What defines the quality of the youths you produce?

i tend to get quite crap ones ..at the moment anyway in past edditions after a good few years they tend to get better

what defines this ? is it randomn?

is it your youth acadamy? the quality of your scouts or youth coaches or is it a mixture of all 3?

As far as I know, random luck affects the most. You could be 20 in youth training with academy and have a bunch of 120- pa youngsters, or be 10 in youth training and get someone 160+ (in a third or fourth tier league, no less).

It is essentially random but having better a youth setup makes it more likely that you will get better youths. It is no guarantee, though!

Just have high quality youth setups and within 2-3 seasons you should be getting the odd decent youth player, 1 or 2 each season.

In fm2009 it took 3-4 seasons before they started to come through

on 09 with 23 years or so at a club with excellent youth facilities only a few ever looked like they'd be good, and for the most part they didn't live up to it (only 1 became a regular but not for that long). into 3rd season on 10 on same side and not only haven't there been good ones but no one's been close. Presumably there'll be one promising one in the next couple of years but don't expect too much whatever your setup.

Its a whole range of things

Staff?, Facilities, Club Status, League, Town & Nation.

In previous versions having an Acadamy gave an increase to Max PA on 1-3 of the players promoted to your Youth Squad.

I'd like a semi-official answer to this too.

Thing is though, often the good players that come out of clubs u18 teams were origanally brought elswhere. As a Liverpool fan I often see some of our brigther prospects are bought from other teams. Amoo I believe from Millwall, Pacheco from Spain (barca?) Nemeth from Hungary. Man Utd the same with Fabo and Rafael + Macheda. So I dont think it's too unrealistic for the big clubs with the best facillities having great players come throug there academy when IRL they're mainly bought.