FIFA 17 scouting guide: Choosing a scout

Key points:

  • This year it’s slightly easier to scout the best players
  • A scout’s experience determines whether he’ll find the player type you’re looking for
  • A scout’s judgment rating refers to whether he’ll find the top rated youth players
  • Buying a scout will generate a replacement of roughly equal quality

 

Welcome to the FIFA 17 scouting guide!

The only guide you need for youth scouting in FIFA 17

Whether you’ve never scouted before or are a seasoned veteran, my guides will help you scout like a pro and find the next generation of superstars.

This guide will show you how to pick the best scout to get amazing results, but if you want to know where to scout, how to spot the best players, how to develop your players and more, head over to my FIFA 17 scouting guide hub page – I’ll be adding more guides soon, so keep checking back.

Scouting in FIFA 17

In FIFA 17, EA have introduced the ‘Total Club Management’ system. Now, instead of just league and cup objectives, you’ll get several objectives every year covering everything from good financial management to youth scouting.

And now that you’ll have goals to reach and tasks to carry out when it comes to youth scouting, it means that finding a good scout and recruiting promising young talent is more important than ever in FIFA 17.

FIFA 17 scouting guide: choosing a scout

Finding a good scout will make a big difference to your scouting success

So with that in mind, how do you choose a good scout? Is it really worth buying the most expensive, highly rated scout, or can you find talented players with the lower-rated scouts? And what’s the difference between a scout’s experience level and their judgment?

Experience vs judgment

Let’s start with that last question. Each scout has two ratings – experience and judgment – each with a rating out of five stars. Firstly, let’s look at experience.

Experience

Experience determines how likely the scout is to find the type of player that you’ve told him to look for. So if you don’t want your scout bringing back a load of defenders when you told him to find attackers, you’ll want a scout with high experience.

It also determines how many players your scout will bring back for you on each scouting report. Here’s how that works based on the star rating of the scout’s experience:

  • 1 star experience: 1-2 players per report
  • 2 stars experience: 2-3 players per report
  • 3 stars experience: 3-5 players per report
  • 4 stars experience: 4-6 players per report
  • 5 stars experience: 5-7 players per report

So clearly a scout with higher experience will give you more players to choose from on each monthly report, and thus a higher chance of finding a good player.

FIFA 17 scouting guide: choosing a scout

The number of players your scout will find varies by their experience level

Note that there are two quirks to experience. Firstly, if you search for goalkeepers then your scout will find nothing but goalkeepers, regardless of his experience. Secondly, if you search for ‘Any’ then the scout’s experience level is irrelevant, as he’s not looking for any particular player type. So you could save a little bit of money in this way by picking a scout with a lower experience level and only looking for goalkeepers or ‘Any’ player types (not that you’ll save much money, but it might help).

If your scout has a poor experience level, he’s more likely to find the wrong type of player. Here’s how likely each scout rating is to find the right type of player, where 0 = exact match and 3 = furthest from what you’re looking for:

[table id=204 /]

So a scout with 1 star in experience only has a 30% chance of finding the player type you’re after, and a 70% chance of finding one of three alternative player types. In contrast, a scout with 5 stars in experience has a reassuring 80% chance of finding the player type you’re after, and just a 20% chance of finding another player type.

Interestingly, these values have been tweaked to make them slightly more extreme than they were in FIFA 16. Last year a scout with 1 star experience had a 35% chance of finding an exact match (slightly better), while a 5 star experience scout had a 75% chance of finding an exact match (slightly worse).

FIFA 17 scouting guide: choosing a scout

A scout with more experience will bring back more players on each report

Judgment

Judgment is different in that it determines the quality of the players scouted, so a scout with higher judgment is more likely to find top quality (platinum) players than a scout with lower judgment. But how big is this difference? How much more likely is it that a good scout will find those amazing platinum players?

Check out the table below to find out. Note that Tier 1 players are platinum, while Tier 4 players are bronze (AKA the worst ones).

[table id=205 /]

It’s pretty difficult for all scouts to find platinum players – while 1 star judgment scouts only have a 1% chance of finding platinum players, 5 star judgment scouts only have a 10% chance, which isn’t that much higher.

FIFA 17 scouting guide: choosing a scout

Higher judgment means better quality scouted players

However, the good news is that EA has made it slightly easier to find platinum players in FIFA 17 than it was in FIFA 16. While in FIFA 16 5 star judgment scouts had a 6% chance of finding platinum players and a 23% chance of finding bronze players, now those percentages are 10% and 14% respectively.

So getting a 5 star judgment scout is a more worthwhile investment in FIFA 17 than it was in FIFA 16, because you’re more likely to find platinum players this year.

Which scouts find the best players? What is a platinum player?

Based on the information above, judgment is the most important scout rating if you’re looking for platinum player quality, while a good experience rating will help if you’re looking for a specific player type and/or want more players on each report.

But what is a platinum player? And what is a bronze player? Here’s how the game defines them:

  • Platinum player: potential 75-95
  • Gold player: potential 65-90
  • Silver player: potential 60-85
  • Bronze player: potential 55-80
FIFA 17 scouting guide: choosing a scout

The best scouts will find more platinum players

So based on this, a bronze player’s maximum potential is 80. However, there’s also a potential modifier of 0-10, meaning the player’s potential could be boosted or reduced by anything from nothing at all to 10 points.

So in practice, you might scout a bronze player with potential 80, and this then gets boosted 10 points by the modifier, meaning you end up with a player with 90 potential. So even though the vast majority (82%) of players a 1 star judgment scout finds will be bronze, there’s a chance he’ll find a real gem whose potential has been boosted massively.

However, given a 5 star judgment scout is 10 times more likely to find a platinum player than a 1 star judgment scout is, it’s worth investing in the best scouts if you can afford to (a scout with 5 star experience and 5 star judgment will cost £3.4m).

Getting better scouts in FIFA 17

If you’re not happy with the scouts you have to choose from, there are two ways to quickly improve your options.

Firstly, save and reload. Scouts refresh every 7 days. Work out which day your scouts will change on, then save the day before. Advance one day and check the scout list and if it’s still no good, quit, reload and try again. Eventually you should find a good scout.

FIFA 17 scouting guide: choosing a scout

This scout replaced a scout with 5 stars experience and 4 stars judgment

The second option is more expensive but a little more reliable. When you buy a scout, there’s a 25% chance they’ll be replaced by a higher-rated scout. So if you buy a scout with 4 stars in both experience and judgment, if you go to buy a second scout there’s a 25% chance the one you bought may have been replaced by a scout with 5 stars in experience and judgment, for example.

So if you have the budget, this second option takes some of the randomness out of generating new scouts. But it will cost you a fair amount of money.