Striker Drought

[distonio]

I have a 17 year old striker that has hit the back of the net a few times for me, mostly in cup games but a few times in the league too. I keep him in the under 18s and promote him to the first for the games I play him in. He is currently going through a bit of a drought for the first team but seems to score for fun for the under 18s.

I wonder what I should do, leave him in the under 18s and let him keep scoring and do not bring him back to the first team for a while.

Move him to the under 23s, is there a benefit to that or is under 18s football better for him?

Or just keep doing what I am doing and hope he gets on in off his backside in the next match. 

Any advice? 

Distonio

[RBKalle]

Scoring droughts are unpredictable and difficult to assess (just like in real life).

If the kid is squandering chance after chance when he doesn't score, it's maybe time to leave him play at a level he's more comfortable at. U18 or U23, it really depends on his skills and the level of competition he gets. You say he's scoring for fun in U18, so probably he's already a bit too good for that. So if your U23 team is part of a league (and doesn't just play "fake" games or friendlies), that may be the next step for him, with still being in contention for a senior app here and there.

At 17 he's still very young, so there's no rush to get him a lot of first-team football unless he's already consistent and good enough.

[Bothan Spy]

Timo Werner had a long spell of not scoring for me even after giving him loads of encouragement. In the end, out frustration after a particularly bad game, I fined him a weeks wages for poor performance. He accepted his fine then promptly scored a hat-trick  the next game and a brace the game after!

[eliasojohansen]

What kind of striker is he? What role and his stats?

[silentwars]

8 hours ago, distonio said:

I have a 17 year old striker that has hit the back of the net a few times for me, mostly in cup games but a few times in the league too. I keep him in the under 18s and promote him to the first for the games I play him in. He is currently going through a bit of a drought for the first team but seems to score for fun for the under 18s.

I wonder what I should do, leave him in the under 18s and let him keep scoring and do not bring him back to the first team for a while.

Move him to the under 23s, is there a benefit to that or is under 18s football better for him?

Or just keep doing what I am doing and hope he gets on in off his backside in the next match. 

Any advice? 

Distonio

Maybe loan him out?

[Svenc]

Scoring droughts -- and the opposite to that -- (in particular in actual sports) involve a lot more randomness than is typically perceived. It's just that nobody tells anybody how to roughly go about this (the game doesn't do much either) -- and why bookmakers on the betting market love to publish recent trends supposedly indicative of an "in-form" or "off-form" forward. Actually, randomness tends to be underrated in General, as humans love linking success/faiulre to a cause, or they are lost (well that, and pundits have to earn their Money somehow). This goes doubly so  for a low scoring sports such as football in particular, where silly men putting a ball past a defense with their feet / head tend to do so against the odds, rather than vice versa.

Check this as an example of how it's done by analytics in real Football; the Forward looked at being Dortmund's Alcacer, who had an outlandish record in the first half of the Season (much much less so in the 2nd half, as predicted).  https://statsbomb.com/2019/01/can-borussia-dortmund-win-the-bundesliga/

In-game it's possible either way to keep Forwards firing, as you can get Forwards into actually space over and over again -- whilst this is often times done by exploiting the AI/ME defending, it's still doable.  As a very Basic rule of the thumb as per the game, don't expect a Forward who averages barely 2/3 attempts per match to score consistently -- attempts p/ 90 minutes  is a column you can enter into your squad screen. You can also check whether the numbers more recently changed by looking at his profile, as it lists the number of attempts for each match. In some Matches he will get a lucky roll of the virtual dice, maybe even in sequence, but most of the time he won't score as there should be very very few chances where he has the Edge over the defense/Keeper, in particularly if most of them are (headers) from set pieces to begin with. That said, in General, the game tends to be much more predictable than Football, likely to Keep the audience from raging all over the shop.