Rookie’s Guide to Staff and Scouting

Getting Started: So you’ve picked your team and looked at your roster- now what? It’s time to building your staff. When you’re first starting, staff positions can be confusing, but hiring a strong staff is an important first step to building any successful club. This guide aims to explain the different roles and help answer questions that plague many IBM newbies.

Evaluating and hiring staff members: Go to the “Staff” page and you’ll see the 8 positions in your front office. In the beginning, you only NEED your coach, junior coach, and financier. The assistant coach and scout can also be hired, but there’s no need to fill the other positions(physio, psych, and doctor) until they are needed. If you click “hire” for each position, you’ll see 4 options with their weekly salary and golden ball rating. New options are available a few times each hour or when someone is hired. While the Golden Ball rating (0-5 gold balls) is helpful to gives you a sense of quality at a glance, if you position your cursor over the gold balls for a few seconds a percentage rating will appear which is much more descriptive. If you like what you see, simply click hire and he’s all yours.

Staff Training: On the staff page you also have the option to train your staff members to boost their skill. Don’t worry about this option for now, but it could become useful in the future. a

Staff Position Summary: Here is a summary of the different staff positions including what each does and the difference between a good and mediocre one.

Assistant Coach – The assistant coach can search for first team players. He can help you identify transfer targets on other clubs and free agents at the start of each season. Paying for a better rated assistant coach will produce faster search results, but does not necessarily mean you’ll get more players or better quality ones.

Scout – Your scout performs a similar function to your assistant coach, except for junior players instead of seniors. The main difference is that junior free agents are available year-round (set the “No Team” parameter to “yes” on the scout search page). Again, scout rating influences the speed of your search, but doesn’t affect quantity or quality of search results.

Physiotherapist – Physios restore “Form” for first team and junior players when they haven’t been training. Lower form reduces energy recovery and can affect forecast. However, if you stay active and plan training ahead of time, you should never have a need for this. Physiotherapists always need 24 hours to work, but better rated physios restore more points per session. (Note: Energy restores ~10 points/night automatically for players with 99 form)

Psychologist – Psychs restore “Morale” when first team players don’t get playing or when your team loses. Lower morale temporarily reduces forecast and mental rating. Like physiotherapists, psychologists need 24 hours to complete a session and better quality psychs restore more morale points in each session.

Coach/Junior Coach – Coaches are responsible for carrying out the trainings you assign. Your coach trains the first team exclusively; the junior coach only trains your juniors. THESE ARE BY FAR THE MOST IMPORTANT POSITIONS ON YOUR STAFF. It will be expensive at first and will most likely take most of your money each week, but they are essential to the successful development of your players. Better coaches will provide better daily training returns for your players, raise their forecasts, and make it easier for you to find quality players on loan. (The best advice I can give to new players is hire the best coaches you can find.)

Doctor – The doctor can accelerate healing for players who are injured. They need 3 days to work and better quality team doctors will have a greater reduction in injury time.

Financier – The team financier negotiates team sponsor and television contracts in the offseason and stadium advertisement and credit availability year-round. Hiring better financiers will result in better offers in all these situations.

Scouting guide
Scouting players with your scout and assistant coach can be an efficient way to find players to add to your team. As explained previously, your assistant coach finds first team players and your scout finds juniors. You have several options to filter your search results.

Country – Player nationality

Positions – Player Position

Division – Division of the player’s current team (1-6)

Group – Group of the player’s current team

Minimum Quality – Minimum value for “Total Average” at the time the search is executed

Maximum Age – Maximum age at the time of the search

No Team – This parameter allows you to search for free agents, which can join your team without the cost of a transfer fee. First team free agents are only available at the start of the season, but junior free agents are available year round. Find free agents by setting this to “Yes”.

Maximum Clause – Filters results based on the current hostile clause value

Maximum Salary – Filters results based on current player salary

Transferrable – Filters based on whether the player is currently available for transfer

Final Year – Filters to find players who are in their final year of their current contract. Set to “Yes” to indentify players who will be free agents next season.

Pre-contract or Renewal – This allows you to filter for juniors who are available for hostile clause transfer. Juniors who have renewed their contracts are not available for hostile clause transfer. Set to “No” to filter these players out.

Premium Search+ options:

Progression*: Filters based on minimum player progression % (progression determines how quickly the player reaches his maximum potential).

Fidelity*: This is believed to determine the specificity of the search.

*Note: Premium searches cost 50 golden balls (available for purchase or through sponsorpay offers in some countries) per search, so use them wisely.

If you have any questions, feel free to reply, send me a message, or ask one of the moderators in chat. Good luck!

Other staff guide
Well, when I started (not so long ago), I wasted a lot of money in employees' wages receiving nothing in return. My main advice would be not to overspend until you really know what you're doing. More in detail:

- Senior coach: pick an affordable one (~50K) until you adquire some players worth developing. Later in the game you'll want a 99% coach, but that's a long-term goal. - Junior coach: you don't really need one. Fire or sell all initial juniors, they're worthless almost without exception. New players shouldn't invest into junior development from the start. Wait until you can get some good juniors. Once you go that route, you want a good coach (200K - 300K), but get the players first. Otherwise it's a waste of money. - Financier: grab a good one (~50K) and have him around the first week. Negotiate sponsorship and TV (look for offers for a few days before signing up) and billboards. Then fire him and get the cheapest you can find. You won't need his services until next season, or a major arena remodeling (lots of new billboards). - Psychologist: get a minimum salary (~1K) and put him to work every day early in the morning. That way your players will always be at 99 morale before each match regardless of the outcome of the previous day. - Physiologist: you don't need one. As long as you set trainings every day your player's form will stay at 99. Sooner or later you'll hire a player with less than 99 form. Pick a decent physio for the week and fire him when he's finished. A 50K physio can get anyone to 99 form in seven days, so don't overspend. - Assistant coach: get a minimum salary one (~1K). He's useless at first because you cannot hire the players he finds, until you reach 8,000 experience (about a month worth of games). And even after that, I would keep the cheap employee. - Scout: you don't need one. Get a minimum salary guy some days before you can actually sign the players he finds. - Doctor: get a cheap one (~2K) and activate him every three days. He'll usually reduce recovery time in 2 weeks. Cheaper doctors sometimes reduce 0 weeks, so I would stay clear from them. You can get a more expensive doctor when a player is seriously injured (12-14 weeks) and go cheap after he's healed.

As a rule of thumb, look at the weekly expenses in player salaries and employees' salaries. Remember that your players actually win games, and employees are there only to help them. So balance their pays accordingly.

Another money pit for beginners is the Arena, but that's a different topic altogether.