Youth Development – The Plan, The Procedure, The Delivery
Bringing through the next generation of world-class stars is one of Football Manager’s most appealing features – youth development is a journey that takes time to get right. Each year, the FM community spends countless hours improving every part of their youth setup to get the best youth intakes, but it can still be a tricky thing to master.
Youth development is a key part of the game for many players. However, because Football Manager is a game in which players can play the game at their chosen level of detail, youth development can be difficult to understand if you haven’t devoted the time to understand the infrastructure of youth development, in-game.
Of course, if you’re successful with youth development, the rewards are what most managers desire – numerous internally-developed players, homegrown players, trophies, players winning individual rewards, etc.
Youth Category Rating (England Only)
You’ll probably question why I have started with a topic that only relates to England. The Youth Category rating is a programme entitled the Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP) which aims at improving the quality and quantity of homegrown players. The plan was created with the individual player in mind with input from the clubs in all tiers of English football. The EPPP works across three phases: Foundation (Under-9 to Under-11), Youth Development (U12 to U16) and Professional Development (U17 to U23).
Football academies are split into four categories: Category One, Category Two, Category Three and Category Four. Only a small group of football academies are awarded a Category One status, and not all of them are in the top tier of English football. Category One status is extremely hard to achieve and takes real commitment from the club. Any football academy that has this status is a show of the quality of the coaching, equipment, facilities and strategic development that you can expect to find. Category One football academies also invest a lot to maintain their status. Naturally, youth development within the higher-ranked academies is than the lower-ranked academies.
On Football Manager, this Category structure is in place when managing in England. Taking over a club with a lower Category score can make it difficult to develop players. Whilst you can’t scout players under the age of 15 on Football Manager due to the game not having players below that age, the Youth Category rating does affect the players that come through the club shown in the usual March youth intake.
My advice when managing in England at a club with a low Youth Category rating is to build up the club’s youth development in phases. On my Coventry save during Football Manager 2022 BETA, it took three seasons for the club to achieve Category One status even with multiple club successes including promotion to the top tier, trophies etc. However, the success of your first team is not the only factor that is taken into account when club Categories are assessed. The reason I suggest that you increase your club to Category One is to prevent other Category One clubs from poaching your better youth prospects for an agreed compensation and to ensure that you’ll get better future intakes (you should take into account though, that there are multiple factors that affect youth intake).
Below are two players that have come through the Coventry academy on my FM22 since improving the facilities.
Youth Facilities & Staff
The quality of your Youth Facilities will impact how good your newgens are when they appear in your intake. Get your Youth Facilities to State of the Art and there’s a good chance that your newgens will have better Current and Potential Ability than they would have if you had Basic Youth Facilities. It’s still a chance at the end of the day.
On Football Manager youth facilities are categorised by the following titles:
Poor > Basic > Below Average > Adequate > Average > Good > Great > Excellent > Superb > State of the Art
It all starts with a board request. Particular attention is required for youth recruitment and junior coaching to bring high-quality talent into your club, followed by improving your training and youth facilities.
As for staff, there are some important attributes to pay attention to. For them to give near-accurate readings on your wonderkids’ potentials, they’ll need great stats in Judging Player Ability and Judging Player Potential. You’ll need to focus on Working With Youngsters when hiring new coaches too, alongside aspects such as Determination, Discipline, Motivating and role-specific qualities.
An important staff member to consider for youth development is the Head of Youth Development. The Head of Youth Development oversees every part of your youth set-up, including judging how good a youth player can be, working well with youngsters to help them fulfil that potential, and making you aware of which young stars need more training to reach the levels they are capable of.
You want a Head of Youth Development with 20s, or as close as possible, in the attributes highlighted in the image above. They will also need their Determination stat to be higher than 15, which will make them more determined to improve the youth players. Finally, their reputation is just as important. A five-star rated staff member is better than a two-star one. Having a bigger reputation means that starlets are more likely to say yes to being recruited by your club to work with your world-class Head of Youth Development.#
For the best possible youth intakes, continuously ask for upgrades to youth and training facilities and get the best Head of Youth Development with the best possible personality AND the same, or similar, formation and tactical preference.
Training/Tutoring – Youth Training Schedules
It is no secret that a huge key to a player’s development is training. Specifically, a player’s individual training can make or break their development. Training is an aspect of the game which everyone approaches differently, and there is no such thing as the ‘perfect training regime” to promote youth development. For my approach, I keep a close eye on specific players and add them to the first team training when they reach the age of 17 so that they’re part of that cohesive unit.
Training doesn’t just involve selecting the role that best suits them and training an attribute they are weak on but also tutoring them early on and training their Player Preferred Moves.
Tutoring youth players with a senior player who has a determined or resilient personality means they will develop better in the long term than someone who has a negative personality.
There are multiple elements to consider when training young players. Firstly, you’ll want to make sure you’re training them with a manageable level of intensity, or you’ll soon bear the brunt of their deteriorating morale and fitness levels.
Be aware that if changing a player’s position and/or role, you’ll want to look at the highlighted attributes of each choice. The more efficient a player is in these highlighted areas, the easier they’ll adapt to their new duties. Focus on these stats as a priority.
Someone that I believe has fantastic knowledge about youth training is Strikerless with his Coerver-inspired schedules.
Junior Coaching and Youth Recruitment
Youth Recruitment will increase your club’s international range and enable your staff to find the best wonderkids to bring to your club. Youth Recruitment shows how far your recruitment staff will go to bring in youth players. Typically, a minor semi-professional outfit will look no further than its local region for youths. Bigger teams with a larger scope for recruitment may draw players in from across the country, while elite clubs can recruit from across the world.
Youth Recruitment also plays a key role in ‘poaching’. That’s where your Head of Youth Devel0pment signs a junior player aged either 14 or 15 from a smaller club before they enter your intake. This can go the other way, in that your best juniors can be poached by bigger clubs in exchange for compensation and transfer clauses.
There are eight levels of Youth Recruitment:
Limited > Basic > Fairly Basic > Adequate > Average > Good > Excellent > Exceptional
Junior Coaching is the simulation of players, below the age where players become visible in-game. The only real attribute of this is the “Junior Coaching Budget” that you can ask to be increased or decreased when communicating with the board. There are seven levels of Junior Coaching:
Basic > Fairly Basic > Average > Adequate > Good > Excellent > Exceptional
It is important to understand the difference between Junior Coaching and Youth Teams. Junior Coaching is what affects players before you can view them in your Youth Team.
Junior Coaching, together with Youth Recruitment and Youth Facilities affects the Youth Intake by modifying the Current Ability and Potential Ability of the average newgens that appears as part of the yearly intake.
Junior Coaching determines how good each youth intake will be. Junior Coaching reflects the level of coaching your rising stars will get from the Under-16s down (i.e. before they generate in-game). This will affect the current ability of your newgens, though any improvements to your junior coaching may not be noticeable for a few years.
It was previously stated that Junior Coaching was the only/main factor to modify specifically the Current Ability, but this has later been changed and now more factors are involved.
The only way to affect this part of the simulation is to ask the board to increase or decrease the budget. This is done by going to Board, Make Board Request, Finance>Increase/Decrease Junior Coaching Budget.
Game Time = Development
Ultimately, the most important element of youth development is game time. If your hot prospects sit languishing on the sidelines, they’ll never get a chance to reach their potential. The best solution is to either play them in the league and/or cup games or send them out on loan to gain quality game time with another side.
If you’re going with the latter, be careful. You’ll need to gauge how often another team will play them, how efficient their facilities are and whether a year’s worth of in-house training is actually more beneficial for your wonderkid in the long run. Sometimes, it’s more suitable to monitor their progress from within, giving them odd starts and a host of substitute appearances throughout the season.
The aim of giving a player game time is to aid development which you can track with either attribute changes or by reviewing the player development graph.
Developmental Loans
In real life, young players are loaned out to provide the experience they need to flourish in the first team of their parent club.
Most of the time, this works. However, in-game loans are hard to get right.
If you decide to send your players out on loan, then you need to take the above into account. On Football Manager, you also have the option to send your players out on developmental loans.
When developing younger players, the decision that you have to make is how much game time they require to aid their development. If you break this decision down into sections then you have to decide if you want to give them playing time within their age group, want them to play above themselves (e.g. an 18-year-old playing U23s) or you want them to have more first-team football than you’re able to offer. If the latter is the case, then a developmental loan might be your best option. Essentially, players need regular match experience at an appropriate level which makes them better at learning necessary skills relating to their position and role.
Lower-league clubs will fall over themselves to temporarily take your biggest prospects. Pay particular attention to those that will offer your youngsters roles as a Star Player, Important Player, or Regular Starter. These will most likely be guaranteed game time, which should increase your young stars’ attributes and experience at a higher level. Once you’ve sent players out on loan, you can keep tabs on their playing time, average ratings, and stats from the development centre’s ‘loan’ tab.
Developmental Loans can be arranged by your Director of Football or Loan Manager. To do this, you have to add the players you want to do out on developmental loan to the Development List.
Player > Transfers > Add to Development List
Staggered Development
Some might ask, what is “staggered development”? Staggered development is when managers phase players through their development solely within the club without any loans. This can be done by ensuring players are staggered through the youth age groups as they develop. For instance, keeping them in the U18s until they reach the age of 18 and then moving them up to the next level. Once they reach the age where decisions need to be made about a player they then get moved up to the first team.
Now, some might question why use this method, surely if a player is good enough they’re old enough. In simplistic terms, you would be right. But, what managers should take into account are the rules of certain competitions that your team might take part in. The UEFA Europa League, and UEFA Champions League all require a specific amount of Homegrown Club players. The staggered development approach is good for teams that have risen through the leagues, potentially sold a number of players and could be struggling to maintain those Home-Grown Club players.
Using a staggered approach to development can aid this and develop players that might not be classified as first-team regulars but more squad players. Those squad players will support filling those Homegrown Club player positions. Giving those types of players game time in top-quality competitions inflates their value the further you get into the top competitions. If you have players that you have stagger developed but decide that they’re no longer worth keeping around you should be able to get a decent amount of profit. The caution you should take with this approach is that you need to consider other youth players coming through that can replace any outgoing players.
Conclusion
As can be seen in this article, there are many layers to youth development on Football Manager as there are in real life. Youth development should be managed differently depending on the ratings of your training facilities, junior coaching, youth recruitment, youth staff. Naturally, your approach to youth development should change depending on the situation that your club is in.
I hope that this article has provided you with an insight into the complex nature of youth development and encourages you to take on a variety of approaches depending on the multitude of factors that I have discussed in this article.
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