A couple of quick questions.

Okay, I tried to quick search but I couldn't find an answer quickly, so I figured I'd make a post here instead. Basically, I like to see how the game works, so I like to look at the numbers of facilities and reputations in FMRTE. One thing I noticed, I have "2" under the youth academy catagory, wheras teams like Manchester Utd have 20. Yet I can't ask to upgrade it. The quality of my youth sucks even though I have state of the art youth facilities.

So:

1. Will my board naturally upgrade the youth academy if I leave them to their own devices?.

2. Does the number *really* matter - I've a belief it does, because of how awful my youth is, I've never had a player good enough to play in even league 1 come through my academy - even when their youth contracts expired. Would be good to know for sure.

Would be nice to know if I'm doomed to forever have lower quality of youth than other teams, despite massive investment in youth facilities.

The board will upgrade it themselves without requests if they think it needs it. If you hover over the greyed out youth academy board request it will give a reason of why you can't make the request to upgrade it.

Yeah the number matters, the higher it is the better the players that are generated.

Well, when I hover over it, it just says "the club already has a youth academy". It seems to have no understanding that it's an awful academy.

Edit: for reference, we're a worldwide reputation team.

Oh I think there is a difference between the youth academy and youth facilities. You probably have a youth academy but your youth facilities are 2. Having a youth academy just means you get players I think, the youth facilities means how good they are. I could be wrong with that but I'm sure that used to be the case anyway. What team are you out of curiosity?

Youth Facilities are 20, it shows Youth Academy at 2. Other clubs have varying levels of academy, that seem realistic based upon their clubs RL academy qualities. I'm Truro City, who I've had in the premiership several years now, we're worldwide reputation and we've won the premier league many times, and the champions league once. So I'm definitely a big enough club to start producing at least championship quality players, but I'm not even managing players who would do well above league 2.

Still, I'm working on improving the youth recruitment network and that will help. However I'm worried about this youth academy being stuck at "2" when other clubs have "20" for it.

Just change it to 20 then, if you feel you can do that without getting a bad taste in your mouth. I don't know if there's a way to improve the youth academy. Is your youth network good too?

Well, currently I'm thinking, I'll leave it as-is. If it gets improved within five years of the board's own volition I'll know the board actually *can* improve the youth academy. If it doesn't, I *might* consider slowly improving it (say, four points every year or two) while also removing a three to ten million pounds from the bank account so it's as if I requested to improve it and they granted it - in a way to simulate how the game should be working. It's a bug in my eyes that I never get the option to improve the academy so if I do it in a realistic way like this, I'll consider it.

I'm not going to just edit it to 20 though, that'd be crossing the line into truly cheating in my eyes. I'm still hoping the board will see the light though and sort it themselves if I don't request anything for a few years.