No scouts

I am just beginning the preseason for my third season in FM 14 having joined Hapoel Jerusalem as manager and noticed that they had no scouts. I figured ok, I will go sign one or two. I went to check to see how many my board would allow and it said 0. My next step was to do a board request and any scouting options were greyed out and when I hovered over them, it said, your club does not do scouting. WTF???

In all my years of playing Football Manager, I have never been at a club that did not do scouting. It seems kind of stupid and very limiting to not do scouting. How am I supposed to build a team that can challenge for promotion and one day dominate Israeli and European football if I cannot scout potential signings. It seems the only way I can assess the quality of new players is to either view their stats (some of which are often hidden) or by getting them on loan or trial. The problem is that if I am interested in a star player from another team, I can't imagine they would want to let me take them on trial or loan and if some of their stats are hidden then my transfers are going to be much more of a risk than if I get a scout to recommend them.

Now I did wonder if this was an Israeli thing but there are teams in my league that have scouts so either it must be a club thing like how Bilbao only sign Basque players.

Anyway, I am always up for a challenge and figured I would give it a go anyway. The main thing I would wondering is if anyone has come across this?

I think this might be a bug, I loaded up a game in Israel and got the same thing. The top division clubs can have scouts whereas no one in the second division can. I managed in the Israeli second division on FM12 and never had such problems. I found someone put up a post in 2011 complaining about exactly the same problem in Israel, and someone posted about the same thing in the MLS.

I don't think it has anything to do with finances, I just think it might be a bug due to the coding of the Israeli league. If I remember correctly the Israeli setup is weird for points and has a split, so this could be causing some sort of problem.

I'm just holidaying a season now to see what happens when teams get relegated and promoted.

So what happens is teams in the second division and relegated to the second division in future seasons have their scouting networks and range downgraded to absolutely nothing. But once you win promotion they are reinstated, definite bug in my view.

That is unless the Israeli FA deem relegation too little of a punishment for failure and command that all relegated clubs and clubs in the second division shall not be allowed to scout.

From what I can gather on Google, there is no rule in Israel that prevents the scouting network from working below the top league. Might be worth posting on the SI boards, they might be able to answer better.