The efficacy of moving youth players to first team training units?

[gooseta]

Firstly I apologise for the succession of rather basic training questions posted in the forum by me, I have read quite a few training & youth development guides, and have thousands of hours across fms11-21 but I have only recently been spending a large proportion of my game time in the training menu, and am managing Vélez Sarsfield, a team with about 20 different prospects with 3.5-5* PA, so I have had a bit of trouble implementing all the advice I know.

What I'd like to know is the effectiveness of training youth players with the first team squad through moving them to first-team training units (through the option in the top right corner of training -> units). Will this help their development by training with first team players who have more experience and better attributes? They stay in their mentoring groups from the under 20s, and just go through the first team training schedules. I'm worried about differing schedules for matches between the under 20s and the first team, as well as possible fatigue (do youth players get fatigued more quickly from tougher training schedules?) Overall I'm just not sure if it's worth moving my best prospects to first-team units, does anyone know if this will be effective in encouraging their development or not?

Thank you.

[AurioDK]

I did it in FM 20 with varying degree of success, your best option is to just pull one or two youngsters to the first team, give them U18 match orders and experiment with them.

[bielsadidnothingwrong]

This is pretty anecdotal, but in FM20 I was managing Newell's Old Boys who have a similar prolific youth setup as Velez. I had a player, Ramiro Sordo, who started the season with U-19s, but I moved him with our first team training units and had Maxi Rodriguez mentor him. By the 2022-23 season, he was the catalyst to our success. I dug up some old screenshots, but couldn't find any that displayed this overall development. However, he developed past his star rating when the save started and while I can't prove it, I believe that had to do with his exposure to first team training from the start. 

[Jervaj]

The benefit mainly comes from the first team having most likely better coaches, plus the squad influence.

To be honest instead of doing that I would rather to move them into the first team proper, and them make them available for the lower teams, because that way you get the training benefits + can mentor them directly. The problem of either approach and having a player train with a different team that the one he plays is that if the lower team match schedule doesn't match the first team, it makes them lose some training days potentially. Also top team is likely to have more matches, so if he is not playing he is losing time he could have been training. So I would only do it with players that I would be playing with the first team even if sporadically, or that I have a lot of interest in mentoring even if that can slow their development a bit. or if the coach differenc eis huge and whatever is lost in training time would be recouped by better training quality.