Scoutlist spreadsheet

On this page you can download the Online Football Manager (OFM) scoutlist, correct at 8 September 2008, in Excel spreadsheet format, as well as find out what you can do with it.

What makes this spreadsheet better than the scoutlist page at OFM ?

The scoutlist page contains a list of all 2,000 European, North & South American, Middle Eastern and Asian players who can be brought to your club by using the Scout feature. This feature is only available to season ticket holders, but it’s well worth the small amount of money you pay for a season ticket (less than 4p per day) for this extra feature alone, let alone the other extras you get.

However, the drawback of the scoutlist in a webpage format is that it is very difficult to view your options – okay, some of us may have a specific player in mind, so it’s simply a case of pressing CTRL and F keys together in your browser program to find him. But the majority of us have a certain amount of money to spend and we’d like to see who we can buy for that cash – we may well end up scouting someone we’ve never heard of !

The spreadsheet enables you to sort your options by price, age, player position, country or club. In addition, the spreadsheet provides two extra columns not included on the scoutlist page :

• overall statistics of each player (att + def divided by 2, and then rounded down – particularly useful for midfield players)
• the actual value of each player (this is the price you pay divided by 1.9)

Now let’s see how we use the spreadsheet in practice.

How to use the spreadsheet

Okay, let’s get started. First, we need to download the spreadsheet. There are two ways to do this :

• Click here and you will be taken to a page containing the spreadsheet – you can then download the document you are taken to by clicking on the spreadsheet
• Alternatively (and much faster) just right click with your mouse here and then click on ‘save link as…’ or ‘save target as…’ depending on your browser

To open the spreadsheet you’ll need either Microsoft Office or, if you’re not loaded, the free open source program OpenOffice

Find the spreadsheet you downloaded and click on it. You will note that there are two tabs at the bottom marked ‘price’ and ‘age’ :

The one marked price shows all players, with the most expensive first. Note that all of the players’ positions are included – the scoutlist webpage lists players by position, then price (i.e. all attackers first, then all defenders, etc). This spreadsheet does it by price only. You will see how easy it is to isolate each player position in a moment.

The tab marked age shows all players, with the youngest first. Each age range then starts with the most expensive gradually working down to the cheapest.

The spreadsheet referred to in this guide is the one marked price – the age one is really for interest only.

At the top of the spreadsheet are some column headings – these are fairly self-explanatory:

• Player player’s name
• Age player’s age at 9 April 2008 (important note – before sending the scout off always check the player’s age is right by selecting the club the player is at on the Teams and Goals page on OFM as players do have birthdays, so might have increased in age – we’ll try to upload a new spreadsheet every few months)
• Pos Player position : Att = attacker/striker; Mid=midfielder; Def=defender; Goal=goalkeeper
• Att Player’s attacking rating – the higher the better for attackers
• Def Player’s defensive rating – the higher the better for defenders
• Ovr Player’s overall rating (Att + Def divided by 2 and rounded down) – the higher the better for midfielders
• Value How much the player is actually worth (Price divided by 1.9)
• Price How much you will pay for the player (Value multiplied by 1.9)
• Team The name of the club the player is currently at – note you cannot scout players in your own league
• Country The country which the player is in

How to find a player

The best way to get to grips with the spreadsheet is to try an example. For starters, let’s say we have £20,000,000 which we want to spend on a midfielder.

First, let’s isolate all the midfielders. Under Column C there is the heading Pos and a little pull down arrow to the right of that. Click on the little arrow and some options will pop up :

Click on the line marked Mid and watch what happens to the spreadsheet – suddenly all the people like Ronaldinho, Rooney, Terry and Cech have disappeared from the top of the list. This is because you have isolated all the midfielders. Note that they are still shown in the same order, with the most expensive (Lampard) at the top. Note also that the arrow to the right of Pos has changed to blue :

Now, if you have a particular fancy for players from a specific country, you can filter out more players. For example, I want to find players from Spain.

Look at column J, Country, and click on the arrow to the right of that word – select Spain from the pull down menu :

Now you are down to 60 players.

You can scan down the list and see what’s available. Let’s say you’ve decided on a midfielder for £18,931,600. How about making that spreadsheet even smaller ? Click on the arrow to the right of the word Price under Column H and from the pull down menu select 18931600 :

Wow – now you just have seven players to choose from :

So, you have gone from 2,491 players to just seven in three clicks ! Clever huh…?

If you want to change your criteria, then simply reverse your steps (so, pull the arrow down next to Price first, and select All) :

And repeat this for Country (column J), and then position (column C).

There is a much quicker way though. Click on Data on the menu options available in your spreadsheet program, and then select Filter, then Show All :

And as if by magic the spreadsheet reverts to how it was before you started mucking around with it !

Hopefully now you can see it is possible to sort players by any criteria you choose – by their age, their statistics, their price, their club, their country.

We hope you agree this is far easier than squinting at a load of jumbled up figures on a webpage !

Good luck in your search for a new player

Happy with this tutorial ? Have a question ?

Please do leave your comments or questions below – we’ll endeavour to respond to queries as soon as we can (within 24 hours, usually a lot less).