How to recruit the best talent

Player recruitment is so important. If you recruit the wrong players you will damage your team’s chances of meeting expectation. On the other hand if you recruit the right players you will achieve your goals and maybe more. So what is player recruitment? How does it work?

In this guide, you’ll find everything you need to know to recruit the best players for your club:

• What player recruitment is and why it’s important.
• The different types of player assessment and how they work.
• Tips, tools, and best practices to recruit the best players.

If you are interested in helping your club perform better, then read on and see the different ways to recruit players we have.

What is player recruitment?

Player recruitment is the life blood of your team. Your recruitment will help push your team in the right or wrong direction. We have seen it so many times in life, where proper recruitment was not done and the team struggle, like Derby County, Everton and Watford. On the other hand we have found that other teams make great recruitment decisions like Leicester in 2016, Man City and the old Man Utd.

Why is player recruitment important?

Creating following a player recruitment model should fit into your team’s philosophy, what sort of club you are and what your objectives are. Reaching too far for a player, spending your whole budget on them at minimal achievement club could spell the end for your career.

• Working inside your budget: By deploying the right model, you will be able to find great performers for your team, that do not cost the earth.
• Talent that improves you: On the other hand, with the right recruitment model you can push the envelope and develop the best performers.

How to recruit and how each model works

There are many models that we have created over the years. I have put together a list and how they work for you to have a look at. Most of these systems will work with any club, but for the system to be successful you should be patient and work with it.

Star System

This is the most basic and readily available system. You use the scout reports page and sort the players by star rating. Depending on your team objectives and goals, it will depend on whether you wish to use the current or potential ability star ratings.

The main thing here is to know, which areas you wish to strengthen in your team from the assistant reports and also which ages you want to recruit from. The most important factors here are having a good assistant in judging current or potential ability, as well as a good scout network that can judge the current potential ability well too.

Performance Based

Performance based data is just that, we recruit based on performance data. There is so much data on football manager and so you can pretend to be OptaJoe. With my data I like it to be as refined as possible, as close to a single number as possible. Football Manager helps with that by combining all performances into an average rating. Using this data you can use all sorts of performance management techniques like stretch targeting.

The way in which stretch targeting works is we look at the squad, sort them by average rating and we put a performance marker on the top 60% of the squad. With a 22 man squad you are looking 13.2 (say 14 players over target). The players under this 60% marker will be replaced.

The next step is make a list of all positions in the bottom, so we can start looking at new recruits. As a side note here, if a certain position has two players in the under performance section, you need to make that position a priority.

Our next move is then go over to the player search and change our filter to selection info and sort them by average rating. Now you have a whole list of potential candidates to replace your under performers.

Data Based

This is a different sort of recruitment for you to take notice of. The data analysts will supply you with data and that is up to you how you interpret that, I will write another blog on that.

What we are looking at here is data that is readily available in the real world. So when assessing your team at the end of the year, we can look at certain trends which can help. So a real world fact is that if your team can score ten more goals next season they will grab another 2 wins. The same is also true if you can keep 10 more goals out of your net, you will get two more wins.

There are so many other trends too, in the book The Numbers Game, it is explained that in the top leagues 43 goals will be enough to save you from relegation. While the basis of the league is points, points are gained through goals.

With this sort of data in mind, you can look at your recruitment and team. So if you are looking at scoring another ten goals where are they coming from? Will a new striker come in and score ten more? Based on last seasons stats, could that happen? Would it better to spread the needed goals across two or three players?

Win rate Legacy

If you have ever had anything to do with match winning algorithms on the football scene you will have seen data like this being used. The way this works is by recruiting players based on their win rate compared to the current team’s win rate.

So first things first, you want to understand the win rate your team needs for next season in order to know, to get a good idea look at the last season’s table to get an idea of how many wins are necessary for each place. Where is it your teams needs to finish? How many wins did they get in that position?

So for example, you want qualify for the champions league, you will need fourth, which was united and they got 23 wins. So 23 wins from 38 games, means that we need to look at player with a 60%+ win rate. Let’s move on the players in our squad which have less than that and recruit those that have more than that.

Again you only want to target players in the top leagues with this one, as lower leagues data can be skewed.

Tips to recruit

The main tips I can give in terms of recruitment is to not just go with the top selection on the type of recruitment you go with. Try to have a look around and identify your own strengths and weaknesses too.

Another thing is to persevere with your strategy. Select one that will work for your club and their vision, and work with it. It will not always go to plan, it may take a while to start working after a number of transfers.

Get started with player recruitment today

That’s how I have had insane success in regards to recruiting in football manager. The best part using these approaches is that it’s not based on theory, it’s proven to work in the FM world.

Now that you’ve seen how well these recruiting tips work, it’s time to carve out some time to put at least one of these tips into practice soon.

Also, which of the approaches are you most interested in and want to try first? Let me know by leaving a quick comment below.