FM Citizens

As you play for a couple of season, you'll slowly start to realize that all the amazing world-class players you know are getting too old. You might even see them retiring, and although this is a perhaps a sad occation there is something good about this well.
The game will automatically generate new players called "newgens/regens" with random attributes. The quality of these players depends on many things:

• Youth Facilities
• If the club has an academy.
• The reputation (quality) of the league, club and country.

There is probably some other factors, but it should be safe to say these are the most important ones. The clever of you has probably realized that (must like real life) the best regens will generally from large clubs in England, France, Germany, Brazil, Spain and such. Which is correct. But due to the randomness in the game every now and then an amazing youngster might arrive at a 2nd division Ukrainian club or a small Mexican club like Club Tijuana, and you don't want to miss out!

To illustrate my point, here's two random extreme regens from FM09. The quality of regens in FM09 is absolutely insane...

Scouting
So how do you give yourself the best chance of finding the amazing regens while they're young and cheap? The answer is SCOUTING, SCOUTING and more SCOUTING!
Usually at Manchester City you will be allowed a silly amount of scouts, most likely between 12-17 scouts but you're going to need them all because you're going to scour every inch of the footballing world for talent.
So what scouts are you looking to employ? You have find scouts who are excellent at judging player potential, and combined they have knowledge (or can get) of the whole world.
A quick note about Judging Player Ability/Judging Current Ability, for youngsters you don't need to worry about judging CA so much. I'd say your scout would at least need 18 (17/16 if you have to) at Judging PA. An added bonus for a scout is high Determination and Disipline.

Regions
Easiest region first - Europe:

• Employ at least 1-2 British scouts of extremely high quality (you should already have one or two at City..), between them they can scout the whole of UK/Ireland.
• Try to find one or two German/French/Italian/etc scouts to cover Central Europe.
• Get one or possibly two Italian/Spanish/Portuguese/etc scouts to cover South Europe.
• You should be able to find a Danish/Swedish/Norwegian scout with good enough stats to cover Scandinavia, if not there is might be some British scouts with good knowledge of the region.
• Find one Russian/Ukrainian/Serbian/whatever that can cover Eastern Europe. Often you'll find scouts from Central Europe with knowledge of Eastern Europe so this could be an option. Alternatively you can get two scouts, as there's a lot of small countries here, plus the massive Russia.

South America:

• Employ 2-3 Brazilian/Argentinian scouts to cover South America. This is a vital region and there is lots of amazing staff at the local clubs so get the best money can buy! If you can't find good enough scouts locally, look for Spanish or Portuguese scouts with knowledge of South America.

The rest of the world (Africa/Asia/Carribean/North America/Middle East):
Places like Eastern/Western Asia and all the African regions are very hard to find scouts with local knowledge. The few scouts native to these places will generally have horrible attributes because of the league/country reputation.
So what you have to do is concentrate on the following two things.

1. The ADAPTABILITY attribute is your saviour, a scout with a high 15+ rating for this attribute will be very quick at getting new knowledge of regions and countries. You can literarly send him to anywhere in the world, regardless of his nationality and knowledge. He'll take slightly longer to explore a new region/country for the first time but it's really your only option. Just look to employ a scout with the highest possible Adaptability but still with a high Judging PA.
2. For some african regions like Ivory Coast you can find certain scouts in France with knowledge of these regions because they have a second nationality or they have been sent there by previous clubs.

Scouting Assignments

To save yourself time and to rather focus you scouts efforts, you should put in some criterias when setting up scouting assignments.

• Set your scouts to look for players younger than 18 in Europe and younger than 21 in South America. Some South American regens can be a bit older, often 20 years old when they appear in the game word.
• Or if there's certain positions you're definate you don't need anymore youths, you can filter out to not look for these positions.
• Or perhaps you're not comfortable paying over a certain price for a youth player and you want to set a maximum value.

Now, unleash your scouting force on the world and keep all fingers and toes crossed!