Youth Academy - The secrets!

If you want to squeeze the maximum of your youth academy because every training is important next lines will be interesting for you.

If you want to squeeze the maximum of your youth academy because every training is important next lines will be interesting for you. Here I will dig in some of the secrets in training of youth players.

So, because every training is important here is what you have to be informed when you choose different types of youth leagues.

To choose the right one:

If you have the ability to constantly take care of your youth academy you should always choose a league with 4 teams.

When all of the matches in your league finish then you will have one week break. There is no point to wait till the next week so it is always good to leave your old league and to look for a new one. Usually you can find a new one which starts in 2 days maximum. This way you will „save“ 5 days of waiting.

Let’s we compare different types of leagues with 4, 6, 8, 12 and 16 teams and see how many matches you can play in 2 seasons if you always leave your old one and find new one right away.

- With 4 teams – 36 matches/2 seasons
- With 6 teams – 35 matches/2 seasons
- With 8 teams – 34 matches/2 seasons
- With 12 and 16 teams – 33 matches/2 seasons

If you don’t leave your old league and you decide to stay and wait for 1 week here how it looks like:

- With 4 teams – 28 matches/2 seasons
- With 6 and 8 teams – 30 matches/2 seasons
- With 12 and 16 teams – 31 matches/2 seasons

Or the best of what you can do in order to squeeze the maximum of your youth club, of course if you have the ability to always take care of it, is to choose leagues with 4 teams, to always leave them when the last match ends and to look for another league with 4 teams.

What does it mean an overall skill of a youth player?

As we all know youth players have current and potential level of a certain skill. When the game reports the overall skill level it calculates the top 3 skills of average levels of their current and potential skills. After that it takes those top 3 average skill levels and calculates the average of them. Then it rounds off to the next bigger integer. This sounds confusing so I will make an example:

Vince Tilly
16 years and 3 days

Keeper	disastrous(1) /wretched(2)
Defending	poor (3) / poor (3)
Playmaking	week(4) / inadequate (5)
Winger	poor (3) / inadequate (5)
Passing	passible (6) / passible (6)
Scoring	weak (4) / weak (4)
Set pieces	weak(4) / weak(4)

Remark: The set pieces are not included in the calculations of the overall skill.

Now we have to find the top 3 average skills from their current and potential levels. So we have:

Goalkeeping – (1+2)/2 = 1,5
Defending – (3+3)/2 = 3
Playmaking – (4+5)/2 = 4,5
Winger – (3+5)/2 = 4
Passing – (6+6)/2 = 6
Scoring – (4+4)/2 = 4

The top 3 average skills here are: Passing (6,0), Playmaking (4,5) and either Scoring or Winger (4,0) (doesn’t matter). Let’s calculate the overall skill:

Overall skill = (6+4,5+4)/3 = 4,83 – inadequate

Interesting here in defining the level of the overall skill is that the game rounds off to the next bigger integer:

disastrous	0,1-1,0
wretched	1,1-2,0
poor	2,1-3,0
week	3,1-4,0
inadequate	4,1-5,0
passible	5,1-6,0
solid	6,1-7,0

Specialty or not:

You have to keep in mind that your scouts will inform you only in 10% of their reports about a specialty of your player (of course if he has) when you call them every week. If your players have a specialty in 90% of the cases you will have to find that when you train them in your academy. In order to increase the chance to find if your players have a specialty or not it is always good to “play creatively“ in youth matches. Of course you have to look at the match reports to find if there were any special events which could revel a specialty of any player.

Hattrick-youthclub

Probably most of you know that there is a really useful site connected with our youth academies – (http://www.hattrick-youthclub.org) . It is highly recommended to use it. It has really nice tools such as training calculator for example. This site could be useful to U17 scouts also.

I hope this information will be useful to all of you and will lead in better understanding of how youth academies works.

Good luck to all!

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