[The FM21 Youth Academy Challenge]

A question:

Will greyed-out players ever develop any tactical familiarity with their position and the system, or will they remain as tactically hopeless as they were at the beginning?

 

Background

By greyed-out players, I mean the ones that auto-magically fill out a list. My promoted club (Lowestoft) has 14 real players only, and 4 greyed-out players available to me on top of that. Due to holes in the list of real players, I need to play at least one of the greyed out players in every match.

 

[The FM21 Youth Academy Challenge]

So, I'm taking the plunge...

After years of intending to bring youth through, but always falling to the temptation of high potential kids from outside, I decided to go cold turkey.

 

I've selected the mighty Lowestoft in the VNL North, who have spent 9 of the past 11 seasons in the Isthmian Premier Division, and are expected to finish rock bottom. I may be restarting this challenge before my first youth intake!

The tale of the tape, with respect to youth facilities is pretty grim, but I thought I would start from bedrock.

 

(One assumption I am making is that it is okay to keep the players that are already at the club (I'm scared to look!), although I do intend to mix in youth as soon as I can.) 

Stepping into the management breach is a newcomer Knuckle Headington, hailing from Melbourne, Australia.

He only ever played Sunday League football and has no coaching badges at all. He is, in other words, a total chump 

 

Wish him luck, because he's going to need it!

 

[Players don't build relationship or have an opinion of me]

Thirding this...

What I see is that players with whom I have a very close relationship with (happiness tab) show up as "no relationship" in discussions.

When I go back from discussions to happiness the relationship is reset to "no relationship" until I advance time then the original "very close" comes back.