To those who challenge themselves to use only their Academy products

In the game I've just started I want to try something new and challenging (for me, I mean- I know this isn't a new idea) so am considering limiting myself to only using the players who have come through my academy, and not signing anyone.

To those who have done/are doing this, how do you do it? Is it fun? Can you still be successful? Any tips/advice?

I am considering maybe not going "cold turkey" on buying players straight away, maybe allowing myself one purchase a year, or being able to sign bosman players etc

Thoughts/comments/advice?

Thanks!

What about signing U18s into your academy? Would that count?

I need to get back into the habit of doing this. I discovered the other day that my FM08 game with Triestina had two "generated" players from my academy (one Italian, one Spanish) in my first-team, and somehow 18 homegrown players in my Champions League squad (without picking youngsters) - despite the fact I had lots of former youngsters scattered all around Serie A.

Neglecting my youth in favour of foreigners...

I'm thinking about doing this with bristol rovers in league 1. Will be interested to hear peoples thoughts.

Would enjoy reading about this playthrough in a story thread. Sounds interesting, though extremely tough. You could limit yourself to one player per year, though with the transfer budgets you'd probably save you could probably get an extremely good player per year... Still, would be interesting.

I've always wanted to play a game focusing heavily on bringing through youth players but never managed it. Anyone have any tips of how to find the best youth to sign or bring through players that come through the academy system?

This is pretty much how I play the game in any case, but that's in large part down to the fact I don't play as anything people would commonly regard as a 'large' club or a significant league. Quite often in long term games, I've found that after a good while I'll change jobs to a 'big' team years down the line, what tends to happen is the entire transfer budget goes unspent year on year, and the bank balance of the club balloons because my habits stay and I'm still entirely reliant on producing my own players

You'll get a lot of crap through with the odd gem here and there. The benefits are several; it's fairly cheap to do, you get full control over the development of your players, they form significant "favoured" status which permeates throughout the entire club, and it's just down right fun. Others would rather blow the gross national product of Malawi on foreigners every transfer window, and each to their own, but I find trawling for players and then finding out they've no intention of moving to Minsk or somesuch tedious.

I'm doing this, but in my fantasy world I've started in Level 9 and used the editor to create perfect youth facilities/academy/network.

I get about 6 superb 16 years olds every year (the rest I release). I have to use FMRTE to fiddle the contracts and favoured personnel/team to stop them getting poached immediately though.

My intention is to see how much they develop as we rise through the leagues. Obviously the coaching staff isn't five star, and although the kids get a lot of first team action, it's at a low rep level. When the original batch reach the optimum age around 23-24 we'll be no higher than League One, So I want to see how far short of PA they achieve, and if we can compete at the highest level.

I've done it but it's really too difficult to be successful in France and in Europe with only players from my Academy.

I usually set some rules, ie. no more than 6 "foreigners" (ie. not from my academy) in the squad and no more than 4 in the starting eleven.

Thanks for the replies!

I'm playing a remodeled German league database where I'm already limiting the match day team to 12 HG in country and 5 HG from club (but with 9 subs), as well as having deleted all players (which means at the start of the game every club has only their U19 newgens). I've holidayed a couple of seasons so some players are over 17 and now figure while I'm stuck with young, German players, I may as well use my own young german players.

Maybe I'll limit myself to buying only players under 17 so they'll be homegrown for my club eventually.

It'd be like a slightly more restrictive version of what Atletico Bilbao does no?

It'd be like a slightly more restrictive version of what Atletico Bilbao does no?

Yeah good point. Makes it feel like more of a realistic challenge if there's real life precedent!

I think I'll make my rule "cannot pay for any players who cannot become home-grown for the club"- allowing a little scope for bosman players...

What is the age that you need to sign players before, so that they can be homegrown for you after three years? Before they turn 18 or before they turn 17?

I'm not doing this but attempting to do something vaguely similar with Spurs, whereby i have set a limit withinn 6-7 seasons 80% of my squad have to have come through the academy. Have no idea if it will be easy or hard.

Actually, on second thought, "cannot pay for any players who cannot become home-grown for the club" still seems too open, so I'll add that I "can only spend 10% of my transfer budget per season" as a second rule, to restrict me a bit more.

Robert the Spud: 80% sounds good, personally I'd find setting myself a goal for 6-7 seasons too far in advance, but I guess that makes me an instant gratification kind of guy.

Actually, on second thought, "cannot pay for any players who cannot become home-grown for the club" still seems too open, so I'll add that I "can only spend 10% of my transfer budget per season" as a second rule, to restrict me a bit more.

Robert the Spud: 80% sounds good, personally I'd find setting myself a goal for 6-7 seasons too far in advance, but I guess that makes me an instant gratification kind of guy.

If i was tottenham manager in real life, i'd set a ten year MINIMUM to achieve this. but since this is a game, no. However i would like to be able to become a sustained top european force before i implement this rule, so i thought 6 yrs was doable, and also we have young players at the club, like Modric, and only a very average youth system as it is. I don't think 5 seasons would be enough but as i said 6-7 yrs is the aim, it might happen before. But it is to still dominate europe even with youngsters, thats the aim.

I did it with FM2010 (can be found here), I built the club up first then went for a youth only approach. It was surprising how much success was possible although you need to be lucky as a you cannot do anything at all about a weak position within the squad.

If i was tottenham manager in real life, i'd set a ten year MINIMUM to achieve this. but since this is a game, no. However i would like to be able to become a sustained top european force before i implement this rule, so i thought 6 yrs was doable, and also we have young players at the club, like Modric, and only a very average youth system as it is. I don't think 5 seasons would be enough but as i said 6-7 yrs is the aim, it might happen before. But it is to still dominate europe even with youngsters, thats the aim.

Obviously it would take time for this kind of goal (which is why I've not tried something like it before). Good luck!

I did it with FM2010 (can be found here), I built the club up first then went for a youth only approach. It was surprising how much success was possible although you need to be lucky as a you cannot do anything at all about a weak position within the squad.

I'm hoping for a bit of luck then! Sounds promising though, thank you

i tried and got bored very easily, Part of the fun is spending the money

iv started this sort of thing today with Man United in preperation for after the Feb patch to do this with a lower league team, where i will attempt to rise through leagues using only youth products. like the recent IK Tord thread in Stories/Careers

I've only ever tried to do it once I got the club as an established championship club. I've just started off a save with St Albans City so hopefully will get to league one/championship within 5 or 6 seasons and then depending on youth facilities I'll perhaps start trying to use only youth academy products. It can be really slow progress though and often quite painful knowing you need to strengthen an area and just watching year after year fail to bring through what you need.

I'm planning to do this in my current Milan save. I'm in 2019, and already have some great newgens, but most of them aren't from my academy and are not Italians. I must know how to resist to a cheap youngster with 4-4 1/2 stars potential.

What is the best way to maximise the potential of the players coming out of your academy?

Is it just down to having great youth facilities and a good club reputation or is there more to it?

just play Athletic

those restrictions are enough to provide a feeling like one get from this style of play

I heard somewhere that the PA of regen youths is affected by club stature, which is hardcoded into game database. There was someone here complaining a few days ago, that even though they had top youth facilities, youth academy, excellent youth coaches and high club reputation, the generated regens were still very poor. Whoever it was, I think he was managing a Serbian(?) club and won some continental competitions with it.

Persoanlly, if I wanted to focus on my own youth players then I'd probably pick a fairly reputable club to start with.

Dafuge is probably the expert on this. He had some fantastic achievements on last year's game using only his academy products.

Hopefully he will pop in and comment plus share some hints and tips!

I heard somewhere that the PA of regen youths is affected by club stature, which is hardcoded into game database. There was someone here complaining a few days ago, that even though they had top youth facilities, youth academy, excellent youth coaches and high club reputation, the generated regens were still very poor. Whoever it was, I think he was managing a Serbian(?) club and won some continental competitions with it.

Persoanlly, if I wanted to focus on my own youth players then I'd probably pick a fairly reputable club to start with.

This is true to an extent, but I've always found that even playing in a second rate nation you still get at least one or two players from each year's crop who develop to the point where they can play at a level above, not only that, but you get the odd gem coming through who could go on to play at the highest levels. I'm not being silly here and talking about say, Fulham, a 'small' team still playing in a big league, but more the likes of Scottish clubs I've taken up the ranks to the SPL, or clubs from the Belarus league etc. Yes, you get a lot of crap which will never make the grade, far more than those players who will, but I've never found long-term competitiveness harmed by lack of quality.

Perhaps the complaint may have been that no matter the level of facilities, staff, coaching etc that there never comes a point whereby you have a stream of potentially World Class talent coming through, but how realistic would that be anyway, even at a very large club?. Personally, I honestly feel the game generates far too high a level of new talent for 'small' leagues on full detail/playable in comparison to much larger leagues not being played on full detail in the same save. Every time I start as a Scottish club, within 5 years the Scottish national team is full of 20-21 year old regens with world class potential, resulting in the team regularly not just qualifying for finals but far surpassing anything Scotland has ever achieved historically. Conversely, in exactly the same game, I've seen the Netherlands dwindle to a footballing backwater who never even come close to qualifying for anything, and don't produce anything like the talent they have historically, entirely because I don't have the league running on full detail. It's been a big issue for many iterations of FM, but I suspect it will never be looked at entirely because of the UK centric and focussed nature of the majority of players.

I'll just add the caveat that in the case of the likes of Scotland, a few of these new 'wonder-talents' will be generated outside of the home leagues, England commonly, but even still, there are far too many home grown talents emerge with ability levels which would have to be considered on a par with some of the best Scottish players in history. It's especially unrealistic that we see several of these emerge at once, and it's not a 'golden generation' either as it continues for as long as I keep playing.

I gave this a try with a lower league Spanish team (Sabadell in Segundo B). To make things slightly less frustrating, I bumped my youth system up from 9 to 12 and added an academy in the editor. I think I also upped the youth recruitment. Already the youth team generated for the first season had 3-5 promising prospects.

My personal rules were:

- only able to sign players that could eventually qualify as 'trained at club' (17 and under)

- no additional loan players (but would keep existing ones til end of loan)

- no contract renewals for non-HG players

- HG players now playing for other teams or unattached could be bought back

Short story is that I got sacked after a season and a half after a run of bad results (winless and goalless in seven games) brought on by injuries to my only true strikers and main AMC. I knew that I would need to avoid the sack for at least three to four seasons before the youth system was able to produce enough to replace the existing first team, but my managerial skills were not up to the task on this occasion. For some reason, there was no option in Board Interaction to explain my beautiful long-term strategy for world domination via our youth system. (Predictably, my U19 team was consistently 3rd behind only Barcelona and Espanyol's youth teams).

Another thing to keep in mind is that - especially in lower leagues - your youth system will probably need to produce about a 30-50% 'excess' of players that you will lose to other teams either to generate revenue or simply because they are beyond your level. You won't be able to hold on to every player that comes through your ranks. It's a pretty tall order.

My advice is that going 'cold turkey' as the OP and I first tried is really really difficult, and a more patient, gradual approach is wiser.. A new manager will be based on immediate results, and few boards will suffer through results far below expectation to give enough time for the youth prospects to develop. Instead, set a target of 5 or more years (ten?) by which time your team will be home-grown. In the meantime, play pretty much free of self-imposed restrictions, but be sure to be recruiting enough U18 players and upgrade your youth system whenever possible, of course.

What is the best way to maximise the potential of the players coming out of your academy?

Is it just down to having great youth facilities and a good club reputation or is there more to it?

Im not sure how true it is but i remember reading a while back thatthe amount of youth coaches at the club have a big effect on the quality of players coming through, I've since always adopted this approach once i got a decent first team coaching rating set up(only signed youth coaches after this)

In my Man Utd save in FM10 after 6-7 seasons i was getting some really good talent through, i had 4-5 good prospects from previous season or two and the last season i played i had the two best young players (pa wise checked in genie after fm2011 was released outta interest) with 197 pa and 193

could be conincedence may not, who knows :O

It takes forever to increase youth recruitment. 12 seasons in with AFC Wimbledon and I have won everything, but I have never been able to get more than 1* players...

In the game I've just started I want to try something new and challenging (for me, I mean- I know this isn't a new idea) so am considering limiting myself to only using the players who have come through my academy, and not signing anyone.

To those who have done/are doing this, how do you do it? Is it fun? Can you still be successful? Any tips/advice?

I am considering maybe not going "cold turkey" on buying players straight away, maybe allowing myself one purchase a year, or being able to sign bosman players etc

Thoughts/comments/advice?

Thanks!

I'm currently doing something like this. I started as Loughborough University, way down in level 9 (or 10, I can't remember) and my rules were as follows:

Season 1 - Make as many signings as I need to get a good solid foundation for the team to build from.

Season 2 - Only make signings in areas we were very weak on last season. Try and sign young players where possible. Give as much game time to my academy players as possible (this will be done in all seasons from now on).

Season 3 - Give as many of my season 1 & 2 academy players a 1st XI spot. If my club is still amateur then I will sign players to replace any who have been stolen from me by other clubs. If I am semi-professional by now then I will not sign anybody.

Season 4 Onwards - Same as for season 3.