Without this skill I would not be able to approach some players in order to sign them. Players you don't have the scouting skills to sign aren't visible on the player search panel. You can also click on links posted by someone else, but the approach button will be greyed out. If you hover over this button it will tell you the reason, like you don't have the required skills.
Within the scouting skill-set, there are area specific skills that improve the amount of players you can see by 5% in specific regions. Famous players can be seen by all players regardless of their scouting abilities. This means that the main benefit of scouting is the ability to find regenerated young players who enter into the gameworld as older players retire.
Now allow me to quote a piece of text from the FM Online manual.
I followed SI’s advice, as evidenced by one of my previous blog posts.If everybody has a certain skill there is no advantage in having it – think about learning something obscure such as the Oceania region scouting skill, which would give you a unique advantage.
Source: FM Live Manual
I'm changing my strategy to keep my wages low but maintain a certain level of quality. I've noticed that most these high wage players are either European or South American. Most managers have focussed their scouting skills in this region. Admittedly, it's where most talents originate from, so it makes sense too.
It also means that most managers have not bothered scouting in Asia and Africa. Admittedly, there's less talent originating from these regions, but they are there and they're still fairly cheap because they're not spotted by most managers, meaning the competition is less fierce and the wages are fairly normal.Source: my own blog
But looking back on that decision, I can’t say it has paid off. The main reason for this is an unfair newgen distribution by the game itsself. Both in quantity and quality, the game heavily favours South America and Europe.
I’m not saying there are never any decent African or Australian newgens, but for every African four star newgen, there are six or seven South American and six or seven European newgens, so the quantity is not balanced.
The same can be said for the quality. Almost all of the top youths PA-wise are European and South American, there are barely any four or more star African or Asian youths in the game.
To a certain degree, I agree that is realism, as there aren’t that many Asian and Australian superstars, but surely Africa deserves a more worthy faith? It’s not like they haven’t produced anything decent, some of the worlds best players are African or of African descent.
In total, I feel the newgen distribution and generation isn’t quite balanced and even a bit unfair. Learning the African and Australian regions for scouting takes the same amount of time as the European and South American regions, but the pay-off is considerably less in quantity and quality of players.
The one advantage I have noticed is that the competition for these players is less fierce, because not every player is visible to all managers. Unfortunately, the moment a top African newgen appears, he is visible to everyone with five star scouting, so I would still have to shell out 20k wage offers.
Perhaps this is something that can be looked at by Sports Interactive?
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