There are a number of tools we can use to scout players, including using data or watching games and spotting something in a player we like.
The most well known and useful when it comes to soare, is without a doubt soraredata! There are a number of functions we can use within it that can help in lots of different way.
I will be going through my favourite ways to scout, I am sure these are well known methods but I hope they prove useful, especially to new users.
The first thing I will do, is analyse my own team. Sounds simple, but when I started, I had a pretty scatter gun approach which led to sometimes having 6 midfielders but no forwards available for a particular GW!
The way to do this is to go to your manager page on soraredata. For example mine is:
We can see all our players by position and most importantly by 1) regions and 2) by GW filter
For example on the below I can see what players I have available for Champion Europe in GW 213
What I find v important is to future plan and ensure I have the players I need for upcoming GWs . We can do this by using the drop down:
I will use a hypothetical situation to illustrate how I would normally scout for the players I need. Lets say for GW219, I realise I am short of a rare challenger midfielder and that I want one not just for that GW but in general. I would firstly go to player rankings page to get a feel of the players available.
Go to the toolbar and under scout you will find Player rankings:
From this we can use the filters to specify what exactly we are after. In this instance:
Currently these are the results I get are this:
I am very much a big fan of L40 data over L5 which I feel can skew the dataset. This is just a personal preference and I quite like to look at the data from different angles to get a feel of what I am after.
We can sort the scores a number of ways including by DS and AA scores. For this case I will do a simple sort by L40
The most important things I look at alongside the scores are
% games played in general (to get a feel of if the player is a starter/recently injured)
Average price
Best market price
Your own budget will be crucial. In this instance, I am using a budget of up to 0.15ish.
From a quick review of the players, I can see there are 3 stand out choices with the follow best price:
Wílmar Barrios - 0.129
Ali Gholizadeh - 0.08
Mateus Uribe - 0.068
I would then click the individual players and see the general trends with the prices. Following this I would check the type of teams they play for, the rotation risk etc. From these three, my thinking is as follows:
Wilmar Barrios - excellent player with good scores. However, in general I am avoiding RPL players due to the relatively long winter break. I automatically excluded him from my thinking (again this is just my thinking, doesnt make it the "right" one!)
Ali Gholizadeh - I can see he is recent good form, another big plus is the fact he is a starter for Iran and I know that internationals are coming up next month. A negative is that his price has recently spiked due to a couple of good scores.
Mateus Uribe - rotation risk and scoring fluctuates with the lowest average of the three. Porto are in Europe which is a plus
Overall based on this I find Ali Gholizadeh the best choice. If I thought the price was too high, I would either try to negotiate with the manager on discord. And/or put a notification setting on, so I would get an alert when he was available at the price I wanted. To do this we can hit the heart symbol next to his name on his profile page:
On the players watchlist we can then set the price we want and an email notification will be sent. In the below example its set at 0.07:
We can also set notification on sorare itself to get notified of upcoming auctions of the card we are after. Favouriting a player also means we can filter by the "favourites" filter to quickly see the players we are after. Filters in general, I find v useful to get rid of the "noise" and allow us to focus on the players we are after in an efficient and targeted manner.
Once I have a player I want, I will then dig deeper into their data. Their are many ways to do this, for example going to sofascore is a good method to see their underlying data and heat map etc.
I will also have a look at the upcoming fixtures for the player in a very general sense and also if its a team I don't know particularly well, make sure there isnt any hidden risk (eg relegation).
This method will work well for all scarcity of cards including limited.
I will be posting other strategies I use over the coming weeks, including how I search for value, including scoping players that are injured and about to return to action.
Let me know what kind of strategies you use, always great to hear from others and to learn different approaches!