I would love to see a more in depth and expansive addition of U-17, U-16, U-15, and U-14. This does not necessarily mean that there needs the ability to treat them as the first team (that level of depth) and or immediately promote them to first team (even though it might be beneficial to have the next Jude Bellingham start at 14 if you play in the Non-League Football). A good starting point might be the annual or even bi-annually report on players with notes from coaches about potential and recommendations on what positions to train them in over the coming years with decisions to be made about their development. Take Reece James and Trent Alexander-Arnold for example. They came up as forwards and midfielders and found their way to RB later on in their academies. These decisions you could also automate to the Director of Youth Development and the 1st team manager could take over manually.
From a back end perspective idk if that would increase the total amount of automated teams needing to simulate results or not, but I if it was an algorithm based on possible growth trajectories, possibilities of training far better in a certain position, academy facilities, and junior development budget that was ran let's say twice a year before the Development Center is updated with the corresponding email based, then that may be a good short term solution until the players reach U-16 and can be promoted into the first team. If it is just an algorithm and you do not need to make all of the youth teams playable, then you could go all the way down to U-10 maybe? Earlier then that and it gets too messy. One other thing to look at is you could prompt the director of youth development to give him a budget for youth trials for academy players by region vs. just the ability to ask your board to increase the overall fund. Obviously, the nation that a club is in will have the highest of that nationality, but you could have academy scouts or designate scouting assignments for academy players in the scouting department for overseas candidates. Those players will have an increased likelihood of dual nationalities to maintain domestic league requirements. I know that there is not a lot of involvement from first team managers with the academy at the highest level, but I personally would love the option to have that added depth. Who knows? Maybe one day you could start out as a youth manager too.
Just a thought and am curious to hear anyone's feedback on how this might look in the game!!
