Youth and free transfers compared to FM2014

Hello folks

I'm quite late to the party, having only just got FM15 about a fortnight ago. FM14 was my first experience of FM, enjoyed it very much.

I played as Barnet in 14, rising through the ranks to become dominant in Europe. As I was coming up through the leagues, I was able to sign plenty of promising 16-17 year olds from throughout Europe, all for fairly little. When I was at Championship level, I was certainly able to sign kids from Czech, Romania, Slovakia, Denmark and all the Scandinavian countries, to build a pool of talent which I could promote/sell on. When I was at Prem level, I could sign anyone but the top youth players from France, Spain, Germany and Belgium (and even they would eventually give in!).

I'm in the Championship with Barnet now, and have been able to sign only 3 decent kids from European teams, only 1 of which will potentially become a Prem player. I can buy a few others, but their teams want £1-5 mil for them. Ultimately that was a long winded way of asking is it generally considered harder to farm young talent in this edition?

Another strategy I used for signing decent players was to scour all the European leagues on 31st December for players with less than 6 months on their contracts. I would be able to sign a multitude of decent players for free this way. Teams seem much more proactive now in renewing their players contracts. Again, is this something that is considered harder to do on this edition?

And finally, players that were 16 or under in most European leagues were rarely tied to the club - most had the 'Approach to sign' tab as opposed to the 'Make offer' tab. This isn't the case at all for me in FM15 now, just about every kid is contracted to their club. Is this something that has changed too?

I'm playing on Classic mode if that is relevant.

Thanks for your time folks, apologies if this has been gone over before.

Ian

I am sure I read someone that that whole kind of thing had been tidied up to make it much more difficult to exploit the transfer market in such a way in FM15 as compared to FM14, for realism purposes I guess. I guess a mod or someone who is more knowledgeable can make a comment on that better than I can!

In terms of players with contracts running down. I also search in the summer for players who only have a year on their contract and if I feel they are 1. worth the money and 2. likely to sign a new contract I try to put a bid in when you are likely to have a low offer accepted. That way you can pick up the players you want for much less than you might otherwise do. Of course, it is not foolproof but an additional strategy to try.

Alternatively, you can try to unsettle players using interactions and speculation so they request transfers or want to leave the club and will not accept new contract offers. I did that with a wonderful regen GK who was too expensive to buy. He would not sign a new contract with his lower mid-table French club and I picked him up with ease. It was a long game I played, took over 2 seasons from discovery to getting my man, but it was damned satisfying if you have the patience and ability to attract young players.

Hope that helps some.