FreddyGuarin

Apologies for the late reply, but I lost him. Ultimately I wasn't too bothered as I got promoted and would've signed an upgrade anyway, but it's the principle. There's a split opinion on this thread, but I maintain that this is something that would see FIFA/CAS rule in the club's favour and should either be treated as a bug or amended in future editions.

Yep, definitely learnt that the hard way! I've got one foot in the Championship now so I'd be looking to upgrade him anyway, although he would've been a useful backup. On FM, I've made offers for players who had their contracts expiring, but as soon as I made the offer, their parent club triggered the extension so my offer became effectively null and void. Had this been an optional extension, I would've done the same. However, this wasn't an option, it was an automatic extension based on appearances and survival. If he's able to sign a pre-contract elsewhere before the extension is applied, which makes the automatic extension redundant, maybe this needs to be rephrased. Will do. I'm now mathematically safe and the player has made 25 appearances, but I think these are only applied well after the season finishes anyway, around June if I'm not mistaken. I'm expecting him to leave though, based on the previous replies.

That's simply not true, it's an automatic extension, not an option on the player's part. Or at least that's how it works in real life, and I've never seen it function differently in FM.

They do indeed need to be league games, but that isn't an issue. I've already played 27 league games and he has featured in 20, so he's well past the threshold. Fingers crossed the clause does trigger, because if it doesn't, then it's either a bug or a massive oversight on SI's part.

This has probably been covered elsewhere but a quick search has proved fruitless as the search words are pretty generic. I've got a situation where one of my best defenders has a clause in his contract where he gets an automatic one-year extension if he plays 10 games and we avoid relegation. Given that we're second in League One in January, we're obviously not going down, and he has already played well over 10 matches, so this obviously will (or should be) applicable. I would've offered him a new contract early in the season had he not had this clause, but because the extension was there, I didn't see much point. However, in early January, he agreed a pre-contract with a club from Nigeria. Now, in real life, FIFA and CAS (if it got that far) would clearly rule in favour of his current contract with his current club, but this is FM we're talking about here so I have no idea what will happen. So will the extension get automatically triggered when survival is mathematically confirmed and the pre-contract with the other club annulled, or am I going to lose him? And this is before taking into account the sheer unrealism of a good League One player signing for a Nigerian club at 24 years of age, and a Nigerian club being prepared to offer a defender with no international caps and very modest career up to now a weekly wage of £5.75k. Such a scenario in real life is unprecedented.

I get what you're saying, and obviously you know far more than me about how this works, but let me rephrase it: in 18 years of playing FM, I've never seen a player whose performance levels tail off completely from their early/mid 20s. In real life, you've got Mario Balotelli, Dele Alli, Micah Richards, Ross Barkley, Jack Wilshere, David Bentley and many others at EFL level who drop off, whether it be through lack of application, injuries, bad luck or other external factors. I've never seen it in FM.

That's not what I'm getting at. That sounds like a talented 16-year-old who will never develop (assuming I understood correctly), whereas I'm on about players who are reach their PA early and then start declining in their mid 20s, which happens in real life but never in FM. Like I said before, just a wider variety of different player peaks rather than what seems like a 'one size fits all' approach would be more realistic.

Personally, I think it just needs more variety. For example, you never get the Dele Alli or Mario Balotelli types who peak in their early 20s and drop off a cliff by their late 20s, and you never get the Vardy/Lambert/Holt types who are non-league in their early 20s, EFL in their mid 20s before reaching a decent Premier League level in their late 20s. Obviously these are very rare, but even if you get 1-2% falling into either category, then some less extreme examples who peak early/late, it would make for a more realistic and interesting approach to youth development instead of everything being so black and white.

I've got this lad who has just come through in my first intake, and he's already good enough for the National League. The problem is, even though he has only existed in the game for eight months, there has been no significant development whatsoever despite the fact he has been playing regular first team football at the age of 16. In fact, his technical attributes seem to have got worse. I know I'm probably being impatient, and the average training facilities, 2*, 2.5* and 3* coaching, and semi-professional status won't help things, but is there any advice on how I could actually develop this kid? I really don't want him to go to waste, because he is one of those youngsters that is freakishly good for the level of football he's playing at.