Debate: Youth Academy

How do you get the most out of your Youth Academy, is it your goal to produce an international standard superstar to go forward and make your country proud? Do you cater for the transfer market and keep those club-level youth players churning out to rake in a tidy profit? Maybe you have discovered the secret recipe for the best possible profit from your youth academy players...

As far as youth academy investment goes there are basically two ends of the spectrum (not including no investment at all) either a max level scout and no facilities or a fully tricked out youth academy with all the best staff available. I say this because generally people who have some level of interest in their youth academy will either be aiming to get everything to the max level (probably excluding the youth manager) or hiring a lvl 3 scout and simply hoarding stars.

With regards to youth pulling strategies there are also two ends to the spectrum, you can either hoard your stars for a limited number of big star pulls or you can pull regularly with a modest number of stars. The first being the more likely if you are hoping for U20's glory with your 200 star monster the latter is a great way to maintain a constant cash flow... or is it?

Let us know your experience with youth academy whether you’ve had success or absolutely failed unfortunately it seems that there is a rather large element of luck when it comes to the youth academy!

Since i'm all about england U20 at the moment its large ocassional pulls for me. And then afew 19 years olds if they got enough skills to make 1st 2nd team.

I've only recently started on my YA path but am going to try and do regular pulls of 30-40 stars.
In doing that I'm hoping to get some sort of income from them and keep any players I think will benefit the squad and I can afford to train.
I've got lvl2 on coaching and scout but will definitely be upgrading my scout and coaches, probably not the manager though - might even ditch him!

I pull 5 weeks in 6 and thus pull with 14,13,12,11,10 stars.

I find this gives me the best physicals and non-trainable stat (leadership, temperament, discipline) to choose my squad from.

I've mentioned before that I don't buy players. As a player has around 13 years playing time in them (17-30) and my squad has 30 players in it I need to replace slightly more than 2 players each season. I find that pulling this number of youths seems to enable me to find a couple of decent lads each season. Sort of a more rolls of the dice approach rather than a bigger bonus to the dice roll one.

As to having a "fully tricked out" youth academy, I do with the exception of the youth manager. My understanding is that the youth manager only enables you to know the stats of your youth. I am a patient man and can wait until I've pulled them to know those details.

I had a level 3 youth manager for a couple of seasons with the aim being to monitor the progress until they get pulled. The problem was when I got near the end that it didn't reveal all the new stats for the brand new players. You still had to wait a few weeks.

On one guy where I did get quite early stats, he only improved one level, and that was in a level 3 academy and playing most of his games LTNT, so the youth manager is definitely a waste of money. You'll know whose good just by looking at their stats for each game.

I'm undecided on the stars, as I put 200 on a guy in week 1, so until he promotes, I don't know if it's a good idea these days.