Not reaching full potential

I am having a problem of youngsters not reaching their full potential for some reason. A lot have great potential but seem to stop at a certain point and never get there, while others get there pretty fast. Any advice about that?

Several factors affect this:

training schedules, age, coaching ability, first team experience, tutoring etc

training is a big factor.

if your coaches (especially youth coaches) are bad or cant work well with youngsters i would say only 1 in 10 players with potential will hit a standard they should.

do you play them? even if it is just 30mins off of the bench? any matches in the 1st team will not only help their skill but mentally it will be a big boost!

and you have to be training them from a high standard at an early age. if you take them when they are 21 chances are they wont develop that much more

There are also certain hidden & regular attributes that effect the rate at which they develop.

From memory they are determination, professionalism (hidden) and ambition (hidden).

As other have said though, its also very heavily influenced by age. If you had 2 players with exactly the same attributes for the 3 areas listed above, one of them aged 16 and one aged 26, obviously the 16 year old would develop very quickly while the 26 year old would either improve slowly or not at all.

thanks you for the addvice, very much appreciated, in my case i think its the coaching from what i have just read. thanks again

Training actually has very little impact while Professionalism, Ambition, Match Experience and Club/Competition Reputation all have a massive impact on CA growth.

Mentoring + Playing Time + Quality Opponents/Matches = Improvement.

I found some balanced and temperamental players that didn't reach potential back in FM08, so since then I only buy determined professional players unless they are unbelievably good.

Training doesn't have much to do with it and I agree with SFraser's points. Professionalism, Determination and first team football will make your player reach potential. Tutoring will increase the rate he grows and if done right it can be a huge increase in one season.