Creating Your Own Effective Scouting Filters; An Introduction

I recently read a column by Gabriele Marcotti about how statistics are becoming more and more important in sports.

Marcotti mentioned a book called Moneyball in his column. This book focussed on the Oakland A's, an American baseball team, and how this team managed to compete with bigger and more wealthy clubs by means of innovative statistical analysis.

The central premise of Moneyball is that the collected wisdom of baseball insiders (including players, managers, coaches, scouts, and the front office) over the past century is subjective and often flawed. Statistics such as stolen bases, runs batted in, and batting average, typically used to gauge players, are relics of a 19th century view of the game and the statistics that were available at the time. The book argues that the Oakland A's' front office took advantage of more empirical gauges of player performance to field a team that could compete successfully against richer competitors in Major League Baseball.

Rigorous statistical analysis had demonstrated that on-base percentage and slugging percentage are better indicators of offensive success, and the A's became convinced that these qualities were cheaper to obtain on the open market than more historically valued qualities such as speed and contact. These observations often flew in the face of conventional baseball wisdom and the beliefs of many baseball scouts and executives.

By re-evaluating the strategies that produce wins on the field, the 2002 Athletics, with approximately $41 million in salary, are competitive with larger market teams such as the New York Yankees, who spend over $200 million in payroll. Because of the team's smaller revenues, Oakland is forced to find players undervalued by the market, and their system for finding value in undervalued players has proven itself thus far.

Basically, the author claims that teams have finite resources (read: money) and are therefore forever looking for value. Value used to be assessed by evaluating traditional parameters. Most of these parameters were subjective, such as for example pace, strength and character. The author claims that one could identify value more efficiently by analysing certain previously obscure statistics.

According to Marcotti, finding a way to apply these principles to football has been something of a holy grail. The most obvious obstacle is that while baseball has easy-to-measure individual match-ups, football is a free-flowing game.

Fortunately, FM Live makes this measuring aspect a bit easier for us, since the game is all about statistics. The attributes of players are displayed in ratings between one and twenty and the game logs pretty much every statistic you would ever want to know.

This means one could apply the aforementioned principles to FM Live. Re-assessing value is becoming more and more important, since your budget is limited and there will be more teams fighting over the same players.

As a result, setting your scouting filters is getting more and more important if you want to end up with proper value for your money. In this article and several follow-up articles, I am going to describe how I set up my scouting filters. In this article, I will describe the general approach I take.

First off, let me tell you that I know what kind of players I am looking for exactly. The game offers various roles for players, even within positions on the pitch. For example, there are five or so roles you can select for your forward, but I know exactly that I only need Target Men or Trequartista's upfront.

Once you know which role or roles your players should cover, you can start by creating your own search template. The basic templates provided by SI give you a nice start to work with. However, following these templates will mean you end up with very broad and generic search results. Basically, you have to narrow the search results down further.

This can be achieved by adding extra parameters to the search. However, how do you know which parameters to add for your role? This is where a combination of common sense and being smart should be applied by a manager. Either read up on forums which attributes to use for which role or look at successful players within the GameWorld and look for common attributes in all of them.

Once you have added these parameters, you will have narrowed down the amount of players you are getting. Now look at the financial means at your disposal. If the listed players are all outside your reach, lower the standards a bit in the search parameters. Ideally, you want to end up with four or five candidates.

Now you can examine these candidates further. How have they performed in the past? What are their statistics like for pass completion or crucial errors? Look at those statistics that are crucial for the role the player should fulfill in your team.

Basically, this is a very generic approach to setting up your scouting filters. In the next few days, I will provide a number of examples of how I scout exactly for players within a specific role.

Wikipedia and Google Scouting

One of the more intriguing aspects of FM Live is the starting squad and the high probability it will be full of unknown players. I'm always fascinated by these unknown names, they give the first few seasons an LLM feeling for me. Plunging myself into the unknown, discovering new names and abilities...

The first thing I do when I sign a new player who isn't very well known, as in not active in the highest division from a top nation, is look up his name in Wikipedia or Google to find more background information and possible footballing relatives and such. I actually do the same for all potential signings (not including newgens...).

An unorthodox method of scouting, I must admit, but not entirely weird. It usually tells you something about a players personality, as those hidden stats are not visible in FM Live and I don't have the need to boot up the FM Scout everytime I want to know such details.

Oh and before I forget, this method is actually used by real-life clubs as well. The tale of Dutch winger Istvan Bakx is one of the more obvious cases where a club used the internet and its capabilities to find and scout a potential signing.

Bakx gained some notability in Belgium with his transfer from the Dutch amateurs of Hoek to Belgian second division side Kortrijk. Manager Hein Vanhaezebrouck was searching for a left winger and he typed the Dutch word for that (linkeraanvaller) into Google. The search results showed a positive report on Bakx. Vanhaezebrouck sent out Kortrijk's head scout who confirmed these reports and Istvan Bakx' transfer to Kortrijk became reality.

As a result of this unorthodox scouting method, Belgian and Dutch media dubbed Bakx "the Google striker." For those wondering if he actually performed well, Bakx impressed during his first two seasons at Kortrijk, earning him a transfer to top-side Racing Genk.

So is there any point in this blog? No, not particularly, besides the fact that I enjoy typing the names of my squad members into Google and Wikipedia to find out more about their careers and personal lives.

Scouting Talents Without Judging Potential

Probably one of the best and most insightful things I have read in a long time took place in a secluded part of the SI fora. It's about how you can scout top youths without the use of the judging potential skill. Potentially, if you get this right, this means you can start your academy in the very first season, when the competition for the top youngsters is less fierce.

Apparently, it's all about setting up the right filters. As the world is quickly swamped with newgen players, you can't go trawling through long lists of players, so you want to set up good filters as fast as you can to start scouting.

One of the tips I picked up, was filtering on wage. Most newgens appear with a wage demand of 200 quid. The ones with higher wages generally have a better chance of becoming better players, if they possess the proper stats as well, so filtering on wages is a smart idea.

Naturally, wages alone are not an indication of a players potential ability. It could just mean his current ability is quite high, but his development chances are limited, which means you still have nothing useful to work with.

We also have to look at certain stats. As I stated in an earlier blogpost, players with decent values for Work Rate and Determination are far more likely to live up to their PA. There's less need of splashing loads of cash on top PA players if there's not a very big chance of them living up to that potential. Looking at these two mental attributes will give you a pretty decent idea if a player will be able to live up to his potential.

One last important thing to look at was basically natural fitness. I suppose that makes sense, especially if you're in the development business for the long haul. You don't want a youth with top stats but who tires after 45 minutes of football, so it is important they have the natural fitness to develop their other physical skills.

Summing it up, these are the things we should be looking at in a filter:

• wages: over 200 quid;
• determination: 10+;
• work rate: 10+ (preferably even 15+);
• natural fitness: 10+.

I put this theory to the test by looking at several teams who were signing the top youths very early on in Miller Beta. Teams like the Tallinna Piraaja and AZ Bruntsfield were reknowned for picking up the youths even in season one, before JP skills were unlocked and when I look at the players they signed who turned out great, they all seem to match the profile described above. So yeah, I think this might help out a lot of people.

Newgen Distribution and Generation A Bit Unfair?

Seeing as I consider myself a talent spotter and developer, I invested quite a lot of time into developing my scouting skills. These skills increase the amount of players you can bid for in the world by 5% per level.

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.

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 followed SI’s advice, as evidenced by one of my previous blog posts.

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?

Insane Youth Wages; Changing My Strategy

With more and more managers learning Scouting 5 and subsequently Judging Potential, the competition for youths has intensified, leading to crazy wages. We've seen several players go for insane wages. I've compiled a top 10, including my own comments as well.

1 - Younous de Souza - 26k

Probably never worth this much, but yes, he as a five star PA rating so the price went mental on him. He doesn't have the stats that go with his status though and he doesn't look like developing at all.

2 - Nando - 23k

Nick Brookes signed this kid and Nick generally knows what he's doing with these kids. Considering his stats, Nick might be the last one laughing with this deal, but right now Nando doesn't have the stats to warrant this excessive wage.

3 - Cléverson Nery - 21k

I've got him down at a three star potential, but he does have a tremendous attribute set. Taking into account the kid is only 15 years old, one can imagine the carnage of the bidding war. Too bad there's no guarantee he will develop at all. Still, he's currently one of the better youth AM's in the Game World. Alternatively, his wage might drop during the next wage auctions, since his contract is not protected.

4 - Marco Antonio Aquino - 20k

More proof that the youth market is sick. Yes, Marco has the potential and the skills to become a great player, but the 20k wage is killing the team that bought him. Marco was placed in an auction today so he will probably leave by tomorrow, with the selling team losing all profit (if there is any at all, at the moment I'm writing this the highest bid is still one quid...) on pre-sale taxes and the buying team getting a 15 year old on a 22k wage.

5 - Alessandro Gardini - 18k

One of the few players in this list who is actually worthy of such a wage. He's only 16 years old, but darn what a player... He's already good enough to perform well in senior matches and he excels in youth matches. What else can I say, he's a genius on the pitch.

6 - Scott Birch - 17.5k

Bought by the same manager who signed Aquino. This 16 year old striker has the physique of a grown man but that's about it. Average at best and like Aquino, placed in a transfer auction already. A waste of money...

7 - David Novillo - 16k

Again a player who is worth the effort and money spent on him. Tremendous skills and he's been ripping up the youth leagues for several seasons. At 19 years old, he looks poised to start doing the same on a senior level.

8 - Fernando Cortés - 15.5k

A very very young player. Perhaps he will go the same way as Novillo, but perhaps he will be another flop. Like Cléverson Nery, he has the skills to be a good player but there's no telling how he will develop in the future. Another huge gamble. Alternatively, his wage might drop during the next wage auctions, since his contract is not protected.

9 - Jonny Vallejo - 15k

Another very young player with a great skill-set. He's not yet good enough for first team, but he might get there. He does need some developing so as said before, the buying manager has taken a huge risk here.

10 - Simone de Gregorio - 15k

Pretty much the same as Vallejo, good talent, very young, big gamble, yadda-yadda.

I've probably left out quite a few players as well, but this is the top 10 of newgens with excessive wages.

This increase in wages works a long way. Even the poor(er) players are going for insane wages. PA isn't even an indication, as we have two-and-a-half and three star players in the above list as well as the more standard five star players. This means that average players are still going at 2k a piece, which is a huge blow for the wage budget.

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.

This morning, I managed to get several promising Asian youngsters, all three stars, to my club at a base wage of 200 quid. Hardly a great loss if they don't develop, so I can take a chance on them. A player of similar class from Europe or South America generally goes at 1,500 quid or more, so I'm not very inclined to take a chance on them.

My tip for youth managers is basically to move away from the familiar South American and European fishing grounds. There are too many people trying to muscle in on the action, causing the wages to sky rocket. Instead, invest some time and effort in looking in less familiar and standard region. You are often rewarded with some bargains and a few gems.

I Spy With My Little Eye... (Part I)

I pride myself in being an accomplished scout. In an effort to have some fun and improve community spirits, I've decided to make a list of some of Miller's finest newgen players. I will present these players in sets of three. Today, part one.

Luca Facchini - D / L C - 19 years old - Ashley Young 4 England

This kid has all the right makings to becoming a top class defender in the near future. At the tender age of 19, he is already fast and strong and good in duels. His jumping needs a bit of work, but he's got the raw potential to get there.

Stefano Fiore - AM / L C / F / C - 19 years old - Mental Militia

This young Italian forward is one of the hottest newgen playmakers I could find. His style of play and attribute setup reminds me of players like Alessandro del Piero or Francesco Totti. The ideal attacking midfielder, capable of both giving a penetrating pass or scoring a goal. His mental stats need developing, but he will get there...

Simone Gentili - D / L C / WB / L / AM / L C / F / C - 19 years old - Tallinna Piraaja

Everyone in the Miller Game World knows Simone Gentili, one of the most versatile talents in the Game World and certainly one of the most talented as well. Gentili can pretty much play anywhere down the left side of the pitch and his skill-set ensures that he will play well at pretty much any place on the pitch.