Purely homegrown club?

After working on using mostly youth squad players and players from the hometown (and surrounding areas, like Bristol/Bath/Chippenham/Clevedon etc) of the club I'm managing, I was wondering if anyone has ever tried to, or has ever successfully, forged a club using strictly homegrown players?

I'm talking about kind of like the 1967 Celtic Lisbon Lions, where every member of the team was born within 30 miles of Glasgow.

I'm thinking this would be an interesting challenge, and as I'm always someone who likes to have a largely domestic squad and focus on bringing up youth through the ranks, I may just do it..

Has anyone else attempted this?

I'm doing something similar, although I gave myself a headstart by building the club up first by signing players. I'm down to just 4 signed players now, hopefully in the next couple of seasons I can go all homegrown. They are not quite all locally born though, just players that have come through my own youth system.

Here's my thread if you are interested.

me on my mates tried this on a multiplayer game. we started as the teams we supported chelsea, man utd and liverpool.

we could only use players from our youth team or sign back players who had started their careers at our club. for example my mate bought back beckham and danny webber to man utd lol and he had to sell cristiano ronaldo lol

was a fun game but most of the players we had were rubbish so it turned into quite a hard game.

Hi dafuge. Funny you should mention that because it was your thread I came across that lead me to what I am doing now.. After viewing your thread I decided to transplant a very low league team (Wells City FC in my case) into the BSS or BSN and work them up.

I renamed the city of Wells to Rainwater and the club to Rainwater as well and took Bath, Clevedon and Weston-super-Mare as rivals and made Burnham an affiliated club (good relations). I made the reputation 1000, gave them a 2000 capacity stadium (named after a pub in Wells City), and gave them a balance of 50,000 pounds as well as making it a PLC with a club membership (I was inspired by FC United of Manchester's set up).

Anyways, I've had to completely rebuild my squad because the regens ("Freds") it gave me were complete trash, but now I'm seeing a player every now and again that's from Rainwater (must have been originally from Wells), and it gave me the idea to work strictly with my youth squad and try and forge a completely homegrown team, with maybe some folks from Bristol/Bath areas.

Anyways, that's what lead me to this. Things are going well, I have two youth squad players in my first squad and I'm 60k in debt already but we're doing all right in the league.

I think this is pretty much impossible to do. Personally i very rarely get a player that could sometime in the future become a regular first team player. You wont be able to improve your club with homegrown players because more than 95% of them are way below your clubs current standard.

I was thinking of doing this with athletic club and do what they do irl and only sign basque youth players.

That is an interesting idea, one that I quite like.

On FM09 I managed to get a purely English team and as a matter of course more than half of them where Home Grown. But the challenge of a pure homegrown squad could be something I would like to try.

(Heads off to read dafuge's thread).

This is exactly what I'm trying to achieve with Peterhead. I've only got one established player from Peterhead at the moment and he's my captain but my youth players are improving all the time.

I'm a below average SPL side with only Scottish players at present and hope to have 4 lads from Peterhead and surrounding areas in my first team by the start of the next season.

I think it is possible, although of course you will probably have to work very hard to get a world class squad capable of winning the title in any top league or competing in Europe.

However, I think that with the odd exception for a Scottish or Irish player, I can begin forging a team in the lower leagues that will challenge for promotion into the football league. As I said, the team I am playing is based in Somerset so all players will mostly need to be from that area (with exceptions to Bristol).

The problem with being in the lower leagues at first is that of course the regens you get are going to be, at best, one day potentially good enough to play in the league you were in when they were generated (with the odd random there).

Another part of the challenge is having to hang onto your good players and not having to sell them, as sometimes it's out of your hands who stays or goes, and you'll also need to balance the books with money from somewhere (especially if you want to upgrade your youth facilities or build an academy).

I'm currently on a save with Alto Adige and it's one of the long term goals. The first is obviously to get them up to Serie A. They are the only(?) team in Lega Pro 2A who start the game with a youth academy.