My suggestion is to have a teams youth quality connected to his scouting department level rather than his country ranking.

Like the following example:

Scouting level – Base stats

Level 0 – 65
Level 1 – 66
Level 2 – 67
Level 3 – 68
Level 4 – 69
Level 5 – 70
Level 6 – 72
Level 7 – 74
Level 8 – 76
Level 9 – 78
Level 10 – 80

Everybody would have level 10 scouts, if that was the case, cause scouting department is cheap. And if we raised its price the rich teams would have a huge advantage all over the world, being able to raise and buy the best players at the same time.

In the real world scouts apart from being used to look for senior players, are also utilised to search for up and coming youth players to sign into their teams development squad. This is what I want to emulate by making this suggestion.

The way it is set up atm, a team in a low ranked country receives a low stated, low value, worthless player as a youth, who generally ends up on the free transfer market, as no one will generally buy these players. The low ranked country teams generally have to buy good players, this puts money into the high ranked country teams, who already receive good youths for development. If the low ranked team decides not to buy players but instead loan, this speeds up player development for the higher ranked country. This improved player is either called back to the team or put on the market for sale. To sum everything up, what I am trying to say is that under the current system of youth to rank structure, the top countries don’t have to spend alot acquiring good players, as they receive them from their youth players, but low ranked countries as their youth are weak and pathetic, have to spend large amounts to get good players but generally these teams don’t have the players to sell to get that money. An example: how many of the top teams do you see run with players from greece, paraguay, chile or russia.

Something has to be done to level the playing field across the countries with regards to youth players.

Maybe instead of a direct link of youth to scouting level, what about the following:

Every country gets a youth player with base stats of around 70 – 75.
The the higher the scouting level, the higher the chance of getting a star player.

Scouting Level 0 – 1 in 48 will be a star player
Scouting Level 1 – 1 in 44 will be a star player
Scouting Level 2 – 1 in 40 will be a star player
Scouting Level 3 – 1 in 36 will be a star player
Scouting Level 4 – 1 in 32 will be a star player
Scouting Level 5 – 1 in 28 will be a star player
Scouting Level 6 – 1 in 24 will be a star player
Scouting Level 7 – 1 in 20 will be a star player
Scouting Level 8 – 1 in 16 will be a star player
Scouting Level 9 – 1 in 12 will be a star player
Scouting Level 10 – 1 in 8 will be a star player

So the higher your scouting level the better chance you have of receiving a star player in your youth ranks.

I understand your point and it does make sense. But also in real world there are some countries that have no tradition in football, so they don’t “generate” star players often and that’s what the ranking tries to reflect. Using your suggestion teams all over the world with equal scouting level would have equal chance of getting a star players in their youth academy. I think we could go for an intermediate solution, keeping the ranking as the main factor for youth quality but also using scout level to somehow raise the chance of getting a better youth more frequently. If we do that we’ll have to increase the maintenance value for the scouting department :)

Let’s see if this topic can lead us to an interesting discussion. Anyone else?

Just thought of another idea and it is sort of similar to what you mentioned but slightly different, here goes:

Youth players in your own country is based on your country ranking but your scouting level has a chance of overriding that by scouting skilled youth players in a higher ranked country.

I.e. A scout from say the Liverpool team goes from country to country and by chance finds a promising 16 year old player in Brazil. He brings this player back with him to the Liverpool team. The chance of this scout event happening depends on your scouting level. You could get the following sort inbox messages:

1) Your scout has successfully found a promising 16 year old player in (insert foreign country) and has brought him back to play in your team.

2) Your scout has managed to find a local player to fill your vacancy in your youth squad.

I think we are getting somewhere! Before my previous post I thought about it but considered it a little bit too far off. Now that you mentioned I see we might have something interesting in our hands.

I think the academy should remain national.
What could help IMO, is that every time you have to pick a new youth, your scouts can present you with a pool of 4-5 choices, which should all reflect the country ranking. Example: The scout present you with 5 youths of base 67 (which should reflect the country ranking). So, they all have the same base, however, you still get to choose 2 things:
a) player’s position
b) his skill spread out on each ability (Out of the same base, you might want to pick a polivalent, or high main primary, or high secondaries player, and so on depending on what;s important to you)

Point B is important if you are to base your team on your academy and you can pretty much build it with certain type of players that best fit your game philosophy.

This kind of flexibility is also interesting. We’ve had similar suggestions in the past and I belive we could also do that at some level. Scouts could influence the amount of choices (positions to choose from, number of skill points you could change in the skill spread, etc). Nice!

I just thought of this recently and as I believe scouting shouldn’t only be restricted to the national level but go international as well, you could also have a setup like the following:

Scouting level 0 – 7: players are scouted from the teams national league and the closer you get to scouting level 7, the more control you have over player position and preferred player stat distribution.
Scouting level 8 – 10: players to be scouted from every nation with the ability to control player position and preferred player stat distribution.