Youth players, nurturing, discovering and everything else

[originaltegs]

I’m really enjoying my current save with Stenhousemuir, who start the game in Scottish league 2. Have got 2 promotions in 2 seasons, so I’m now in the Scottish championship and have signed players to try and get promoted again. Aim is to get to Scottish prem, win the prem, and become the number one club in Scotland, with only Celtic and Rangers the completion. This is my first fm since fm13 though, and I’ve never really done scouting a great deal for youngsters, or focused on youth from my academy to bring through. Any tips for a beginner or how to begin the gradual process of trying to bring through good players from the youth intake or scouting for young players around the world to improve and sell on? Would be much appreciated 😊

[Marshdweller]

I'm far from the best person to answer this, but as a starting point, I would suggest the following:

• Make sure you have a good Head of Youth Development with a positive personality and a preferred formation that resembles your own (e.g. if you play 4-3-3, a HOYD who prefers a 4-4-2 diamond will generate fewer wingers than you need)
  
• Pester your board to invest in your youth facilities and youth recruitment. The recruitment will affect the quality of player coming through (obviously!) and the facilities will affect how well they develop
  
• Hire the best youth coaches you can
  
• Use the mentoring groups. This is somewhere I need to improve too!
  
• I believe that after the age of 18, first team football is the best for the player's development. Therefore, keep them at your club until they're 18 and then if they're promising but not going to get much experience with you, loan them out. Pay attention to the quality of the facilities at the team you loan them to (if you put them on the Development List, you can set a minimum level for the facilities)

I hope this all helps and isn't teaching you to suck eggs. As I say, I'm far from the best at this and learning myself as I go along.

[originaltegs]

Jan 18, 2021 21:16:50 GMT Marshdweller said:

I'm far from the best person to answer this, but as a starting point, I would suggest the following:

• Make sure you have a good Head of Youth Development with a positive personality and a preferred formation that resembles your own (e.g. if you play 4-3-3, a HOYD who prefers a 4-4-2 diamond will generate fewer wingers than you need)
  
• Pester your board to invest in your youth facilities and youth recruitment. The recruitment will affect the quality of player coming through (obviously!) and the facilities will affect how well they develop
  
• Hire the best youth coaches you can
  
• Use the mentoring groups. This is somewhere I need to improve too!
  
• I believe that after the age of 18, first team football is the best for the player's development. Therefore, keep them at your club until they're 18 and then if they're promising but not going to get much experience with you, loan them out. Pay attention to the quality of the facilities at the team you loan them to (if you put them on the Development List, you can set a minimum level for the facilities)

I hope this all helps and isn't teaching you to suck eggs. As I say, I'm far from the best at this and learning myself as I go along.

Thanks very much - really appreciate that, gives me a base to start from👍 As for mentoring that’s something I need to get to grips with too, I always go with the assistant managers recommendations unless I have one specific player in mind who’s personality I want to be influenced by a determined veteran who’s a team leader/highly influential player.

[Dirk Nowitzki]

Welcome to the forum!

Marshdweller already made some great points about youth development, so I will add something about my approach to scouting young players.
When you get to the point you can scout in foreign leagues I try to sign scouts from various countries to build the world knowledge of the club. I think this also helps with players from other countries showing up when simply going to the search function on the scouting tab. Sometimes it's hard to find good scouts from other countries if you have no knowledge there, so I sometimes sound crappy scouts from the desired country on a short contract, simply as a stepping stone to revealing better staff from that country.

Something I love to do once I get to the point that my club's reputation is high enough to attract good foreign talent is to go to the club overview of a team in a country that tends to produce good youngsters, and then just browse through all the teams in that league. The club overview shows their best player and biggest talent, so I click on these if they are regens. This is a relatively time effective way to manually spot great talents, because you don't have to go through all the players on a team. Some countries that I tend to do this for are Colombia (cheap and insanely talented, probably my favourite), Uruguay, Argentina and to a lesser extent Brazil since the players there tend to be more expensive and less willing to come over because Brazilian teams have pretty high reputations. In Europe my go-to countries are Serbia and Croatia, and to a lesser extent Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Czech Republic and Romania. If you really want cheap talent Iceland can be a good shout too. Obviously, countries like France, Spain, The Netherlands, Portugal, Germany, Italy and England have higher volumes of great talents showing up, but they are generally much harder to buy and way more costly.

[Dirk Nowitzki]

Jan 18, 2021 23:04:43 GMT originaltegs said:

Jan 18, 2021 21:16:50 GMT Marshdweller said:

I'm far from the best person to answer this, but as a starting point, I would suggest the following:

• Make sure you have a good Head of Youth Development with a positive personality and a preferred formation that resembles your own (e.g. if you play 4-3-3, a HOYD who prefers a 4-4-2 diamond will generate fewer wingers than you need)
  
• Pester your board to invest in your youth facilities and youth recruitment. The recruitment will affect the quality of player coming through (obviously!) and the facilities will affect how well they develop
  
• Hire the best youth coaches you can
  
• Use the mentoring groups. This is somewhere I need to improve too!
  
• I believe that after the age of 18, first team football is the best for the player's development. Therefore, keep them at your club until they're 18 and then if they're promising but not going to get much experience with you, loan them out. Pay attention to the quality of the facilities at the team you loan them to (if you put them on the Development List, you can set a minimum level for the facilities)

I hope this all helps and isn't teaching you to suck eggs. As I say, I'm far from the best at this and learning myself as I go along.

Thanks very much - really appreciate that, gives me a base to start from👍 As for mentoring that’s something I need to get to grips with too, I always go with the assistant managers recommendations unless I have one specific player in mind who’s personality I want to be influenced by a determined veteran who’s a team leader/highly influential player.

Something to keep in mind is that there are several hidden attributes such as ambition and professionalism that are affected by mentoring and the team personality as a whole. Determination is important, but certainly not everything. This is a good guide explaining some of this: www.guidetofm.com/players/personalities/

Mentoring works vastly different and is way less effective compared to previous FM's (like FM13). You have probably figured out that you now make these mentor groups, but I don't find the setups the assistant advises particularly good. I generally try to make my players with the best personalities (Model Citizen, Model Pro, Professional etc.) the captain and hope they become a team leader. This makes them more effective as a mentor, and then I pair them with one or two youngsters. Groups need to be at least 3 players big, so in case of just 1 youngster you have to add another player with a good personality for the desired effect.