Top Tips for Youth Recruitment in FM26

It's important to note from the outset that your Scouting staff are the single most important part of your recruitment flow.

You want them to be the best judges of both Current and Potential Ability as a minimum. Ideally, you also want strong Adaptability and as much world Scouting Knowledge as possible to make your scouting the most effective it can be.

There are a couple of ways to source new players this year. With the TransferRoom integration, you can jump straight in to setting up some requirements if you've identified a specific position that you’re looking for. 

To do this, click the 'Create Requirements’ button in the bottom right of your screen and set up what positions, roles, age range and squad role you want to target.

A key benefit of the system is that your playing time expectations for the player can be understood up front, which means the level of the suggestions will mesh nicely with the rest of your squad. 

Give it a couple of days, and you'll start to get clubs offering you players who meet your requirements.

For long-term prospect scouting, there is another effective option to consider.

I'm talking about Recruitment Focuses. They’re flexible, and they give you some extra control over which scouts you send where, depending on their knowledge and skills. 

Everyone has different ways of setting up recruitment focuses, but for me personally, they tend to look like this.

First, look for any position; you don't want to limit yourself to just the shape or tactics you’re playing currently (and most players I'm finding are moldable to a certain extent anyway). You can break down your scouting by position if you want some more depth, or have a limited scouting range and therefore more scouts available.

Next, set up my scouting by regions or by groups of nations. This does depend on what scouts you have available, and how much time you have to set things up. Set the minimum current ability to five silver stars and the minimum potential to 2.5 gold stars. Sometimes you can go lower than this, depending on the abilities of your scouts; 2.5 tends to be around first team level, or just below, so if your scouts aren't the most accurate, or your squad is changing a lot, it helps keep the recommendations in a ballpark. 

Set your age range from 15-21 and the priority to ongoing. This sounds obvious but you should make sure you’re sending a scout who has knowledge of most of the areas you’re scouting in - this means you’ll get results faster, and they often already have some recommendations once they've been assigned. Also make sure you’ve unticked 'include results found in other recruitment focuses', so you’re not picking up players more than once and clogging up my inbox.

In a sense, this scouting is something you can do in the background. If you also wanted to go and scout things like youth tournaments and national squads manually, that would only add to the depth of your recruitment.

When you feel that your Youth Intakes have left you with a few gaps in your club’s development pipeline, FM26 provides some great tools for bolstering your youth recruitment. 

Let us know what success you’ve had with these tips on social media @FootballManager.