FM21 Experiment - 200 Youth Rating for Croatia + Maximum stats for staff, facilities, recruitment and other things

[FM21_Scout]

Here's what I did:

- 200 YR for Croatia

- My club (Dinamo) had all of their youth recruitment stats maxed out and had the club rep maxed out

- All of my staff was given 200 PA with model citizen/professional/model professional personalities and high reputations

- I savescummed for each season to get the best possible results

- I also did up the ratings of some countries for fun. Uzbekistan was put at 200 YR. Nigeria, Kosovo, Montenegro and others were put around 140-150. I put Scotland at 170 YR earlier in the game too. In the late 2060's, I put Iceland, Fiji, New Zealand and Australia at high YR's too. I later upped the YR's Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Tunisia, Morocco and some other countries as well.

I started this in 2021 but I made too many adjustments. I then stopped making adjustments in 2044 and so far am up to 2072. I will continue to update as I make progress but I can really only get through a season a day.

Edited August 25, 2021 by FM21_Scout

[FM21_Scout]

Some things I have learned or noticed:

- Even at 200 YR, you still aren't guaranteed good classes. I really only had 3 players make the main team from 2052-2060. I wasn't sure if I'd ever get out of the slump. That was a frustrating run, but the run from 2067-2072 has been strong with 3 players at 160 PA or more each year.

- Youth intake previews and the youth intake are fixed but random. The best way to put it in like by buying lottery tickets. Some years, the game is going to give you a vast majority of youth intake preview tickets for "a poor crop of players" and some it will be good many times. It just depends on how much time you want to spend fishing for the right result. The only comment that I think is reliable is that if it says you are getting a player from a specific country, you will. I've had classes where there was no comment on the crop of players and the players would be be better than years where it said they would be a good class. Golden generations are the rarest result in the game and I haven't seen one for over 45 years.

- The actual youth intake varies. The names, positions and nationalities will be the same every time(not skin color though), but the PA's will be much different. The best or 2nd best player in the group may not always be at the top of the email or youth candidates section and they may have a significantly lower potential ability rating than players who are much worse than them. However, if you do a re-load, all of that can completely change.

- Long term, I think it's extremely hard to smaller clubs to keep up with bigger clubs just on youth alone. You really have to have similar or better youth and you need to make some good youth signings, while major countries can do worse and get further.

- I did not see a correlation between a nation's youth rating and the foreign players in youth intakes. Pearson from 2059 is from Gibraltar who has a Youth Intake rating of 15 and he has gone on to be World Goalkeeper of the Year several times. Sierra Leone has a YR of 29 and produced Kanu, who in a save scum I didn't use, had a PA of 184.

- The easiest way to get foreigners is to add foreign affiliates. 13 foreigners is the record so far. Having staff from various countries does not give you the chances that affiliates do. The nationality that you pick as manager should also be good for a recruit from that country every other year or so.

- You do not have to have leagues loaded to get foreigners from various countries as I had a North Korean player who had a 170+ PA when NK was not loaded as a nation.

- The game has a bias towards "Major Nations". If you do advanced set-up and look through the teams, IIRC Italy, England, Spain, France and Germany are marked as major nations. These countries will generally get good intakes at higher rates than other countries even with lower YR's.

- I do not believe nation size has anything to do with getting good youth intakes. Game Importance in the editor seems like it matters though.

- I am not sold on the HOYD mattering as much as people say. I've upped their CA's and not done so and I didn't see a large difference.

- I want to talk about Youth Rating. I upped Uzbekistan's YR to 200. I really did not see many good Uzbekistan players come through local clubs until later in the game even after giving them good facilities, hoyd's and increasing reps. It took a while for that to go through the system. I did see Uzbeki nationals that spawned in foreign clubs start to make up the majority of their national teams though.

- When you increase the Youth Rating of various countries, their teams get better. That's not news, but the game recognizes these countries getting better and the price of those players from those clubs gets a lot higher. Uzbek players with strong YR's could initially be found for under a million. Those same players are $15,000,000-$30,000,000 now. As smaller countries/clubs get better, the game picks up on it too as multiple Uzbeki clubs ended up becoming affiliates of bigger European clubs.

- Youth Intakes can be odd. Even with view only or full playable leagues, sometimes the countries just don't produce many youth intake players. I've had Morocco added for 40+ years now and still there's usually only 2 clubs that have newgens. Bayern Munich also ended up with a 20 player Youth Intake in 2071.

- I play with Dinamo from Croatia. As soon as I increased the Youth Rating at the start of the game, the first couple of classes were golden generations almost every savescum. I had about 5-6 in a row then they were mostly good for a few more years and went back to normal eventually. My guess is the game saw a bunch of great players coming quick for a club that doesn't produce at that level then eventually did some correcting as my teams got better.

- Even with 200 CA scouts, they still had some major screwups. I've had multiple players with high 80's to 90's Recommendation Ratings only have PA's of 110-130 while some all-time greats in this game sometimes had bad Recommendation Ratings.

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Results

Croatia grabbed a WC in 2046 after 2 decades of good youth intakes and came in 2nd at the 2062 World Cup and 3rd at the 2030 World Cup. As I added more foreign affiliates, our results dwindled. They never won the European Football Championships(Spain, Italy and England won multiple instead) but came in 2nd in 2036. Their best Olympic result was a 3rd place finish in 2064. Scotland also grabbed World Cup wins in 2058 and 2070. Mexico grabbed a shocker of a World Cup win in 2054. Uzbekistan never got close on World Cups, but has become an Asian Nations Cup beast with 5 wins and 2 runner ups. Nigeria, whose rating I upped early, has won the African Cup of Nations 7 times in the timeframe. There's been no real surprises in the Olympics except for Slovakia somehow winning in 2048 with Germany and Italy getting multiple wins.

Dinamo has won every Croatian First League title since this started. We won 7 European Championship Cups total with wins in 2044, 2046, 2048, 2051, 2053, 2058 and 2060 and a runner up in 2049. We won 4 Club World Cups with wins in 2045, 2049, 2053 and 2061. We also grabbed a Euro Cup win in 2054 which took me forever to win and a win in 2068. Surprisingly, what I thought was my best squad never won in the Euro Championship Cup and the 2060 win was pure luck. We had a Macedonian player who had a 191 PA and could play in the midfield, as striker, as the AMC and even on defense but he only had about 100 goals in 400 appearances and just never fit like I hoped he would.

Edited August 25, 2021 by FM21_Scout

[FM21_Scout]

More results from 2072-2079:

 

 

Edited September 1, 2021 by FM21_Scout

[FM21_Scout]

Here's the results from 2080-2086

 

As you can see, 2082 was the best PA class I ever recorded. 4 players above 160PA with a 197PA player, which is the best I ever recorded in this project. The luck continued as 2084, 2085 and 2086 all came out with great classes. I'm pretty sure I could field a top level CL team just with these recruits alone.

I'm starting a new save but under the same guidelines, so nothing changes.

Edited September 14, 2021 by FM21_Scout

[Swills417]

This is a good experiment. I've always been intrigued by the youth rating in the past versions of the game. Previously I've tried to level up the major Nations to have near enough equal ratings and the chasing pack of nations reasonably close.

All that seems to happen when I do this though is that Argentina develop super teams. 

Out of curiosity are you able to advise on the average CA of the national teams squad or first eleven? I assume these would be similar or the same as your intake average PA? 

 

How would you suggest tinkering with the nations to make the major tournaments a little less predictable? 

[FM21_Scout]

On 16/09/2021 at 10:10, Swills417 said:

This is a good experiment. I've always been intrigued by the youth rating in the past versions of the game. Previously I've tried to level up the major Nations to have near enough equal ratings and the chasing pack of nations reasonably close.

All that seems to happen when I do this though is that Argentina develop super teams. 

Out of curiosity are you able to advise on the average CA of the national teams squad or first eleven? I assume these would be similar or the same as your intake average PA? 

 

How would you suggest tinkering with the nations to make the major tournaments a little less predictable? 

>Out of curiosity are you able to advise on the average CA of the national teams squad or first eleven?

National teams don't always pick the highest CA players and as you can guess, the countries with the highest CA don't always win the tournaments.

I took some screenshots from some of the top 15 teams: https://imgur.com/a/FqkEfsU

>How would you suggest tinkering with the nations to make the major tournaments a little less predictable? 

Let's say you want to do this with Croatia and their national team. You would want to increase the Croatian Youth Rating, reputation, facilities/junior coaching and CA's of staff at many Croatian clubs. This should produce better youth who will eventually start on the national team. You would also want to increase the CA of staff on the national team. You could also add Croatian affiliate clubs and Croatian staff to major clubs from other countries or from clubs that produce a lot of good youth, then those teams would produce some good Croatian players. My guess is that the more Croatian staff and Croatian affiliates you have at those clubs, the more Croatian recruits you get. I also added more teams to the Croatian league in one of my saves so that more Croatian players would be produced.

Let's say you want to do this with a particular club and let's say you chose Dinamo Zagreb from Croatia. You would want to increase the youth rating, facilities, HOYD's, staff, the reputation of the clubs you want and I would increase how much money the clubs have so they could in buy better players.

You could also just outright cheat and make every player and staff member on those teams 200 CA.

 

Edited September 17, 2021 by FM21_Scout

[FM21_Scout]

I'm working on another save, but all conditions are the same. I created my own competitions and didn't get any new recruits in 2021, but finally they came through in 2022. The new save is fun as I made Croatia a 20 team league and added a few custom tournaments.

2022-2024 saw three Golden Generations in a row. As I've mentioned and others have as well, when you start playing with the youth ratings, improve youth facilities and get a strong HOYD, the game notices and the first few youth intake classes are usually Golden Generations.  It took me a couple of re-loads, but my 2022 class had Pekcic-Pelaic. He is a 200 PA striker and he's the man in this game. He has an insane 233 Goals in 186 Appearances....and he's only 24! Unfortunately, the game made some bad deals when I wasn't looking and the team suffered for a few years as 3 of starters were missing. We haven't won a single international competition yet. 2028 was initially marked as Golden Gen in the preview, but somehow it changed before the actual youth intake. I don't know if I used the wrong reload or something, but I was not happy.

I only have a couple of foreign affiliates right now, hence the lack of tons of foreigners.

The data also continues to show that the youth intake preview really doesn't mean that much since an Excellent Group of Players only averaged out to a 98 PA, which would be a Poor Crop of players on another save.

We'll talk about 2030 in a week or so but spoiler alert - it's a real real good class.

Edited September 19, 2021 by FM21_Scout

[FM21_Scout]

Hey crew, I'm still around. I spent a week or two building a new competition and that kept me busy. These are the results from two completely different saves, hence 2022 being repeated:

As you can see here, there's more evidence to the first couple of years having really good crops of players on new saves when you start hiring good staff and increasing facilities. We also have proof that non-golden gen previews can sometimes be better than actual golden gens.

Edited October 9, 2021 by FM21_Scout

[FM21_Scout]

Here's the classes from 2025-2028:

 

The 2027 class was the best class I ever produced in Average PA at 123.8. Only one super great player, but Eggers is really good 4 position player as he can be a Winger, an AMC, a Midfielder or a Wingback.

Edited October 16, 2021 by FM21_Scout