The following article was written by @AcidBurnTNA.

This is the first time I’ve attempted to write anything about Football Manager that isn’t a weird story or a basic season update post. This won’t be long and should hopefully shed light on a little trick I suppose you’d call it, to find wonderkids easily. Every person that plays FM hopes to uncover some wonderkid from a far off country that takes their team to the next level.

Throughout my many years playing FM I’ve always enjoyed the Brazilian league, I’ve had saves with a few teams there that I’ve enjoyed a lot. This FM I decided to play as the club I love, Sunderland. Once we achieved promotion to the Premier League I thought I’d send my scouts toBrazil as well as hire a Brazilian scout to give us knowledge of the country. Ialso constantly checked the Brazilian Under 20’s. Now comes part of the trick,I added the column media description to the squad view.

As you can see this lists all the wonderkids in the Brazilian Under 20’s squad. You can also do this on the player search screen and click the media description at the top so it lists them in order of their media description. On my current save there are 137 wonderkids listed on the player search they should appear between the descriptions Promising Striker and Elite Fullback. Just to make it easy filter by age as well to only show young players.

Now I’m not sure how the player search works, but it’s linked to how many players you’ve discovered and had knowledge of. So this method is more successful the more scouting knowledge you have.

I also add the following columns as it helps see if there’s any bargains at a quick glance. So add Minimum Fee Release Clause, Minimum Fee Release Clause(Foreign Clubs) Minimum Fee Release Clause Clubs in Major Continental Competition and Minimum Fee Release Clause in Continental Compeition. The foreign one is especially important as they can often be lower than Minimum Fee Release Clause Domestic Clubs especially in Brazil.

Something you should also know is that just because a player has the “Wonderkid” media tag it does not mean they will turn into a world beater. On older FM wonderkids had 130+ current ability and I think it was 170+ for potential ability. This has changed and it appears that players get this tag simply based on their current ability. So these wonderkids have 135+ for current ability but some of them are only a few points higher for potential ability. The cut off point is most likely a hard one so to speak, so there will still be players out there with 125 current ability along with a Messi like potential ability.

I guess this means always scout them anyway don’tjust go buying them. Most should turn into at least decent squad players butsome will be a bust for big teams without scouting them. And that’s all theiris to it, it’s a simple trick that has allowed me to grab some real goodplayers for my Sunderland side.

This article was written by @AcidBurnTNA.I highly recommend following Ant Mac on Twitter, because of his unorthodox style and he’s an allround good guy.  

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Guido

Guido is the founding father of Strikerless and main nutjob running the show.