Football Manager — How to find the best regens

Football Manager is the best management simulation, ever. However the game would be restricted if SI were to just use real life players. This is why FM creates regens within every single game, so we can carry on playing forever. Today I will share some hints and tips on how to find the best Football Manager regens. If you use the right techniques, these FM regens can be found early and therefore cheap. :) :) All the methods below are used by myself. But the places and times you can find these regens come from tonnes of research and surveying through the FM community on top of my own experience.

Before we get sticky with the details and technical stuff, I have one piece of obvious advice. When you load up a country, more players from that area are available. Therefore more regens will be available. I would suggest loading up countries like Brazil, Argentina and a few small European ones like Croatia. The amount of countries will depend on your computers performance, but you get the idea. Load the country and get access to more regens.

Preparation — the right scouts and correct assignments

You don’t have to do all the work yourself. Sign 5-6 scouts, all with experience in different regions. Each scout must have very high attributes for judging player ability and judging player potential. Every scout should be diverse and different from the rest. This way you’ll have a bigger potential network of countries to scour. Your six scouts should collectively have knowledge in the following countries.

• Big European countries — Italy, Spain, France, England, Holland, Germany and Portugal (spread over two scouts.)
• Smaller European countries — Croatia, Belgium, Czech Republic, Romania, Ukraine and Russia (spread over two scouts.)
• North and South America — Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Mexico (one scout.)
• Africa — South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana and Ivory Coast (one scout.)

Obviously you can’t expect to get knowledge in all these countries across your scouting network…but its a good guide. Now you have the scouts, here is how you should set their assignments. Click on your scouts name, now click ‘add new assignment’. From here you should select ‘add new assignment’ situated near the bottom of your screen. A filter box pops up, follow the steps below.

• Select persons age and set to is at most 19.
• Now you should use the assign to option. Select the region your scout has the most knowledge of. Use the list above to select which regions you’ll cover. Obviously all your scouts will cover different regions/countries.
• Now make sure you check if the scout has finished his search (do this every month.) When he has either reset for the same region/country or pick a new one.
• The key nations to scout are Argentina, Brazil, France, England U19’s, Italy, Spain, Holland, Croatia and Czech Republic.
• Please note regens are created from the start of the game, so you may need to wait a little before their generated. After the first year you’ll notice more and more regens appearing with every year.

How to manually search and where

Scouts are important and offer a helping hand, but I find my best regens through manual searches. We’ll start by explaining what view mode you should be in while looking at clubs and then decipher which clubs to search. So, what is the best view to search through a club for regens? While in a club screen set your ‘view’ option to ‘general information’. Now click the age tab until all the players are listed in order of their age from youngest to oldest. Now manually look at every player under the age of 21. While searching clubs with a huge list of players, you may want to limit views to regens valued £800K plus. But if searching the same clubs as myself this shouldn’t be a problem. So below are all the clubs I search and the clubs I have seen talked about a lot within the community (excluding big European clubs.) One side note is to search the whole of Brazil and Argentina not just the clubs listed below.

Europe — Aberdeen, Motherwell (Scotland), Auxerre (Fance), Rayo Vallecano (Spain), Stuttgart (Germany), Feyenoord, Twente, Ajax (Holland), Dinamo Minsk (Belarus), Dinamo, Hajduk (Croatia), Anderlecht (Belgium), Slavia Prague (Czech Rep.)

South America — Arsenal Sarandi, Argentinos, Banfield, Boca Jnrs, Colon, River Plate, Estudiantes (Argentina), Cruzeiro, Independiente, Gremio, Santos, Flamengo (Brazil) and Colo Colo (Chile.)

North America — Chivas, Atlas, America (MEX) and Cruz Azul (Mexico.)

Africa — Orlando Pirates, Ajax Cape Town (S.Africa), ASEC (Ivory Coast), Zamalek (Egypt), Enyimba, Kano Pillars, Heartland (Nigeria.)

Any club in bold should seriously be checked, I have seen amazing regens come from those areas. Below is when you should check clubs within each country. FM has a pre-set date for every country to produce new youth, these dates should put you ahead of the pack. If you can buy regens at 16-17, the price tag will be minimal. Just to clarify the dates below are an estimate for when regens are generated based on what I’ve seen in game and read around the community.

I have only listed the top European and relevant countries to my club shortlist. You should check all the clubs I listed previously during the date their country produces youth. This way you’ll be the first to see any top talent. You should also check the under 19 and under 21 national sides. Any top class talent will be lurking within those teams. Every six months I would recommend selecting ten national teams and searching their youth. Maybe two big European countries, two South American etc.

How to use the filtered search and find top regens

Doing a filtered search is simple and most of you know how. Therefore, below are some simple steps on how I set up my filtered search for regens. (Note the amount of regens listed will depend on your in game year.) Basically the game starts with next to no regens, then after one year the first batch of regens are introduced at the age of 15-17.

• Go into player search, now edit your filter.
• Add person age to be no more than 18.
• Now click attributes within the filter.
• Tick the work rate and determination attributes and change them to minimum of 12. (Check the important information below and decide if you want to use this step.)
• Now click OK and order the list from most valuable to least valuable.
• Click on all the players with a high value, anyone from Africa with a value of more than £1m could be worthwhile too.
• Any players you like should be scouted. Then asses whether their worth a bid based on the report and your instincts.

Important information: My friend Thomas (FMPundit) wrote an extremely interesting post a while ago. It anylised some research within the FM community on players and their growth. His post proved that players with high work rate and determination reached their potential far more often than players with low work rate and determination. These two attributes are obviously key and should be considered when searching for regens.

Well I have offered you a few tools to find the right rocks to look under…now its up to you in terms of spotting the talent. Please feel free to ask any questions below and I look forward to reading your comments. If you feel I have missed any clubs that produce great regens, please comment below. I will add them to the list, but please be sure they have produced a lot of talent and not just one or two good regens.