Young Players

A few questions regarding young players...

1. When a player becomes eligible for a professional contract, should you sign them to a professional deal, or keep them on their cheap youth contract (most of the guys on my club have 16 months or so left on the cheap deal). Not sure if there is any detrimental effects to the player for not offering a deal.

2. Still in my first season with my current club. I've gotten at least a dozen requests from younger players wanting to be let go on a free transfer because they want first team time and give me negative feedback when I suggest loaning them out. This is very unusual to me (from a gaming perspective) as we've got our starting eleven and our primary backups. These younger kids are nowhere near good enough to take a first team spot so what can I do here as they may be guys I could build around in a couple of seasons.

1. Not sure as I let my staff handle that. They usually do sign the kids with enough potential to someday play for the senior club as soon as they can, so there is probably some in-game benefit to it. I actually think that it might be that anyone who can sign a professional contract that is still on youth contract can be freely poached by another team. It's been awhile since that has come up for me though, so I'm not certain.

2. They may not be good enough to play for your team, but are they good enough to play for other teams in your division? In their scouting reports under their current ability stars, what league is listed that they could play at? Generally, once they get to the point where the assistant is saying they would be decent in my division, that's when I start figuring out how to either make room for them on my senior club the next season or get them out on loan if they already have trained at club status. If you are holding coaching staff meetings, your staff will suggest when players are ready development wise that they need to be seeing first team action somewhere. You can't always get them out on loan at that moment for other reasons, but you do want to do something with them fairly soon if you have hopes of them reaching their full potential.

Basically, if you are just letting them rot in your youth and reserve squads, they aren't going to be happy and will ask to leave. The bigger the club you are, the more likely it is they will ask to go out on loan instead, or at least it seems that way to me.

Awesome information. I hadn't even looked at that Scouting Report screen so that was new for me. Much appreciated.