under review User's youth intake players are ONE YEAR older than AI youth intake players

[CFuller]

I'm going to start this bug report by quoting myself from the OTF FM20 thread, where I explain a major issue I had with youth intake players.

Quote

I bought FM20 very late this year and only have about three intakes to draw from, but my big complaint with my intakes isn't that they're not very good. It's that they come in older than they should. Other teams in my division get intakes aged 15-16, but mine are always slightly older (e.g. my first-year intake is all born in 2003, rather than Sep 2003 to Aug 2004).

I'm not sure if anyone else has noticed that. (I've managed in England and Portugal, by the way.)

I've had my first intake at Rennes, and I've come across the same problem as I did in my FM20 saves with Burnley and Sporting.

My intake players were all born in the calendar year 2005. Upon closer inspection, I found that other French clubs in Ligue 1 and Ligue 2 who got full youth intakes all had players that were born in 2006. My youth intake is literally a year older than AI youth intakes.

I've decided to run a couple of holiday test saves, with just the French leagues loaded. I've holidayed until 31 March and then looked at the DOBs of all youth intake players from a number of clubs.

SAVE 1: WITHOUT USER MANAGER

In CFuller_NewgenSave01.fm, I've not taken charge of any team. These are the intakes as of 31 March:

RENNES (AI)

REIMS (AI)

LORIENT (AI)

As you can see, the vast majority of first-year newgens were born in 2005.

SAVE 2: WITH USER MANAGER

In CFuller_NewGenSave02.fm, I've holidayed until 1 January 2021, added myself as Rennes manager, and then gone back on holiday for three months. These are the intakes when I came back to the game on 23 March:

RENNES (USER)

REIMS (AI)

LORIENT (AI)

Notice the problem there? My youth intake was all born in 2004, with some of the newgens being older than real-life youth players at the start of the game! Meanwhile, AI-managed teams all get newgens born in 2005 (or late 2004). Ricardo Afonso from Reims' intake is 22 months younger than Mathieu Lamy from my intake, even though they're both from the class of 2021! That cannot be right.

I have now noticed this bug across three different countries on FM20 and FM21. Words cannot express how frustrated I am right now. This is a HUGE problem -a genuinely GAME-BREAKING problem - for me, as it will greatly hamper any plans I have for a long-term save. Can you please listen to my concerns and make sure that ALL youth intakes generate players of the appropriate ages, whether they're managed by the user or by the AI?

[Kyle Brown]

Investigating this now for you, @CFuller. I'll give you an update as soon as I can.

[Kyle Brown]

We've got this logged now and it's under review. Doesn't appear to be happening for every nation but I was able to replicate it for France. 

We'll aim to find a resolution as soon as we can.