Using Cleon's Ajax Youth Development thread IN GAME

[JonasMorais]

Hi

I am JonasMorais a Portuguese aficionado of the game since the good old CM and like most people that play the game for so long was getting bored with the game, so I went in search of some reading material to inspire me and maybe give me an idea on something else to explore in the game.

After reading Cleon's Ajax Youth development thread HERE,THANK YOU VERY MUCH, and realizing that its main objective is solely develop youths I decided that I like it so much that I would give it a go and try and recreate this myself IN GAME, he gives us all the principal points in his thread all we have to do is actually read the thread top to bottom that by the way it makes quite a good reading Cleon.

So me being Portuguese and my team being SL Benfica this will be our starting point.Of course Sporting CP would be the best place to start for this purpose as they have been doing it for years and years as they are the best youth school in Portugal, creating players like Ronaldo,Joao Moutinho, Nani, Simao,etc, but Benfica its not to bad as we want to ,still, won Leagues, Cups and Europa Leagues or even Champions League like we have been doing for years but try to replicate this as well, they have great youth facilities, under18/9's team, under21 team and a B Team, that works a bit like the reserves teams in England and second teams in spain (i.e. Real madrid - Castilla), this will allow me to keep having the results in the first team and also give first team time to the youths in the principal team when good enough, but mainly at the B Team( SL Benfica B).Also there is a good history and "DNA" in the board with loads of ex players being part of it, and having a good number of older players to use as tutors.This way I am hoping that I will not need 3 or 4 years to see something happening/changing.

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OBJECTIVES

1st Season - Reduce all teams numbers(youths and "B" Team to 16 players only), Rebuild the Coaching staff(as well as keeping the more important ones there is a lot of not so good coaches that need to be replaced), Rebuild the Scout team, Bring In a few more older players that might or might not have played at Benfica before to become tutors(that are not going to be to expensive to keep).

I am going to do this with Cleon thread in mind that is one of the main objectives of this thread/test

Development Plan

Every Ajax youth eleven has 16 players. There are 2 goalkeepers. Four righ tfooted players are selected for positions 2, 6, and 7 (right back, right midfield, right wing fwd), Four left footed players for positions 5, 8 and 11 (left back, left midfield, left forward), Three players for 3 and 4 (central defenders) and finally three players for 9 and 10 (striker and shadow striker). This applies from the Under 10 team up to the first eleven. During the players’ development, therefore, they play in the two or three positions within the team for which they have been selected.

....

I also need to set up a large scouting network so I can scour the globe for players aged between 14-17 who I think might make a good addition to the youth teams. At first I wasn't going to bring anyone in but it seems like Ajax do this a lot so I thought I'd do the same. That doesn't mean I'll be going mad and buying everyone though, I have to set myself some limits. So I've decided I can't buy anyone over the age of 17 and I can't spend more than £2 million on a single player.

...

Youth Recruitment = Increases likelihood of recruiting high PA youth and increasing how far your youth recruitment network will reach (low recruitment means you will probably only get local players who aren't recruited by bigger clubs, high recruitment means you will get top talent from all over the world). Youth recruitment, however, is also affected by your club's reputation.

Youth Rec. Attribute

Limited 1-2

Basic 3-5

Fairly Basic 6-8

Average 9-11

Above Av. 13-14

Established 15-16

Well Estab. 17-18

Extensive ​19-20

Youth Facilities = The quality of the training facilities used by the players currently in your youth team. Good youth facilities will help your youth players improve more.

Youth Facilities

Basic 1-3

Poor 4-5

Below Average 6-7

Adequate 8-9

Average 10-11

Good 12-13

Great 14-15

Superb 16-17

Excellent 18-19

Top 20

Junior Coaching = The quality of the coaching of the lower levels of your youth system. Basically, this represents coaching of youth players before they're generated as 14/15 year-olds. In terms of game mechanics, high junior coaching will increase the average ability of your youth players when they're first generated.

Junior Co. Attribute

Minimal 1-2

Basic 3-5

Adequate 6-9

Average 10-13

Good 14-16

Excellent 17-19

Exceptional 20

So in short it's;

Recruitment = Regen PA

Junior Coaching = Regen CA

Youth Facilities = Rate of youth player CA improvement

This are the Objectives for 1st Season and in what I am going to Focus on,from Cleon's Thread.There will be another points like Training,etc that I will talk a bit forwarder in this thread but for now lets start with the save and I will come with updates on teams( all around), and coaching team,scout team and even maybe on a new head of football and head of youth football.

[JonasMorais]

FIRST TEAM

Here I focus on bringing a couple of players to help in the development of the youth, as there was a few players already to do ths job I only got a couple so far and just want to get another one or two as was just allocating tutors and got a couple positions missing for the first 11 U19's Team.

This will be the focus for this first season 11 tutors. Also will have them tutoring the top one first(MATCH) and the second after(PERSONALITY) and just once each so we can study the improvements by the end of the season.

(in blue are the players waiting to be sold as I am just starting)

YOUTH U19's

Here I got rid of everyone and just kept the 16 players, actually 17 as I play with a N10 and wanna to have at least 2 in the youth, apart from that I've followed everything as in Cleon's thread.

Every Ajax youth eleven has 16 players. There are 2 goalkeepers. Four righ tfooted players are selected for positions 2, 6, and 7 (right back, right midfield, right wing fwd), Four left footed players for positions 5, 8 and 11 (left back, left midfield, left forward), Three players for 3 and 4 (central defenders) and finally three players for 9 and 10 (striker and shadow striker).

[JonasMorais]

Tactics

(This is just the way we are going to play this is not my start eleven)

Tactically we are going to use my most trusted 4-2-3-1, I been using this system since 2008, last year i started a save with Chelsea to try and recreate Mourinhos 4-2-3-1 at Porto and first year at Chelsea and after hours/days of research I've realized that I was no longer looking only for Mourinhos tactics but trying to create my own tactic. But I will not get in to many details about this as would need another thread .

Lets say that with this tactic on my principal save where I've started at Olhanense from the portuguese first league, I won 2 league, got to 2 portuguese super cups where I lost on penalty's against Porto, won 1 portuguese cup and 1 league cup and got to the last 16 of CL where I lost against Barcelona for 5-4.

Also this is the system that Benfica use to use in the past and was part of the DNA of the club so a great choice for our test.

System Instructions

[JonasMorais]

Training

Ok training, so this will be the most important part of this test, as that is the idea,develop the best players I can ,this being FM I don't only want to get 3 youth players a year to the first team but try and get as many as I can in to the first team and sell 2 or 3 for a good profit.

I will be posting about this more often and on the next post where I will ad all the pairs ( tutor-youth) and the progress.

As part of Cleon's thread this is what we have to have in mind:

Training Facilities Info

Some of these ratings have changed since FM13 but I believe this is all correct info and relevant for FM14 after checking it all thoroughly.

Corporate Attribute

Basic 1-2

Fairly Basic 3-5

Adequate 6-9

Average 10-12

Good 13-15

Top 16-20

Training Facilities

1-3 poor

4-5 Basic

6-7 below average

8-9 adequate

10-11 average

12-13 good

14-15 great

16-17 superb

18-19 excellent

20 Top

Youth Facilities

Basic 1-3

Poor 4-5

Below Average 6-7

Adequate 8-9

Average 10-11

Good 12-13

Great 14-15

Superb 16-17

Excellent 18-19

Top 20

Junior Co. Attribute

Minimal 1-2

Basic 3-5

Adequate 6-9

Average 10-13

Good 14-16

Excellent 17-19

Exceptional 20

Youth Rec. Attribute

Limited 1-2

Basic 3-5

Fairly Basic 6-8

Average 9-11

Above Av. 13-14

Established 15-16

Well Estab. 17-18

Extensive ​19-20

(My team has got the ones in Red, as you see very good to start this test as I said before, I do want to develop players but still need to play the game and win and keep getting better and better.)

Youth Recruitment = Increases likelihood of recruiting high PA youth and increasing how far your youth recruitment network will reach (low recruitment means you will probably only get local players who aren't recruited by bigger clubs, high recruitment means you will get top talent from all over the world). Youth recruitment, however, is also affected by your club's reputation.

Youth Facilities = The quality of the training facilities used by the players currently in your youth team. Good youth facilities will help your youth players improve more.

Junior Coaching = The quality of the coaching of the lower levels of your youth system. Basically, this represents coaching of youth players before they're generated as 14/15 year-olds. In terms of game mechanics, high junior coaching will increase the average ability of your youth players when they're first generated.

So in short it's;

Recruitment = Regen PA

Junior Coaching = Regen CA

Youth Facilities = Rate of youth player CA improvement

The way I got my training instructions is like this:

FIRST TEAM

YOUTHS

As you can see the only thing that changes for this preseason training instructions from the first team to the youths is the general instruction where i am trying to get a better cohesion between players. And can see that I have the same amount of games for both teams and like Cleons I think that a well prepared preseason is half way for success so tactic familiarity , morale and fitness are my priority.

Cleon says this about this topic:

Preseason

Pre-season is one of the most important times at the club because if you get this right you can start the season in the right frame of mind and hit the ground running. The majority of my success on FM is down to how I approach pre-season as I believe I set up the best I possibly can for me and my club and the style I play. So why is it important? Well let me show you how I approach it and then you can see why

I break preseason down to;

Morale

Fitness

Tactic Familarity

Team Cohesion

The above is what I class as really important and are all the things that will make the biggest difference over the season especially at the beginning.

Morale

Having players with high morale is always a bonus and its a really good idea to get it as high as possible straight away. To achieve this as soon as possible what I do is make sure any friendlies I play are against extremely weaker opposition. The reasons behind this is I want the team to score a lot of goals. I don’t see the point in playing hard friendlies and risking affecting a players morale. So setting up the correct friendlies is vital for me to allow me to build on morale. the more goals you score in pre-season the better imo.

Fitness

Every player at the club must be match fit before the season starts. If not then you’ll find they tire more quickly and increase the risk of picking up injuries or little niggles from games. I can do without this so I ensure everyone is fit all the time. By getting everyone match fit it means you can throw them into the first team should you suffer injuries/suspensions early on in the season and don’t have to worry that they aren’t fit. It also becomes easier to maintain throughout the season

Tactic Familiarity

Probably the most important thing to concentrate on for me. The sooner everything is fluid the better because it means your tactic will play better and the players are used to every aspect of it. You can get tactic familiarity fluid before the start of the first game of the season if you play properly. It takes around 12 friendlies to do this and while this might seem like an excessive amount of games to play, it isn’t really. Remember that I am picking very weak opponents to play so this means it doesn’t matter if I have to play my youths or not. No matter what side I put out I should win. I tie this in with getting everyone at the club match fit. So I tend to play a game every 3 days to get both fitness and tactic familiarity up.

I’ve seen people post saying they set general training focus to tactics to get familiarity levels up however that doesn’t actually work despite the misleading name. What you have to do is set the match training focus to tactics. This is what gets tactic familiarity up.

If you are one of the lucky clubs who gets to go to training camps then while these are on you gain tactic familiairty/fitness a lot quicker.

To build tactics familiarity the best you can you need to ensure you have;

Set up around 12 friendlies.

Do not allow rest before or after a game.

Make sure you have someone taking control of the 'tactics' catergory in training.

Signing new players will reduce tactic familiarity, so the more signings you make the longer time you need to become fluid in all areas.

You must set the scheduling bar in the training section all the way to the left so its set on 50%. The end of the bar is 50% and not the middle like some assume.

When you've set up the friendlies check on the training calendar to make sure you have a training day before each game. If not cancel the game because its pointless.

If all this criteria is met and you've done it correctly then you should have almost full tactical familiarity. In the first season though it can be hard to achieve in some leagues due to the dates of when the game starts. It's much easier to achieve from the 2nd season onward.Team Cohesion

If I’ve promoted players from my youth/reserves team into the first team or bought any new players then I focus on this heavily as the general focus once my players are fit. It helps them settle into the team quickly and get an understanding. This is vital because it helps with language barriers if you have foreign players who might not understand the language of the country you play in and his team mates.

Friendlies

I like to set up very easy friendlies against very weak sides. This means my team should win them easily and winning builds morale, so if I can beat a non league or amateur side 10-0 then this is what I'll do. I want to ease the players into the new season while building confidence. I don't see the point of playing against sides who I might lose against and lose morale, so rather I'd focus on building this up during preseason.

[JonasMorais]

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[lawton92]

Great start and really looking forward to reading this thread as I also like doing a project like this with Sporting CP.

[JonasMorais]

Great start and really looking forward to reading this thread as I also like doing a project like this with Sporting CP.

Thanks mate, it is more of a study case to be far lets see what coming out of this..

Post 2 updated with teams and tactics and training will be updated tomorrow.

[kerrdavidson95]

Good start Jonas. I'm really interested in this as I've started a save with Southampton and they have a history of producing fantastic players (Lallana, Clyne, Shaw, Ward-Prowse, Bale, Walcott, Oxlade-Chamberlain). I'll be following this closely.

[JonasMorais]

Good start Jonas. I'm really interested in this as I've started a save with Southampton and they have a history of producing fantastic players (Lallana, Clyne, Shaw, Ward-Prowse, Bale, Walcott, Oxlade-Chamberlain). I'll be following this closely.

Thank you very much for the interest, I will make sure That I give the most details that I can....

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Post #4 TACTICS Updated

Post #5 TRAINING Updated

[eyalf83]

@JonasMorais That means you managing the youth team?

I mean play with them each game instead of the youth coach?

and how did you manage to do exact same games and dates like your first team?

[JonasMorais]

@JonasMorais That means you managing the youth team?

I mean play with them each game instead of the youth coach?

and how did you manage to do exact same games and dates like your first team?

Well lets say that the only thing the youth manager does is going to games, as I am in charge of anything else, friendly games, training ,start 11, development, contracts, new signings everything, apart from go to games.

At the same time I am managing the first team and bringing young players as you can see for the team above and using the ones from the youths in case of any injury...well this is the plan...as you can see above most of the players out of the first 24 are only there to be tutors or waiting to be sold as I am just beginning the save.

[eyalf83]

Well lets say that the only thing the youth manager does is going to games, as I am in charge of anything else, friendly games, training ,start 11, development, contracts, new signings everything, apart from go to games.

At the same time I am managing the first team and bringing young players as you can see for the team above and using the ones from the youths in case of any injury...well this is the plan...as you can see above most of the players out of the first 24 are only there to be tutors or waiting to be sold as I am just beginning the save.

Cool.

Waiting to see the rest of the season!

cheers.

[Cleon]

I'm flattered you enjoyed my thread but I'm not keen on you copying and pasting everything out of it without asking. This thread is the exact same as mine, you could have made this more personal and about your own game and the reasons for doing what you are doing. Rather than just doing a straight copy of all my hard work

[JonasMorais]

I'm flattered you enjoyed my thread but I'm not keen on you copying and pasting everything out of it without asking. This thread is the exact same as mine, you could have made this more personal and about your own game and the reasons for doing what you are doing. Rather than just doing a straight copy of all my hard work

My apolegies if it came across like that not my intention, I really like you thread and the only reason I am quoting that from you thread is because I did saw people there saying, "ok that really nice thread but how do I use this in my game?"...I am just showing them what to look at from your thread.

Again my apologies and feel free to close and delete this thread if necessary.

[Biscotti]

Your location is a lie! Yeovil isn't anywhere near Bristol

Look forward to seeing how you get on, mate.

[likesiamesefish]

If this is a long term thing a lot of you guys have been doing then? I managed to get my first team more than 50% academy grown and 100% signed u18 on the last game but only with a created team with perfect training stats (and after twenty-five years of trying).

Has anyone ever achieved 100% academy graduates and competed at top level?

[JonasMorais]

If this is a long term thing a lot of you guys have been doing then? I managed to get my first team more than 50% academy grown and 100% signed u18 on the last game but only with a created team with perfect training stats (and after twenty-five years of trying).

Has anyone ever achieved 100% academy graduates and competed at top level?

I don't know if a lot of people been doing it my my target it is to have a 100% home grown team and not in a that long run as I've started somewhere with a good academy etc...

Cleon said this is a copy of his post I believe without reading its title... I am just using his theory's and aply them to the game. Yes I am quoting is text but hey I do say it is " Using Cleon Ajax thread...IN GAME" in the nex few posts and as soon as I leave the first month of two or even three of playing the save it will be more personal more my own save... So far oli am just showing what to pick from his thread...

I hope in 3 or 4 seasons be playing with all my own home grown/found players, as in the 2nd season I will be playing only with home grown players already, the Portuguese members of this forum will know that from my first 24 , more then half are home grown or spend a lot of time in the team as youngsters. Will post my first eleven later on or tomorrow but let's say that 90% of the first eleven I hope to play on this first year are already home grown even tho not by me but in reality...

[Cleon]

I don't know if a lot of people been doing it my my target it is to have a 100% home grown team and not in a that long run as I've started somewhere with a good academy etc...

Cleon said this is a copy of his post I believe without reading its title... I am just using his theory's and aply them to the game. Yes I am quoting is text but hey I do say it is " Using Cleon Ajax thread...IN GAME" in the nex few posts and as soon as I leave the first month of two or even three of playing the save it will be more personal more my own save... So far oli am just showing what to pick from his thread...

I hope in 3 or 4 seasons be playing with all my own home grown/found players, as in the 2nd season I will be playing only with home grown players already, the Portuguese members of this forum will know that from my first 24 , more then half are home grown or spend a lot of time in the team as youngsters. Will post my first eleven later on or tomorrow but let's say that 90% of the first eleven I hope to play on this first year are already home grown even tho not by me but in reality...

Yes I did read, its just the fact you used all the text I put effort into writing in your own thread, its a total lack of respect you didn't even ask. Sure it says my name in the title but that's not the point. You've padded out the content in your thread with stuff that I wrote not you and spent a lot of time doing. So please don't come out with silly comments.

[GEORGE WEAH]

I agree with Cleon to be honest i can only imagine the hours he must of put into his thread and for you to come along and hijack a lot of his work is a bit rude at least ask him before putting this up,you could of got involved with his thread and told us how your implementing the Ajax way into your save. cant wait for some more updates on your thread Cleon

[JonasMorais]

Easy.... Delete please... Don't want to argue about this....this was just a test anyway

My apologies