Scouting & recruitment
Your roster is only as good as the athletes you bring into it. There are four ways to find talent, each with a different mix of quality, cost, and control.
What scouting reveals
Section titled “What scouting reveals”New athletes rarely arrive fully known. You see a range of what their attributes could be and you can narrow this range through scouting. Some attributes, in particular those related to the potential will remain fully hidden even after you sign an athlete.
The four channels
Section titled “The four channels”Reports
Section titled “Reports”Every day, your scouts will watch events outside of the official leagues and they’ll surface prospects. On weekends, they’ll share special reports that are theme batched: young talents, sprinters, and so on. Reports are the steady, everyday way to discover athletes you’d never otherwise see, and the theme lets you fish where the fish are. Find them under Scouting → Reports.
Free market
Section titled “Free market”A pool of unattached athletes you can sign directly, right now, under Scouting → Free Market. It’s the fastest way to fill a gap or plug a hole in your squad, but quality varies wildly — some genuine bargains, plenty of journeymen. Scout before you buy.
Free agents reach the market from several places: athletes released by their clubs, draft prospects who went unpicked, and academy or report prospects that nobody signed before the season turned over. A trickle of fresh faces keeps the pool stocked, so it’s always worth a look.
The draft
Section titled “The draft”At the beginning of each season, the draft will open up for 3 days under Scouting → Draft. When you join the draft, you’ll see a pool of young prospects looking to join the league. You can rank them and the 7 other clubs in your drafting group can do the same. At the end of the 3 days, each club will turn by turn pick their highest ranked athlete that remains in the pool. The pick order is defined by the club’s ranking in the previous season (worst club picks first).
Your academy
Section titled “Your academy”Your club’s own youth pipeline, managed under Club → Academy. Every season, your academy produces three young athletes of your club’s nationality, and you can unlock up to two additional slots each season for 2,000 credits each — up to five prospects a season. Every morning, you’ll see an academy report that will help you better assess the potential of the prospects. On odd days (days 3, 5, etc), you’ll see a training report that will narrow one attribute per prospect. On even days (days 2, 4, etc) you’ll see a competition report showing how your prospects performed against academy prospects from other clubs.
Building a pipeline
Section titled “Building a pipeline”The best clubs don’t rely on one channel. The free market and reports keep the senior squad competitive now; the draft and academy build the squad of three seasons from now. Since athletes decline and retire, a club that stops recruiting is a club that’s already fading — even if it doesn’t feel like it yet.
Next: once you’ve signed them, it’s time to make them better — see Training.