific nations or certain regions depends on how many scouts I got at my disposal.

My vision when setting up recruitment focuses is to balance the workload of the scouts, so they generate more scout reports quicker. A scout is never send to more than two assignments.

If I got 10 scouts, I always make sure the Chief Scout and the one with the highest Judging Player Ability is not send on any ongoing missions. Instead, these scouts is saved for any individual scouting trips where I need second judgement about a player’s abilities ahead of a potential transfer move.

This means, there are 8 scouts left to roam the world. Those with good Adaptability and knowledge of several countries will be send out to scout a region, e.g Central Europe. Those with knowledge of only one Nation will be most likely send out to scout for players under the age of 25, as it fits my Transfer Vision.

The priority of recruitment focuses to set up:

When creating recruitment focuses I tend to prioritize certain regions and nations ahead of others. I might have one scout targeting the entire region, and then I try to sign scouts with the knowledge of nations within each region, for instance by having a dedicated scout with the mission to roam around Brazil for Under 21 players.

One strategy I use is to couple one big nation with a ‘smaller’ neighbouring country e.g. Austria and Switzerland, or Belgium and Netherlands. I take into account the travelling distance and how long time the scout may spend roaming the nation before moving to the next.

• Region: Western Europe
  • Spain
  • Portugal
  • France
• Region: South America (South)
  • Brazil
  • Argentina
• Region: UK & Ireland
  • England
• Region: Central Europe
  • Germany
  • Poland
  • Netherlands
  • Belgium
• Region: South America (North)
  • Colombia
  • Venezuela
  • Ecuador
• Region: South Europe
  • Italy
  • Croatia
• Region: Northern Europe
  • Norway
  • Sweden
  • Denmark
• Region: North America
  • Mexico
  • USA
• Region: Eastern Europe
  • Serbia
  • Hungary
• Region: Central Europe
  • Austria
  • Switzerland
• Region: South Eastern Europe
  • Türkiye
  • Greece
• Region: East Asia
  • Japan
  • South Korea
• Region: Western Africa
  • Nigeria
  • Ivory Coast
  • Ghana
  • Senegal
• Region: North Africa
  • Morocco
  • Tunisia
  • Egypt
  • Algeria

How you will prioritize region-based scouting ahead of nation-based scouting or certain continents ahead of others will be all up to you but you’ll get the overall picture – targeting first and foremost nations around you before expanding your scouting network to find potential signings all over the world.

#9.3.1 Scouting for wonderkids on the Iberian Peninsula (Spain & Portugal)

In this case, I have asked Javier Ribalta and Pedro Ferreira to scout the nation of Portugal and Spain for Under-21 talents. As always, I select ongoing assignment and ask the scout to find players with a minimum ability of 5 silver stars and a minimum potential of 3 golden stars (depending on the squad’s quality).

Here’s an illustration of the recruitment focus I’ve called ‘SPA POR U21’, but you can title them whatever you want. For instance, a great tip could be to add the name of the scout at the end of the recruitment focus, or how many scouts are conducting the search.

#9.3.2 Scouting for Wonderkids in South America

Due to its reputation of generating world-class wonderkids, South America is probably the area of the world you wish to use great resources to track down the next Brazilian wonderkids and other hidden gems found within this region.

Since the continent of South America is large with many nations favourable to scout, we need to split the region up in multiple recruitment focuses. This is a quick list of the recruitment focuses I use to find hot prospects and the best wonderkids and talents in South America:

• Brazil U23 – Assign the scout with extensive knowledge of Brazil with plus 14 in JPA and JPP
• Brazil U21 – Assign the scout with highest judging player potential to identify those young talents that can become wonderkids.
• Argentina U23 – Assign the scout with extensive knowledge of Argentina with plus 14 in JPA and JPP
  In this instance, you could include Chile into the areas of focus.
• Colombia, Venezuela & Ecuador U23 – This scouting focus groups three ‘smaller nations’ together. I prioritize assigning a scout with great Adaptability to roam these nations famed for their cheap wonderkids bargains and hidden gems
• Uruguay & Paraguay U23

For such a huge project to scout for wonderkids in South America, you will notice that it requires at least five different scouts to roam that continent. In this illustration, I got 4 different recruitment focuses prioritizing the region of South America.

#9.3.3 Scouting for wonderkids in Europe

As the illustration above reveals, I create similar recruitment focuses for the major nations in Europe. In fact, I group them together so every recruitment focus prioritize on one major nation and one smaller nation that neighbours the country, or a maximum of three ‘smaller’ footballing nations. In fact, it all comes down to how large the country is both in terms of geographics and population – and the likeliness of how many footballers there are in the country.

For instance, you can set up recruitment focuses that looks at players from nations in close proximity to each other:

• England, Scotland and Ireland
• France
• The Netherlands and Belgium grouped into one recruitment focus
• Germany & Poland
• Italy and Croatia
• Czechia and Slovakia
• Norway, Sweden and Denmark
• Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria, or just scout the region of Eastern Europe
• Türkiye and Greece

#9.3.4 Scouting for wonderkids in Africa

When it comes to African wonderkids, you can potentially find the best talents by scouting the Western Africa. This region includes major African footballing nations such as Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Ghana and Senegal.

Whether you set up a specific recruitment focus that looks to find the best talents under-23 in Western Africa, by either focusing on the area or specifically pick these four nations, or go to Players in Range and sort by players under the age of 23 based in these specific nations, are all up to you.

Monitoring the youth academy of either ASEC Mimosas, RC Abidjan (both from Ivory Coast), Enyimba Aba or Remo Stars from Nigeria, Diambars FC or Generation Foot from Senegal, or Ghanasian Accra Lions and Hearts of Oak, could help you identify some amazing African wonderkids on Football Manager.

#9.3.5 Scouting for wonderkids in Asia or Oceania

Unless you have an extensive scouting team, it’s probably impossible to set up recruitment focuses for all the corners of the world. You need to prioritize certain areas of the world ahead of others.

Asia is probably an area of the world people tend to overlook, as the potential to find wonderkids is lower than in Europe or South America. However, it might pay off searching for wonderkids based in four particular nations; Japan, China, South Korea and Australia.

How many players you’ll find from these countries will depend on your database size. It’s here I would conduct a search for players of Nationality under the age of 21, rather than setting up a scouting assignment.

Time and time again, I’ve been able to find wonderkids and cheap gems by conducting such a search before sorting by tansfer value or reputation. Then visit the players that has come through, or are playing for a club with great youth facilities.

In this instance, I would recommend to browse the squads of some specific clubs famed for their youth production.

Some of the best hidden wonderkids factories in Asia are:

• Ulsan (South Korea)
• Pohang Steelers (South Korea)
• Suwon Samsung (South Korea)
• Yokohama F Marinos (Japan)
• Kashima Antlers (Japan)
• Kyoto (Japan)
• Gamba Osaka (Japan)
• Sanfrecce Hiroshima (Japan)
• Melbourne City (Australia)
• CC Mariners (Australia)

#10 Why do I receive few scout reports?

#10.1 Low Adaptability or Knowledge

It’s important to maintain control of your scouting network by assigning appropriate staff to each particular scouting assignment. Never assign a scout with none or marginal knowledge of a particular nation or region to travel to that area. If you do so, you can’t expect quick results as he might spend the first three to six months just trying to settle into the new culture. How quickly he adapts is determined by his Adaptability, but also his Determination can affect how efficient he works.

Sending a scout with low Adaptability to scout a nation or region where he has marginal knowledge of will result in fewer scout reports being generated as well.

If you ask Gilles Grimandi, a chief-scout with adaptability of 7, to scout Germany, which he has no knowledge of, it will probably take one to two seasons before you start seeing results of the assignment. In fact, it takes quite a long time to get knowledge of a country but the longer time he spends out in one particular country, the better results.

It’s important that the scout has knowledge of the nation, or that he has superb rating of ‘adaptability‘ to generate scout reports immediately, due to him being accustomed to the language and the cultural difference in the nation.

#10.2 Too high workload

Another thing that may affect the number of scout reports you receive is his overall workload. If you have too many scouts assignments ongoing and too few scouts available to travel the world, you will be met by a message saying: “scouts are busy with other tasks” within the recruitment focus interface.

I recommend to assign scouts to no more than 2 assignments to make sure their focus and quality of their reports is as good as possible. One scout could potentially scout a nation and a competition without ease, but if you use a vaste number of Standard or Top Priority recruitment focuses, which requires minimum two or four scouts, their workload will be intensified – resulting in less results on ongoing focuses as they are paused.

Setting up too many scout assignments relating to the number of scouts allowed will also give you the notice: “Scouts are busy with other tasks, so results will take time”.

This can occur if you set up a Top Priority or Standard Priority recruitment focus on top of your ongoing assignments where you have no available scouts left to conduct the search.

This notice, will not appear when you create the recruitment focus but will show if you head back to the recruitment focus after you have set it up. Normally, you can keep it as thumb of rule that you only set up the number of recruitment focuses that you have available in your scouting team.

#10.3 Near Matches & In Progress

When browsing the results of your recruitment focuses, you should keep a close eye on the ‘Near Matches’ and ‘In Progress’ tab.

Visiting the Near Matches sections every other week or on a monthly basis could help you discover more talents that doesn’t quite match the criterias you’ve set. For instance, if you search for players under the age of 17, a scout might recommend a player at the age of 18 or 19. Those players will then be listed in the Near Matches.

The In Progress section gives you a list of players the scout is currently in process of generating a scout report of. A scout might stop generating a report card if they for whatever reason don’t believe it’s useful to gain full knowledge of the player – perhaps due to a minimum potential ability that is far away from the minimum potential ability of your recruitment focus.

Visiting the Player Recommendations tab once in a while, will help to browse through the latest players your scouting team has taken a look at. Even swtiching the toggle inside the Player Database to only show ‘Scouted Players’ will be beneficial.

From there, you can take further actions – either by moving them into a shortlist to keep track of their development, their transfer value and form or make an offer on the player.

Personally, I would recommend you to re-scout players under the age of 20 every other month to keep track of their development.

Pro tip: If you’ve gained only partial knowledge, keep scouting until reports fill in gaps. Casting judgement too early leads to overpriced, low-impact signings.

Conclusion

Here we have gone through a number of ways to scout for the best wonderkids and newgens in Football Manager. From quick methods like using the youth intake list to more advanced measures where you set up recruitment focuses to unearth the biggest talents in your save, it shows there’s no right or wrong way to find the best talents.

What’s the most effective when looking for wonderkids depends on the size of your scouting team and how meticulously you want to go. We hope you have enjoyed our guide to scouting for wonderkids and encourage you to share your methods by dropping a comment below!

Did you enjoy our guide to scouting for wonderkids on Football Manager and want to master scouting in Football Manager as an expert. Explore more scouting guides for Football Manager, that can be of value!

Thanks for reading and happy managing!

Sources & Credits

1. Determination – Sigames Forum ↩︎
2. Determination, Ambition and Professionalism – FMStats.com ↩︎