Bringing Through The Youth

Anybody have any good tips for bringing through youth players? It is something which I would love to try and do but the youth players never seem to be good enough. Any tips through training, loaning or just giving them first team experience?

It's a mix really. I always sign my best youth players to full time contracts as soon as they turn 17. I then put them in my reserves so they can train with the first team. Tutoring, first team experience and a close watch on their training regime are all helpful in turning them into better players. Eventually, a well place loan move can do wonders as well.

It's a "feature" of FM08 that youth players are not especially good. Hopefully they'll be better in FM09

Your best bet is to wait until you get your new youth players in then go through them checking their coach reports. There is a problem with regen youth players as their not very good so any regen with about 5 or 6 gold stars in potential is worth keeping an eye on. You should then leave them until they sign a pro contract when there 17. Then loan them out to an affiliates (sp) in a lower league in the same country. After a few years start loaning them to foreign affiliates or if you don't have one just put them on the loan list so teams that want them can pick them. Once they reach 3 or 4 stars in the current ability start to give them sub appearences in the league and starts in cup games. This should hopefully help them to develop more.

This is the way to do it at a premiership/top league side. If your outside of the top leagues you can use the same ideas but you will have to lower the ratings e.g a player with 3 or 4 stars potential would be good.

I hope this helps and if your still stuck have a look in the Good players and teams guide forum.

i have bought a few cracking youth players that are regens without ever being at a club.

a tend to send them out on loan once they are about 17.

if i think they're going to be good then i only loan them as far down as league 1 .

get them to play about 100 league games before their 20 .

Thanks for the feedback will try to implement the features now. Have got one or two youth players who could do a good job

A good idea for regens imo is that we should be able to boost some of their attributes we think they're way too bad at.

For example. If a striker that comes to your youth team is a 4-7 stars player but has poor off the ball movement there should be an option to boost his off the ball attribute so it will raise real quick in a short space of time depending on his personality attributes and luck.

That happens irl, i'll use Kaká as an example, he was far from being one of the most promissing players in São Paulo youth academies because he didn't have the physical attributes to be a professional player, but he had the potential, as we all can see now, so his youth coach at that time told him that if he wanted to get in the first team he had to go through a heavy training regime to gain muscular mass, and with professionalism and determination he reached their objective.

I'm not saying it should make a player go from 2 to 20, as you can see, Kaká is still a fairly weak player, but to be able to make a player reach decent level in some attribute.

LeoViera, isn't that already in the game?

I say this because I tend to do this with training. If a player with good potential is weak or slow, I will make a dedicated schedule so he improves them.

it is in the game as far as training, but what i think LeoVieira's saying is that you should focus on one stat only, rather than all the stats associated with the training section. for instance, i had a young DM with really good stats, except his marking was 3. there was no way any schedule could get him up to an adequate level, so i sold him. i suppose if it were in the game it could be implemented in the same way the new PPM's feature will be, eg if i could've asked my player to stay back after training pretending to mark people lol

Do you mean by setting some training category to extensive? I try that but it doesn't make such difference.

Do you mean by setting some training category to extensive? I try that but it doesn't make such difference.

Yeah, just focus on one part (obviously take into account the effect of lowering other parts though).

Have you all had success with the 'intensive' training of a particular set of skills? I have not, but admittedly have not given this much of a try with FM08