Football Manager 2022 scouting guide: How to find wonderkids in FM22

FM22 brings the series’ huge database back with updated players, clubs, and staff. With thousands of variables, here’s our Football Manager 2022 scouting guide to help you find the best players for your club.

Football Manager 2022 is here, meaning players are combing through the game’s huge database, already on the lookout for the best wonderkids and free signings. While we have guides for finding those, there’s nothing quite like doing the homework yourself to unearth a world-class talent.

FM22 offers a sizeable scouting update, meaning there are more tools than ever to find the greatest young players to spend your transfer budget on. That can be pretty overwhelming, but we’ve put together this guide to help identify the best players for your squad.

Here’s our guide to scouting in Football Manager 2022.

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Contents

• Types of scouting
• New scouting changes in FM22
• How to find wonderkids at youth intake day
• When is youth intake day in Football Manager 2022?

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Football Manager 2022 scouting guide

Types of scouting

Players in Football Manager 2022 can be scouted in a number of ways, each with its own pros and cons.

Individual scouting is for when you’ve already identified a player and are looking to get more information about them. When you scout them, your scouting staff will produce a report that’s updated as their knowledge of the player grows, with less well-known players needing longer to scout than the Lionel Messis and Cristiano Ronaldos of the world.

Scouting assignments help narrow your search, allowing managers to filter what they’re looking for. As an example, you may be looking for a striker within a certain age range and in a certain region. The more specific your search, the more detailed your results will be. This means that while you may search one specific region, you may find yourself tweaking your criteria to find, say, a striker that’s a good header of the ball.

Scouting costs money and ties up scouts for a period, though, so you’ll want to ensure you have a solid lineup of scouting staff ready to jet off. Bigger clubs will have a larger scouting setup at the start of the game.

New scouting changes in FM22

Football Manager titles add a series of “headline features” each year, and Football Manager 2022 has a new focus on scouting and the transfer market.

While the latter now means more realistic transfer fees and greater staff and agent input, the scouting changes can best be summed up with the improved scouting report.

Rather than assigning a value out of 100, scouts will now offer a grade instead. These grades are determined by Scouts and Analysts, meaning you get two reports in one and allowing for pros and cons on a single page that pertains to on-the-pitch stats as well as transfer value compared to the current market.

How to find wonderkids at youth intake day

The best feeling in Football Manager 2022 is finding that one gem that lights up your league in a few years’ time, and wonderkids have been a core part of the franchise since its inception.

The best time to look for these wonderkids is on youth intake day, an in-game event where newgens (procedurally generated players) are randomly assigned to club academies across the world. These 14 to 16-year-olds can be invited to trial at a team, and then potentially tied down to a contract.

If your club has a high youth recruitment rating, you’ll have a better chance of high potential newgens.

When is youth intake day in Football Manager 2022?

Here are the youth intake dates for each nation in the game.

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For more on Football Manager 2022, be sure to check our other guide content at Dexerto.

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